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In this paper, we consider a wireless powered multi-relay network in which a multi-antenna hybrid access point underlaying a cellular system transmits information to distant receivers. Multiple relays capable of energy harvesting are deployed in the network to assist the information transmission. The hybrid access point can wirelessly supply energy to the relays, achieving multi-user gains from signal and energy cooperation. We propose a joint optimization for signal beamforming of the hybrid access point as well as wireless energy harvesting and collaborative beamforming strategies of the relays. The objective is to maximize the network throughput subject to probabilistic interference constraints at the cellular user equipment. We formulate the throughput maximization with both the time-switching and power-splitting schemes, which impose very different couplings between the operating parameters for wireless power and information transfer. Although the optimization problems are inherently non-convex, they share similar structural properties that can be leveraged for an efficient algorithm design. In particular, by exploiting monotonicity in the throughput, we maximize it iteratively via customized polyblock approximation with reduced complexity. The numerical results show that the proposed algorithms can achieve close to optimal performance in terms of the energy efficiency and throughput [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physical-layer security is usually ensured by the injection of artificial noise (AN) at the legitimate source or destination when relays are cooperative but untrusted. In this work, in order to avoid the power-consuming AN at the legitimate user pairs, the authors investigate multi-pair two-way relaying as a solution for secure transmission in wireless relay networks with untrusted relays. They formulate a generalised problem for the joint design of cooperative beamforming (CB) and AN at relays to maximise the secrecy sum-rate in wireless networks with multi-pair legal users, multiple untrusted relays as well as multiple non-colluding eavesdroppers. Further, they reformulate, approximate and relax the original non-convex problem into a sequence of convex sub-problems based on semi-definite relaxation (SDR) and Taylor series approximation. Particularly, for the reformulated problem they prove that the SDR is in fact tight, and hence propose an iterative algorithm for CB and AN design at the relays. In the simulations, they demonstrate the fast convergence and high achievable secrecy sum-rate of the proposed algorithm. Also, they simulate and discuss the impact of the number of user pairs on the secrecy sum-rate, and reveal the change of performance gain with the number of multiple user pairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies an energy harvesting (EH) based cooperative relaying system, where two half-duplex relays operate with EH and alternately amplify and forward source data to the destination. When one relay joins in the cooperative data transmission, the other relay will harvest wireless energy by overhearing the transmissions from both the source and the transmitting relay. Both the time-switching and power-splitting architectures are considered for the EH and data reception at relays. Since the EH can be implicitly performed by each relay through listening the ongoing transmissions, more energy can be harvested for the cooperative data transmission. The outage probability and throughput of the proposed scheme are derived. Simulation results are provided to verify the correctness of our theoretical analysis and show that our scheme can significantly outperform the single-relay system in terms of throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the benefits of incorporating relays in future multi-user wireless networks that seek to exploit unexplored bands of very high frequency spectrum, where transmitted signals are known to be highly susceptible to outages. To this end, we examine a two-user bursty MIMO Gaussian interference channel with an in-band relay, where Bernoulli random states conceptually capture signal outages. As our main result, we show that an in-band relay can provide a degrees of freedom (DoF) gain in this bursty channel. This beneficial role of in-band relays in the bursty channel is in direct contrast to their role in the non-bursty channel which is not as significant to provide a DoF gain. More importantly, we demonstrate that in certain antenna configurations, an in-band relay can help achieve interference-free performances with increased DoF. We find the benefits particularly substantial in high-outage circumstances, as the DoF gain can grow linearly with the number of antennas at the relay. In this paper, first we derive an outer bound from which we obtain a necessary condition for interference-free DoF performances. Then we develop a novel scheme that exploits information of the bursty channel states to achieve them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we apply the innovative multi-objective optimization methods to the challenge posed by rate maximization, total transmission power minimization and relay selection in cooperative cognitive radio networks. The proposed methods which are based on amplify and forward relaying strategy optimize the three conflicting objectives and, at same time, they maximize the rate quality, minimize the total transmission power allocated to the network relays and make the best relay node selection. The multi-objective optimization studied is a non-convex non-linear combinatorial algorithm which is converted to its convex smooth equivalent through two efficient approximation methods. We apply the multi-objective lexicographic method to overcome the challenge posed by these conflicting objectives simultaneously. The proposed relay node selection method is based on zero-norm principle which provides an effective technique to obtain a minimum node selection. Simulation results confirm that the proposed approaches offer superior performance over known schemes in terms of throughput gain and number of active relays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an adaptive cooperative