Distributed space-time-coded protocols for exploiting cooperative diversity in wireless networks

We develop and analyze space-time coded cooperative diversity protocols for combating multipath fading across multiple protocol layers in a wireless network. The protocols exploit spatial diversity available among a collection of distributed terminals that relay messages for one another in such a manner that the destination terminal can average the fading, even though it is unknown a priori which terminals will be involved. In particular, a source initiates transmission to its destination, and many relays potentially receive the transmission. Those terminals that can fully decode the transmission utilize a space-time code to cooperatively relay to the destination. We demonstrate that these protocols achieve full spatial diversity in the number of cooperating terminals, not just the number of decoding relays, and can be used effectively for higher spectral efficiencies than repetition-based schemes. We discuss issues related to space-time code design for these protocols, emphasizing codes that readily allow for appealing distributed versions.     

Performance analysis of multiuser diversity in cooperative multi-relay networks under rayleigh-fading channels

In multiuser cooperative relay networks, cooperative diversity can be obtained with the help of relays, while multiuser diversity is an inherent diversity in multiuser systems. In this letter, the performance analysis of multiuser diversity in cooperative multi-relay networks is presented. Both the case of all relay participating and the case of relay selection are considered. We first derive asymptotic expressions of outage probability and symbol error probability for amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols with joint multiuser and cooperative diversity. Then, the theoretical analysis are validated by Monte Carlo simulations. Both the theoretical analysis and simulations show that a multiuser diversity order of K and a cooperative diversity order of M+ 1 can be achieved simultaneously for both AF and DF protocols (where K is the number of accessing users and M is the number of available relays). These demonstrate that the multiuser diversity can be readily combined with the cooperative diversity in multiuser cooperative relay networks.     

Performance Analysis of Relay-Assisted Cooperative Systems in Correlated Fading Channels

In this paper, the effect of fading correlation at the receiving elements of a linear antenna array in a relay-assisted cooperative single-input multiple-output (SIMO) system has been investigated over flat Rayleigh fading channels. Considering a model of local scatterer around the source and relay nodes and uniform angle of arrival (AOA) distribution, the spatial cross-correlation analysis is presented and extensive simulation studies are performed to determine the envelope correlation as a function of antenna spacing, mean AOA and angular spread. Error performance analysis for coherent binary and quaternary modulations are presented for fixed-gain amplify-and-forward (AF) and fixed decode-and-forward (DF) relaying with dual diversity maximal-ratio combiner (MRC) receiver array. Error probability in terms of bit error probability (BEP) and symbol error probability (SEP) is evaluated to study the effect of relevant parameters on the correlation performance. The presented results establish the fact that fixed DF relay network performs relatively well than fixed-gain AF relaying. Superior performance of dual-hop cooperative SIMO system over conventional single-hop SIMO system has also been observed.     

On the achievable diversity-multiplexing tradeoff in half-duplex cooperative channels

We propose novel cooperative transmission protocols for delay-limited coherent fading channels consisting of N (half-duplex and single-antenna) partners and one cell site. In our work, we differentiate between the relay, cooperative broadcast (down-link), and cooperative multiple-access (CMA) (up-link) channels. The proposed protocols are evaluated using Zheng-Tse diversity-multiplexing tradeoff. For the relay channel, we investigate two classes of cooperation schemes; namely, amplify and forward (AF) protocols and decode and forward (DF) protocols. For the first class, we establish an upper bound on the achievable diversity-multiplexing tradeoff with a single relay. We then construct a new AF protocol that achieves this upper bound. The proposed algorithm is then extended to the general case with (N-1) relays where it is shown to outperform the space-time coded protocol of Laneman and Wornell without requiring decoding/encoding at the relays. For the class of DF protocols, we develop a dynamic decode and forward (DDF) protocol that achieves the optimal tradeoff for multiplexing gains 0/spl les/r/spl les/1/N. Furthermore, with a single relay, the DDF protocol is shown to dominate the class of AF protocols for all multiplexing gains. The superiority of the DDF protocol is shown to be more significant in the cooperative broadcast channel. The situation is reversed in the CMA channel where we propose a new AF protocol that achieves the optimal tradeoff for all multiplexing gains. A distinguishing feature of the proposed protocols in the three scenarios is that they do not rely on orthogonal subspaces, allowing for a more efficient use of resources. In fact, using our results one can argue that the suboptimality of previously proposed protocols stems from their use of orthogonal subspaces rather than the half-duplex constraint.     

