On beamforming with finite rate feedback in multiple-antenna systems

We study a multiple-antenna system where the transmitter is equipped with quantized information about instantaneous channel realizations. Assuming that the transmitter uses the quantized information for beamforming, we derive a universal lower bound on the outage probability for any finite set of beamformers. The universal lower bound provides a concise characterization of the gain with each additional bit of feedback information regarding the channel. Using the bound, it is shown that finite information systems approach the perfect information case as (t-1)2/sup -B/t-1/, where B is the number of feedback bits and t is the number of transmit antennas. The geometrical bounding technique, used in the proof of the lower bound, also leads to a design criterion for good beamformers, whose outage performance approaches the lower bound. The design criterion minimizes the maximum inner product between any two beamforming vectors in the beamformer codebook, and is equivalent to the problem of designing unitary space-time codes under certain conditions. Finally, we show that good beamformers are good packings of two-dimensional subspaces in a 2t-dimensional real Grassmannian manifold with chordal distance as the metric.     

User cooperation diversity. Part I. System description

Mobile users' data rate and quality of service are limited by the fact that, within the duration of any given call, they experience severe variations in signal attenuation, thereby necessitating the use of some type of diversity. In this two-part paper, we propose a new form of spatial diversity, in which diversity gains are achieved via the cooperation of mobile users. Part I describes the user cooperation strategy, while Part II (see ibid., p.1939-48) focuses on implementation issues and performance analysis. Results show that, even though the interuser channel is noisy, cooperation leads not only to an increase in capacity for both users but also to a more robust system, where users' achievable rates are less susceptible to channel variations.     

Multiple-Antenna Cooperative Wireless Systems: A Diversity–Multiplexing Tradeoff Perspective

We consider a general multiple-antenna network with multiple sources, multiple destinations, and multiple relays in terms of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT). We examine several subcases of this most general problem taking into account the processing capability of the relays (half-duplex or full-duplex), and the network geometry (clustered or nonclustered). We first study the multiple-antenna relay channel with a full-duplex relay to understand the effect of increased degrees of freedom in the direct link. We find DMT upper bounds and investigate the achievable performance of decode-and-forward (DF), and compress-and-forward (CF) protocols. Our results suggest that while DF is DMT optimal when all terminals have one antenna each, it may not maintain its good performance when the degrees of freedom in the direct link are increased, whereas CF continues to perform optimally. We also study the multiple-antenna relay channel with a half-duplex relay. We show that the half-duplex DMT behavior can significantly be different from the full-duplex case. We find that CF is DMT optimal for half-duplex relaying as well, and is the first protocol known to achieve the half-duplex relay DMT. We next study the multiple-access relay channel (MARC) DMT. Finally, we investigate a system with a single source-destination pair and multiple relays, each node with a single antenna, and show that even under the ideal assumption of full-duplex relays and a clustered network, this virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system can never fully mimic a real MIMO DMT. For cooperative systems with multiple sources and multiple destinations the same limitation remains in effect.     

Spreading and power allocation for multiple antenna transmission using decorrelating receivers

We propose a new scheme for multiple antenna transmission in the context of spread-spectrum signaling. The new scheme consists of using shifted Gold sequences to modulate independent information on the multiple antennas. We show that this strategy of using multiphase spreading (MPS) on different antennas greatly improves the throughput over currently known spread-spectrum multiple-antenna methods. We also find the optimal power allocation strategy among multiple transmit antennas for a fixed rate of channel state information, which might be provided via a feedback link, at the transmitter. We demonstrate the differences in optimal power distribution for maximizing capacity and minimizing probability of outage. When the transmission from the two antennas uses orthogonal spreading, we find that optimizing the power does not give much gain over the equal power transmission. However, when the transmissions are not orthogonal as in the case of MPS, then allocating power to maximize throughput gives considerable gain over equal power transmission. We also consider the effect of imperfections in the feedback channel on the optimal power allocation and show that our power allocation scheme is robust to feedback errors.     

Power efficient multimedia communication over wireless channels

In this work, we introduce an approach for minimizing the total power consumption of a mobile transmitter due to source compression, channel coding and transmission subject to a fixed end-to-end source distortion. We illustrate our approach both on an abstract class of sources and channels and on a realistic H.263 video transmission system through a wireless channel. Performance under different channel environments and implementation schemes are investigated. Our numerical analysis shows that optimized settings can reduce the total power consumption by a significant factor and prolong battery life considerably compared with fixed parameter settings.     

Code Designs for Cooperative Communication

The goal of this article is to discuss the implementation of two cooperative protocols - decode-and-forward (DF) and estimate-and-forward (EF). In each case, the starting point is an information theoretic random coding scheme, which motivates a practical code construction. Low-density parity check (LDPC) codes are used as components in both protocols. In DF relaying, the problem boils down to a search for multi-rate LDPC codes that simultaneously perform well for the source-relay and the source- destination links. On the other hand, in EF relaying, the challenge is to design an efficient quantizer for forming a compressed estimate at the relay. The performance of each scheme is comparable to theoretical limits.     

A Generic Model to Solve Tactical Planning Problems in Flexible Manufacturing Systems

This paper is an attempt to develop a generic modeling framework that addresses tactical planning problems of flexible manufacturing systems in a coherent manner. We propose a generic 0-1 mixed integer programming formulation, that integrates batching, loading, and routing problems with their critical aspects related to a system's performance. For this purpose, a thorough analysis is made to determine and relate system components, their attributes, and alternatives together with performance measures specific to tactical planning. This provided the justification to support our argument about generality of the model. A linear programming formulation is provided to approximate the mixed integer formulation proposed so as to overcome the problem's combinatorial complexity. The potential capability of the linear approximation proposed also is demonstrated via a small set of test problems.     

Assessing the benefits of remanufacturing option under one-way substitution and capacity constraint

In this article, we investigate the profitability of remanufacturing option when the manufactured and remanufactured products are segmented to different markets and the production capacity is finite. A single period profit model under substitution is constructed to investigate the system conditions under which remanufacturing is profitable. We present analytical findings and computational results to show profitability of remanufacturing option under substitution policy subject to a capacity constraint of the joint manufacturing/remanufacturing facility.     

Source and Channel Coding for Cooperative Relaying

User cooperation is a powerful tool to combat fading and increase robustness for communication over wireless channels. Although it is doubtless a promising technique for enhancing channel reliability, its performance in terms of average source distortion is not clear since source-channel separation theorem fails under the most common nonergodic slow-fading channel assumption, when channel state information (CSI) is only available at the receiving terminals. This work sheds some light on the end-to-end performance of joint source-channel coding for cooperative relay systems in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Considering distortion exponent as a figure of merit, we propose various strategies for cooperative source and channel coding that significantly improve the performance compared to the conventional scheme of source coding followed by cooperative channel coding. We characterize the optimal distortion exponent of a full-duplex relay channel for all bandwidth ratios. For the half-duplex relay channel, we provide an upper bound which is tight for small and large bandwidth ratios. We consider the effect of correlated side information on the distortion exponent as well.