transmission scheme with relays harvesting wireless energy. Two relays are adopted to alternately forward source data to the destination using the two-path successive relaying (TPSR) protocol. When one relay forwards previous data along with source transmitting current data, using the power-splitting technique, the other relay will harvest energy and decode the current data from the received composite signal. If the TPSR cannot be performed due to the failure of data decoding at either relay, the decode-and-forward (DF) protocol will be performed by selecting a better relay. If one relay joins in the DF relaying, it will harvest energy and decode source data using the PS technique, while the other relay will always harvest energy from the received signal. If neither TPSR nor DF relaying can be performed, the source will transfer wireless power to both relays. The transmit powers of relays and the PS ratio are judiciously determined through analyzing the occurrence probability, average power fading, and success probability of each case. Numerical results show that our adaptive relaying scheme can achieve a much higher throughput than the single-relay DF scheme and the TPSR-only scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we investigate an energy harvesting cooperative network in which the cooperation is done in a random access environment. Although the cooperation provides an extra harvested energy supply for transmissions of the source, it causes probable collisions for the transmitted source packets. Thus, this kind of cooperation can improve or degrade the QoS of the source packets. We find the optimal policy in such a scenario to maximize the source throughput and derive the necessary and sufficient condition for no-cooperation policy to be throughput-optimal. Then, we prove that the maximum throughput is obtained by considering no-cooperation or full-cooperation policy depending on the network parameters. Also, we design optimal static and dynamic policies to minimize the average end-to-end delay for the source packets. In a static policy, the packets are accepted at the relay with a fixed probability while in a dynamic policy, the decision is made based on the status of data and energy buffers in the relay. We derive the necessary and sufficient condition under which the no-cooperation is the delay-optimal policy. When no-cooperation is not optimal, we model the scenario as a quasi-birth-death process and a constrained Markov decision process to derive static and dynamic delay-optimal policies, respectively. By several numerical results, we show the effect of tradeoff between cooperation and collision in the derived optimal policies in different network conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the authors take into account the imperfect channel state information for beamforming (BF) scheme in a dual-hop multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) amplify-and-forward (AF) relay network. Since the overall performance has been decided by the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the destination, the authors derive the optimal BF weights that maximise the SINR at the desination. To evaluate the performance of the relay network, the authors also derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability and probability density function of the received SINR. Computer simulations are carried out, which show the superiority of the designed optimal BF scheme, the impacts of channel errors and antenna configurations on the performance of the MIMO AF relay systems, and the validity of the analytical expressions. It is shown that due to the channel errors, the performance of the relay network is bounded no matter how much power is injected into the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of relay selection on the performance of distributed orthogonal space-time block coding (D-OSTBC) in a wireless network. The relay selection algorithm is based on minimizing the pairwise error probability (PER) or equivalently maximizing the signal to noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver. The receiver can always find the optimal selected relay by exhaustive search where the number of relays rarely exceeds four. It is shown in this work that the proposed scheme achieves full diversity order and provides an additional array gain compared to conventional D-OSTBC. Our results show that the proposed scheme is more power efficient than the conventional D-OSTBC. Since 50% of the time the half of the relay is off, the proposed scheme increases the life time of the relay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider cooperative communications with energy harvesting (EH) relays and develop a distributed power control mechanism for the relaying terminals. Unlike prior work, which mainly deals with single-relay systems with saturated traffic flow, we address the case of bursty data arrival at the source cooperatively forwarded by multiple half-duplex EH relays. We aim at optimizing the long-run average delay of the source packets under the energy neutrality constraint on the power consumption of each relay. While EH relay systems have been predominantly optimized using either offline or online methodologies, we take on a more realistic learning-theoretic approach. Hence, our scheme can be deployed for real-time operation without assuming acausal information on channel realizations, data/energy arrivals as required by offline optimization, or relying on precise statistics of the system processes, as is the case with online optimization. We formulate the problem as a partially observable identical payoff stochastic game (PO-IPSG) with factored controllers in which the power control policy of each relay is adaptive to its channel and energy states as well as to the state of the source buffer. We equip each relay with a reinforcement learning procedure and prove that the parallel execution of this procedure is convergent to (at least) a locally optimal solution of the formulated PO-IPSG. The proposed algorithm operates without explicit message exchanges between the relays, while inducing only little source-relay signaling overhead. By simulation, we contrast the delay performance of the proposed