Mixed AF and DF cooperative relay systems and their performance bounds analyses

This paper analyzes the performance bounds of a wireless relay system consisting of several relay stations working on both amplifier‐and‐forward (AF) and decode‐and‐forward (DF) protocols. We want to study the outage probability behavior of the proposed mixed AF and DF relay systems under independent Nakagami‐m fading channels. In particular, we will derive the lower and upper bounds of outage probability of the mixed AF and DF relay systems based on maximal ratio combining diversity reception. The results give optimal configuration of AF and DF relays under a specific channel condition, thus helping us to design an optimized mixed AF and DF relay system in a generic fading environment. The trade‐off between complexity and performance is discussed in this paper. In addition, we will use computer simulations to verify the effectiveness of the proposed mixed AF and DF relay configurations. Finally, the power allocation issues for such a mixed AF and DF relay system will also be discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cooperative diversity performance for OFDM transmission over partially jammed channels

Cooperative diversity is a transmission technique, where multiple terminals share their resources to form a virtual antenna array that realizes spatial diversity gain in a distributed fashion. In this paper, we focus on a performance evaluation for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission in cooperative networks under partial-band jamming (PBJ) environments. We present a bit error rate (BER) analysis for a cooperative diversity system with amplifying-and-forward (AF) relays over partially jammed Rayleigh fading channels. In addition, a simple jamming mitigation technique, called relay-based sub-band shifting method, is proposed. Through this approach, each sub-band of the amplified OFDM symbol at the relay can be changed by the predefined shifting rule of each relay, and the jamming effects at the destination are partially removed. Simulation results show that the proposed method improves significantly the BER performance at a low signal-to-jamming ratio.     

Statistical channel knowledge-based optimum power allocation for relaying protocols in the high SNR regime

We are concerned with transmit power optimization in a wireless relay network with various cooperation protocols. With statistical channel knowledge (in the form of knowledge of the fading distribution and the path loss information across all the nodes) at the transmitters and perfect channel state information at the receivers, we derive the optimal power allocation that minimizes high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) approximations of the outage probability of the mutual information (MI) with amplify-and-forward (AF), decode-and-forward (DF) and distributed space-time coded (DSTC) relaying protocols operating over Rayleigh fading channels. We demonstrate that the high SNR approximation-based outage probability expressions are convex functions of the transmit power vector, and the nature of the optimal power allocation depends on whether or not a direct link between the source and the destination exists. Interestingly, for AF and DF protocols, this allocation depends only on the ratio of mean channel power gains (i.e., the ratio of the source-relay gain to the relay-destination gain), whereas with a DSTC protocol this allocation also depends on the transmission rate when a direct link exists. In addition to the immediate benefits of improved outage behavior, our results show that optimal power allocation brings impressive coding gains over equal power allocation. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the coding gain gap between the AF and DF protocols can also be reduced by the optimal power allocation     

Nested cooperative encoding protocol for wireless networks with high energy efficiency

Recently, distributed space-time code designs with high cooperative diversity for wireless communication networks, such as ad hoc and sensor networks, have received much attention. Amplify forward and decoding forward are widely used protocols for the cooperative diversity in the wireless communication networks. In both protocols, the information received by relay terminals are "forwarded" to destination or next relay terminals. Since the signals transmitted by relay terminals and those transmitted from the source terminal are correlated, there is information redundancy. To improve the energy efficiency of cooperative networks, we propose an encoding protocol, which is referred to as a nested cooperative encoding protocol. In our proposed protocol, the received signal at each relay terminal is divided into several sub-signals with the nest lattice structure of source information. Each of the sub-signals contains only a partial information with a smaller size of constellation compared to the original information sent by the source terminal. Do a new encoding or modulation by using these sub-signals before transmitting at relay terminals. It is shown that the proposed new protocols can achieve both high cooperative diversity and high energy efficiency.     

Performance Analysis of OSTBC Transmission in Amplify-and-Forward Cooperative Relay Networks

A performance analysis is presented for amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative relay networks employing transmit antenna diversity with orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs), where multiple antennas are equipped at the transmitter. We develop a symbol-error-rate (SER) and outage performance analysis for OSTBC transmissions with and without cooperative diversity over flat Rayleigh fading channels. We first derive exact probability density functions (pdf's) and cumulative distribution functions (cdf's) for the system SNR without direct transmission with an arbitrary number of transmit antennas and then present the exact closed-form SER and outage probability expressions. Next, we derive the moment-generating function (MGF) for the overall system SNR with direct transmission and present the exact SER and outage probability with joint transmit antenna diversity and cooperative diversity. The theoretical analysis is validated by simulations, which indicate an exact match between them. The results also show how the transmit antenna diversity and the cooperative diversity affect the overall system performance.      