method against existing heuristics for throughput maximization. It is shown that compared with these heuristics, the systematic approach adopted in this paper has a smaller suboptimality gap once evaluated against a centralized optimal policy armed with perfect statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the joint partner selection and power allocation problem for two different network power management policies, i.e, group lifetime maximization (GLM) and minimum weighted total power (MWTP), with the aim of lifetime maximization in symbol error rate (SER)-constrained pairwise cooperative wireless networks. With the optimal power allocation solution derived according to each policy, we show that the optimal partner selection can be obtained using the bottleneck matching (BM) algorithm and the maximum weighted matching (MWM) algorithm for GLM and MWTP policies, respectively. Since partner selection with the BM algorithm is not power efficient, we propose a novel minimum BM (MBM) algorithm to solve the optimal partner selection problem for the GLM policy. We further propose a suboptimal partner selection (SPS) algorithm for these policies with lower time complexity, compared with the optimal partner selection schemes. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed partner selection and power allocation strategies based on the GLM policy have better network lifetime performance over the strategies based on the MWTP policy and achieve significant network lifetime improvement over conventional strategies of minimizing the total power per transmission, with and without an equal power constraint. Compared to the MBM and SPS algorithms, partner selection based on the BM algorithm for the GLM policy has inferior network lifetime performance at a low update interval. We show that partner selection based on the MBM algorithm achieves maximum network lifetime performance and that partner selection with the SPS algorithm performs very close to it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We consider an opportunistic wireless communication setting, in which two nodes (referred to as forwarders) compete to choose a relay node from a set of relays, as they ephemerally become available (e.g., wake up from a sleep state). Each relay, when it becomes available (or arrives), offers a (possibly different) “reward” to each forwarder. Each forwarder’s objective is to minimize a combination of the delay incurred in choosing a relay and the reward offered by the chosen relay. As an example, we develop the reward structure for the specific problem of geographical forwarding over a common set of sleep-wake cycling relays. In general, our model can be considered as a game theoretic variant of the asset selling problem studied in the operations research literature. We study two variants of the generic relay selection problem, namely, the completely observable (CO) and the partially observable (PO) cases. These cases are based on whether a forwarder (in addition to observing its reward) can also observe the reward offered to the other forwarder. Formulating both problems as a two person stochastic game, we characterize the solutions in terms of Nash equilibrium policy pairs (NEPPs). For the CO case, we provide a general structure of the NEPPs. For the PO case, we prove that there exists an NEPP within the class of threshold policy pairs. Through numerical work, for a one-hop forwarding example, we compare the cost performance of various NEPPs with a simple forwarding (SF) policy, which causes each forwarder to act as if the other is not present. We find that if the forwarders are not very close then the SF policy suffices. Insights gained from this numerical work are then used in an end-to-end simulation of geographical forwarding in a large network, in which we are concerned with delivery of packets from a tagged source to a sink, in the presence of competition from other packet flows destined for the same sink. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Power consumption of wireless network is increasing as the demands in wireless data rates are escalating in modern life. Base stations are the major power consumption component in the wireless network. Therefore, the main challenge is to reduce the total power consumed in the network while maintaining the network coverage and its capacity. In this paper, a new relay switching perspective is introduced for relay blossoming and withering algorithm. First, relay switching is considered as a function of time representing the rate of active relays. The effect of the rate of active relays, arrival rate and average load factor of relays on the total network power consumption is modelled. It is found that the rate of active relay function that optimises the network power consumption obeys linear first-order ordinary differential equation. The effect of different synthesised arrival rate profiles on the rate of active relay is presented. Moreover, relative relay to base station capacity parameter is defined, and its effect on the power optimisation is investigated. Based on the solutions of the ordinary differential equation, an approximate fuzzy-based relay sleeping mode is introduced. The fuzzy logic sleeping mode utilises the arrival rate and its derivative as inputs. The solution of the differential equations shows that power saving up to 45 and 30 per cent can be achieved in sleeping and idling modes, respectively, in contrast to 42 per cent achieved from the fuzzy sleeping mode. The increasing slope of the arrival rate results in less power saving. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the performance of energy-constrained dual-hop amplify-and-forward relaying systems with multi-antenna nodes in the presence of multiple co-channel interferers at the destination. To maximize the overall signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio, as well as the harvested energy so as to mitigate the severe effects of fading and enable long-distance wireless power transfer, hop-by-hop information and energy beamforming is proposed where the transmitted signal is steered along the strongest eigenmode of each hop. The wirelessly powered relay scavenges energy from the source information radio frequency signal through energy beamforming, where both the time-switching receiver and power-splitting receiver are considered, and then uses the harvested energy to forward the source message to the destination. To this end, tight lower and upper bound expressions for the outage probability and ergodic capacity are presented in closed form. These are employed to investigate the throughput of the delay-constrained and delay-tolerant transmission modes. In addition, the asymptotic high signal-to-noise ratio outage probability and ergodic capacity approximations are derived, where the achievable diversity order is also presented. Numerical results sustained by Monte Carlo simulations show the tightness of the proposed analytical expressions. The impact of various parameters, such as energy harvesting time, power-splitting ratio, source transmit power, and the number of antennas on the system throughput, is also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyzes the impact of statistical delay constraints on the achievable rate of a two-hop wireless communication link in which the communication between a source and a destination is accomplished via a buffer-aided relay node. It is assumed that there is no direct link between the source and the destination, and the buffer-aided relay forwards the information to the destination by employing the decode-and-forward scheme. Given statistical delay constraints specified via maximum delay and delay violation probability, the tradeoff between the statistical delay constraints imposed on any two concatenated queues is identified. With this characterization, the maximum constant arrival rates that can be supported by this two-hop link are obtained by determining the effective capacity of such links as a function of the statistical delay constraints, signal-to-noise ratios at the source and relay, and the fading distributions of the links. It is shown that asymmetric statistical delay constraints at the buffers of the source and relay node can improve the achievable rate. Overall, the impact of the statistical delay tradeoff on the achievable throughput is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we consider a cooperative simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) network with one source–destination pair and multiple energy harvesting relays. How to efficiently use these relays has been addressed in conventional cooperative networks, and this paper investigates the impact of SWIPT on the performance of such multirelay cooperative networks. In particular, the main contribution of this paper is that a closed-form expression of the outage probability achieved by the multirelay cooperative protocol is obtained, as well as its approximation at high SNR. In addition, the performance of the cooperative network with the SWIPT relays is compared with that in conventional systems with self-powered relays. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Because of the surging demands of multimedia services, quality-of-experience (QoE) is becoming an important metric to evaluate network quality from users' perspective. In this paper, resource optimisation to achieve optimal tradeoff between QoE and energy consumption in bidirectional orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access relaying networks is addressed so as to provide satisfactory multimedia delivery quality and support green communications. We first formulate a QoE-energy efficiency tradeoff optimisation where QoE requirements and relaying traffic balance are considered and prove that QoE-energy efficiency is quasiconcave on QoE, which suggests the existence of a unique global optimal tradeoff point. We then propose an optimisation framework to achieve the optimal tradeoff efficiently. With the framework, we develop resource allocation approaches for two specific relaying strategies, that is, two-phase decode-and-forward relaying with dynamic XOR network coding and compute-and-forward relaying with physical network coding via structured codes. Numerical results validate theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed optimisation solution for achieving the tradeoff between QoE and energy consumption. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid developments in mobile services and wireless technologies have prompted users to form mobile social networks (MSNs), where bundles can be delivered via opportunistic peer-to-peer links in a store–carry–forward mode. This mode needs all nodes to work in a cooperative way. However, mobile nodes may be selfish and might not be willing to forward data to others due to the limited resources (e.g., buffer and energy), resulting in degraded system performance. To tackle the aforementioned problem, this paper proposes a novel incentive scheme to stimulate selfish nodes to participate in bundle delivery in MSNs. At first, a virtual currency is introduced to pay for the relay service. Then, a bundle carrier selects a relay node from its friends or other strangers based on its status. Next, a bargain game is employed to model the transaction pricing for relay service. In addition, the simulation results show that the proposal can improve the performance of the existing schemes significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensing devices have been widely used in civilian and military applications over the past decade. In some application scenarios, the sensors are sparsely deployed in the field and are costly or infeasible to have stable communication links for delivering the collected data to the destined server. A possible solution is to utilize the motion of entities that are already present in the environment to provide opportunistic relaying services for sensory data. In this paper, we design and propose a new scheduling scheme that opportunistically schedules data transmissions based on the optimal stopping theory, with a view of minimizing the energy consumption on network probes for data delivery. In fact, by exploiting the stochastic characteristics of the relay motion, we can postpone the communication up to an acceptable time deadline until the best relay is found. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the derived optimal strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new technique for soft information relaying, which is based on a soft decode–compress–forward relay protocol. The proposed system provides a means of using distributed low-density parity-check (LDPC) coding in conjunction with higher order modulation, such as pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), which is effective even under poor source–relay link conditions. Ordinarily, such schemes suffer from error propagation to the destination caused by incorrect decoding at the relay when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the source–relay link is low; however, our system avoids this problem by generating soft versions of the additional (parity-bearing) PAM symbols for transmission from the relay. The proposed technique of soft compression does not suffer from parity log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) converging to zero, as do many soft re-encoding techniques for turbo and LDPC codes. In the case of Gray-coded PAM/QAM signaling, we also propose a method of performing exact expectation-based soft modulation with low computational complexity. Furthermore, we propose a new model, which we refer to as the soft scalar model, for the overall source-to-destination channel encountered by the constellation symbols, and this model is used at the destination to compute LLRs for joint decoding of the distributed LDPC code. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can provide good coding gain, diversity gain, and spectral efficiency under poor source–relay SNR conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a full-duplex (FD) decode-and-forward system in which the time-switching protocol is employed by the multiantenna relay to receive energy from the source and transmit information to the destination. The instantaneous throughput is maximized by optimizing receive and transmit beamformers at the relay and the time-split parameter. We study both optimum and suboptimum schemes. The reformulated problem in the optimum scheme achieves closed-form solutions in terms of transmit beamformer for some scenarios. In other scenarios, the optimization problem is formulated as a semidefinite relaxation problem and a rank-one optimum solution is always guaranteed. In the suboptimum schemes, the beamformers are obtained using maximum ratio combining, zero-forcing, and maximum ratio transmission. When beamformers have closed-form solutions, the achievable instantaneous and delay-constrained throughput are analytically characterized. Our results reveal that beamforming increases both the energy harvesting and loop interference suppression capabilities at the FD relay. Moreover, simulation results demonstrate that the choice of the linear processing scheme as well as the time-split plays a critical role in determining the FD gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the energy efficiency (EE) of a decode-and-forward relay network with wireless energy harvesting. The data transmission between a multi-antenna base station (BS) and its user equipment is assisted by an intermediate relay node, which operates with the wireless energy harvesting. The BS firstly transmits energy and information to the relay node, which can harvest the energy and retract the information simultaneously using the power-splitting or time-switching method. Then, the relay node forwards its decoded information to the user equipment using all the harvested energy. Through maximising the instantaneous EE for the power-splitting-based system, the optimal power-splitting ratio and the optimal transmit power of the BS are derived in closed form for each time block. To maximise the instantaneous EE for the time-switching-based system, an optimisation algorithm is proposed to judiciously determine the harvesting time and the transmit power of the BS for each time block. Furthermore, we optimise the number of antennas N of the BS by taking into account the circuit power consumption, as it cannot be ignored when N is large. Finally, simulation results are presented to validate our derived closed-form solutions and verify the efficiency of our proposed algorithm. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) can lead to uninterrupted network operation by integrating radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting with data communication. In this paper, we consider a two-hop source-relay-destination network and investigate the efficient usage of a decode-and-forward (DF) relay for SWIPT toward the energy-constrained destination. In particular, by assuming a Rician fading environment, we jointly optimize power allocation (PA), relay placement (RP), and power splitting (PS) so as to minimize outage probability under the harvested power constraint at the destination node. We consider the two possible cases of source-to-destination distance: (1) small distance with direct information transfer link; and (2) relatively large distance with no direct reachability. Analytical expressions for individual and joint optimal PA, RP, and PS are obtained by exploiting convexity of outage minimization problem for the no direct link case. In case of direct source-to-destination link, multipseudoconvexity of joint-optimal PA, RP, and PS problem is proved, and alternating optimization is used to find the global optimal solution. Numerical results show that the joint optimal solutions, although strongly influenced by the harvested power requirement at the destination, can provide respectively 64% and 100% outage improvement over the fixed allocation scheme for without and with direct link. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a new linear vector physical-layer network coding (NC) scheme for spatial multiplexing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) two-way relay channel (TWRC) where the channel state information (CSI) is not available at the transmitters. In this scheme, each user transmits $M$ independent quadrature amplitude modulation signal streams respectively from its $M$ antennas to the relay. Based on the receiver-side CSI, the relay determines a NC generator matrix for linear vector network coding, and reconstructs the associated $M$ linear combinations of all messages. We present an explicit solution for the generator matrix that minimizes the error probability at a high SNR, as well as an efficient algorithm to find the optimized solution. We propose a novel typical error event analysis that exploits a new characterization of the deep fade events for the TWRC. We derive a new closed-form expression for the average error probability of the proposed scheme over a Rayleigh fading MIMO TWRC. Our analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves the optimal error rate performance at a high SNR. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms existing schemes, and match well with our analytical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Device-to-device (D2D) communication has recently attracted much research attention because of its potential to increase the capacity of cellular networks. Most existing works aim to maximise the overall system throughput (systemcentric), which ignores the actual traffic demands of D2D users. In this study, the authors consider user-centric relay assisted D2D communications where D2D users have different evaluations for the significance of every unit of increased data rate. By considering the traffic demands of D2D users, the authors propose a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction based relay allocation mechanism (ARM) in which every D2D user submits a bid to the basestation (BS). The submitted bids indicate D2D users' valuation on every unit of the increased data rate. The BS then allocates relays to D2D users by maximising the social welfare of D2D users while maintaining a predefined data rate requirement for cellular users. A payment scheme to charge D2D users for using relays is designed, and the authors show that the auction is truthful. The authors also extend the results to a general case and provide a general ARM accordingly. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a compress-and-forward scheme with backward decoding is presented for the unicast wireless relay network. The encoding at the source and relay is a generalization of the noisy network coding (NNC) scheme. While it achieves the same reliable data rate as NNC scheme, the backward decoding allows for a better decoding complexity as compared with the joint decoding of the NNC scheme. Characterizing the layered decoding scheme is shown to be equivalent to characterizing an information flow for the wireless network. A node-flow for a graph with bisubmodular capacity constraints is presented and a max-flow min-cut theorem is presented. This generalizes many well-known results of flows over capacity constrained graphs studied in computer science literature. The results for the unicast relay network are generalized to the network with multiple sources with independent messages intended for a single destination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the power allocation and relay selection strategy for two-way relaying systems using physical-layer network coding (PNC), in which two information symbols can be exchanged in two time slots. Our approach is based on maximizing the objective rate under a total power budget consumed by the transmission of the two information symbols. Two optimization objectives, namely, the minimum of the achievable rates of the two directions and the sum rate of the system, are considered here. Since the objectives are not continuously differentiable functions, we propose a method based on a suboptimal solution to solve the original problems. It is shown that the main problems have closed-form solutions, and the strategies can be implemented in a distributed manner. The numerical results verify the effectiveness of our proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most practical communication links are bidirectional. In these models, since the source node also receives signals, its encoder has the option of computing its output based on the signals it received in the past. On the other hand, from a practical point of view, it would also be desirable to identify the cases where such an encoder design may not improve communication rates. This question is particularly interesting for the case where the transmitted messages and the feedback signals are subject to eavesdropping. In this paper, we investigate the question of how much impact the feedback has on the secrecy capacity by studying two fundamental models. First, we consider the Gaussian two-way wiretap channel and derive an outer bound for its secrecy capacity region. We show that the secrecy rate loss can be unbounded when feedback signals are not utilized except for a special case we identify, and thus conclude that utilizing feedback can be highly beneficial in general. Second, we consider a half-duplex Gaussian two-way relay channel where the relay node is also an eavesdropper, and find that the impact of feedback is less pronounced compared to the previous scenario. Specifically, the loss in secrecy rate, when ignoring the feedback, is quantified to be less than 0.5 bit per channel use when the relay power goes to infinity. This achievable rate region is obtained with simple time sharing along with cooperative jamming, which, with its simplicity and near optimum performance, is a viable alternative to an encoder that utilizes feedback signals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A cooperative wireless relaying communication system usually consists of a source node, a destination node and one or more relay nodes. In this work Amplify-and-Forward/Decode-and-Forward relaying techniques are discussed in order to improve the performance of a wireless relaying communication system under the case of high code rate. As a performance metric, the outage probability of the proposed Amplify- and-Forward/Decode-and-Forward relaying structure is compared with and without coding issue. Results from the proposed modeling and simulations illustrate that our Amplify-and-Forward/Decode-and-Forward relaying method with high code rating enables robust cooperative wireless communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a relay network that delivers a Gaussian source by employing successive refinement source coding and superposition coding of layers at the source node and successive decoding at the relay