多天线中继网络中的终端性能和多样性分析

The performance of multi-antenna multi- relay cooperative system is investigated in this paper. Two relaying strategies, i.e., reactive and proactive strategies are analyzed with the Amplifyand- Forward (AF) and Decode-and-Forward (DF) protocols. We derive the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of the received Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) at the destination, which is used to calculate the exact outage probability, for both AF and DF protocols. According to these results, we conclude that a cooperative network which composes K relays each equipped with nr antennas can achieve maximal order-(2nrK+1) diversity gain, by proper processing at relays and destination. Furthermore, the performance comparison is given, in terms of outage probability. These two strategies outperform each other in different scenarios in AF protocol, whilst proactive strategy is always better than its counterpart in DF protocol. According to these results, the optimal power allocation schemes among relay nodes are also presented, with reasonable power constraint.     

协同分集和截断ARQ在单中继无线网的使用：一种交互层研究

该文着重研究了无编码两跳中继网中考虑各节点的最大传输次数受限时的一种交互层协同设计,提出了两种类型的简单自适应中继协同策略以探索一种合并的空间分集与时间分集.分析与计算机仿真表明:在非对称的多跳无线网和块衰落信道下,尽管基于截断ARQ (Automatic Repeat Request)的重传将带来一定的平均吞吐量下降,但该协同策略在实现有效的天线与能量共享的同时,也显著地改善了系统的帧误码性能.     

Distributed space-time coding scheme with differential detection and power allocation for cooperative relay network

By introducing orthogonal space-time coding (STC) scheme in wireless cooperative relay network, two distributed differential STC (DSTC) schemes based on the amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and- forward (DF) methods are, respectively, developed. The scheme performance is investigated in symmetric and asymmetric wireless relay networks. The presented schemes require no channel information at both relay terminals and destination terminal, and have linear decoding complexity when compared with the existing scheme. Moreover, they are suitable for the application of different constellation modulations and DSTC schemes, and thus provide more freedoms of design. Besides, the power allocations between source and relay terminals are jointly optimized to minimize the system pairwise error probability for symmetric and asymmetric networks, and two practical methods are presented to solve the complicated optimized problem from asymmetric network. Simulation results show that the scheme with DF method has better performance than that with AF method due to no amplification of noise power, but the performance superiority will decrease at high SNR due to the error propagation of decoding at the relays. Furthermore, the distributed DSTC schemes with optimal power allocation have better performance than those with conventional fixed power allocation.     

Cooperative quadrature physical layer network coding in wireless relay networks

This paper proposes a cooperative quadrature physical layer network coding (CQPNC) scheme for a dual‐hop cooperative relay network, which consists of two source nodes, one relay node and one destination node. All nodes in the network have one antenna, and the two source nodes transmit their signals modulated with quadrature carriers. In this paper, a cooperative quadrature physical layer network coded decode‐and‐forward (DF) relay protocol (CQPNC‐DF) is proposed to transmit the composite information from the two source nodes via the relay node to the destination node simultaneously to reduce the number of time slots required for a transmission. The proposed CQPNC‐DF relay protocol is compared with time‐division multiple‐access amplify‐and‐forward (TDMA‐AF), TDMA‐DF, cooperative network coded DF (CNC‐DF) and cooperative analog network coded AF (CANC‐AF) relay protocols to demonstrate its effectiveness in terms of bit error rate (BER) and system throughput under different propagation conditions. The simulation results reveal that the proposed CQPNC‐DF relay protocol can significantly improve the network performance. Compared with two TDMA schemes and CNC‐DF, the proposal can provide up to 100% and 50% throughput gains, respectively. Moreover, no matter what the scene, the proposed scheme always has the lowest BER in the low SNR region. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Using Orthogonal and Quasi-Orthogonal Designs in Wireless Relay Networks

Distributed space-time coding was proposed to achieve cooperative diversity in wireless relay networks without channel information at the relays. Using this scheme, antennas of the distributive relays work as transmit antennas of the sender and generate a space-time code at the receiver. It achieves the maximal diversity when the transmit power is infinitely large. This paper is on the design of practical distributed space-time codes (DSTCs). We use orthogonal and quasi-orthogonal designs which are originally used in the design of space-time codes for multiple-antenna systems. It is well known that orthogonal space-time codes have full diversity and linear decoding complexity. They are particularly suitable for transmissions in the network setting using distributed space-time coding since their ldquoscale-freerdquo property leads to good performance. Our simulations show that they achieve lower error rates than the random code. We also compare distributed space-time coding to selection decode-and-forward using the same orthogonal designs. Simulations show that distributed space-time coding achieves higher diversity than selection decode-and-forward (DF) when there is more than one relay. We also generalize the distributed space-time coding scheme to wireless relay networks with channel information at the relays. Although our analysis and simulations show that there is no improvement in the diversity, in some networks, having channel information at the relays saves both the transmission power and the transmission time.     

Differential modulation for two-way wireless communications: a perspective of differential network coding at the physical layer

This work considers two-way relay channels (TWRC), where two terminals transmit simultaneously to each other with the help of a relay node. For single antenna systems, we propose several new transmission schemes for both amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol and decode-and-forward (DF) protocol where the channel state information is not required. These new schemes are the counterpart of the traditional noncoherent detection or differential detection in point-to-point communications. Differential modulation design for TWRC is challenging because the received signal is a mixture of the signals from both source terminals. We derive maximum likelihood (ML) detectors for both AF and DF protocols, where the latter can be considered as performing differential network coding at the physical layer. As the exact ML detector is prohibitively complex, we propose several suboptimal alternatives including decision feedback detectors and prediction-based detectors. All these strategies work well as evidenced by the simulation results. The proposed protocols are especially useful when the required average data rate is high. In addition, we extend the protocols to the multiple-antenna case and provide the design criterion of the differential unitary space time modulation (DUSTM) for TWRC.     

Impact of receive diversity on the performance of amplify-and-forward relaying under APS and IPS power constraints

In this letter, we investigate the impact of receive diversity on the error rate performance of a relay-assisted cooperative scheme in which the relay terminal is operating in amplify-and-forward (AF) mode under the so-called average power scaling (APS) and instantaneous power scaling (IPS) constraints. We assume that the source and relay terminals are each equipped with one antenna, while the destination terminal is equipped with N receive antennas. Through the derivation of symbol error rate expressions, we demonstrate that the maximum achievable diversity orders under APS and IPS constraints are N+1 and 2N, respectively.     

Shift-full-rank matrices and applications in space-time trellis codes for relay networks with asynchronous cooperative diversity

To achieve full cooperative diversity in a relay network, most of the existing space-time coding schemes require the synchronization between terminals. A family of space-time trellis codes that achieve full cooperative diversity order without the assumption of synchronization has been recently proposed. The family is based on the stack construction by Hammons and El Gamal and its generalizations by Lu and Kumar. It has been shown that the construction of such a family is equivalent to the construction of binary matrices that have full row rank no matter how their rows are shifted, where a row corresponds to a terminal (or transmit antenna) and its length corresponds to the memory size of the trellis code on that terminal. We call such matrices as shift-full-rank (SFR) matrices. A family of SFR matrices has been also constructed, but the memory sizes of the corresponding space-time trellis codes (the number of columns of SFR matrices) grow exponentially in terms of the number of terminals (the number of rows of SFR matrices), which may cause a high decoding complexity when the number of terminals is not small. In this paper, we systematically study and construct SFR matrices of any sizes for any number of terminals. Furthermore, we construct shortest (square) SFR (SSFR) matrices that correspond to space-time trellis codes with the smallest memory sizes and asynchronous full cooperative diversity. We also present some simulation results to illustrate the performances of the space-time trellis codes associated with SFR matrices in asynchronous cooperative communications.     

Cooperative Hybrid‐ARQ Protocols: Unified Frameworks for Protocol Analysis

Cooperative hybrid‐automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocols, which can exploit the spatial and temporal diversities, have been widely studied. The efficiency of cooperative HARQ protocols is higher than that of cooperative protocols because retransmissions are only performed when necessary. We classify cooperative HARQ protocols as three decode‐and‐forward‐based HARQ (DF‐HARQ) protocols and two amplified‐and‐forward‐based HARQ (AF‐HARQ) protocols. To compare these protocols and obtain the optimum parameters, two unified frameworks are developed for protocol analysis. Using the frameworks, we can evaluate and compare the maximum throughput and outage probabilities according to the SNR, the relay location, and the delay constraint. From the analysis we can see that the maximum achievable throughput of the DF‐HARQ protocols can be much greater than that of the AF‐HARQ protocols due to the incremental redundancy transmission at the relay.     

基于两个中继的多跳无线网中的编码协同

本文针对使用两个中继的多跳无线网,提出了一种新的编码协同方案.利用有线的方式,两个距离很近的中继终端被联接后形成一对虚拟天线阵.由于分布式Turbo码被融合到该网中,该方案便于单天线中继与其他中继共享天线,并且以较低硬件实现复杂度提高了系统在准静态衰落中继信道下的性能.