and destination nodes. For the network, making use of the decoding results at the relay and destination nodes of the first transmission, an efficient relaying strategy of layers is proposed to minimize the expected distortion (ED) when only the average channel state information is available at the source node. Three types of the proposed scheme, defined as Prop-DF, using decode-and-forward signals, Prop-AF, using amplify-and-forward signals, and Prop-MF, using mixed-forward signals, are addressed and analyzed in terms of the outage probability and distortion exponent. Unlike other studies, we have also taken the relay location into account in deriving the distortion exponent showing the high SNR behavior of the ED. The results show that the proposed scheme increases the distortion exponent up to twice that of the conventional relaying schemes when the relay is close to the source node, and that Prop-MF provides the best performance for most relay locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the design of coding schemes for the wireless two-way relaying channel when there is no channel state information at the transmitter. In the spirit of the compute-and-forward paradigm, we present a multilevel coding scheme that permits reliable computation (or, decoding) of a class of functions at the relay. The function to be computed (or decoded) is then chosen depending on the channel realization. We define such a class of functions which can be decoded at the relay using the proposed coding scheme and derive rates that are universally achievable over a set of channel gains when this class of functions is used at the relay. We develop our framework with general modulation formats in mind, but numerical results are presented for the case where each node transmits using 4-ary and 8-ary modulation schemes. Numerical results demonstrate that the flexibility afforded by our proposed scheme results in substantially higher rates than those achievable by always using a fixed function or considering only linear functions over higher order fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a distributed network coding (DNC) scheme based on the Raptor codes for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where a group of sensor nodes, acting as source nodes, communicate with a single sink through some other sensor nodes, serving as relay nodes, in a multi-hop fashion. At the sink, a graph-based Raptor code is formed on the fly. After receiving a sufficient number of encoded packets, the sink begins to decode. The main contributions of this paper are the derivation of a bit error rate (BER) lower bound for the LT-based DNC scheme over Rayleigh fading channels under maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding, and the derivations of upper and lower BER bounds for the proposed Raptor-based DNC scheme on the basis of the derived BER bound of LT codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relay sharing has been recently investigated to increase the performance of coexisting wireless multi—hop networks. In this paper, we analyze a scenario where two wireless ad hoc networks are willing to share some of their nodes, acting as relays, in order to gain benefits in terms of lower packet delivery delay and reduced loss probability. Bayesian network analysis is exploited to compute the probabilistic relationships between local parameters and overall performance, whereas the selection of the nodes to share is made by means of a game theoretic approach. Our results are then validated through the use of a system level simulator, which shows that an accurate selection of the shared nodes can significantly increase the performance gain with respect to a random selection scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Routing strategies deeply affect the performance of wireless ad hoc networks, in terms of coverage, interference, and delay. In this work, we investigate the impact of different routing strategies on the overall amount of interference generated in a distributed ad hoc network with power control. To this end, we derive an analytical model for the evaluation of the performance in terms of mean value and variance of the interference when signal level power control is adopted and different routing strategies, based on long-hop and short-hop relay selections schemes, are considered. This model allows us to quantify the performance of the overall network in terms of interference, average number of hops and path efficiency. Numerical results have been also verified by simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider an erasure multi-way relay channel (EMWRC) in which several users share their data through a relay over erasure links. Assuming no feedback channel between the users and the relay, we first identify the challenges for designing a data sharing scheme over an EMWRC. Then, to overcome these challenges, we propose practical low-latency and low-complexity data sharing schemes based on fountain coding. Later, we introduce the notion of end-to-end erasure rate (EEER) and analytically derive it for the proposed schemes. EEER is then used to calculate the achievable rate and transmission overhead of the proposed schemes. Using EEER and computer simulations, the achievable rates and transmission overhead of our proposed schemes are compared with the ones of one-way relaying. This comparison implies that when the number of users and the channel erasure rates are not large, our proposed schemes outperform one-way relaying. We also find an upper bound on the achievable rates of EMWRC and observe that depending on the number of users and channel erasure rates, our proposed solutions can perform very close to this bound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of multiple services such as the transmission of private, common, and confidential messages at the physical layer is becoming important for future wireless networks in order to increase spectral efficiency. In this paper, bidirectional relay networks are considered, in which a relay node establishes bidirectional communication between two other nodes using a decode-and-forward protocol. In the broadcast phase, the relay transmits additional common and confidential messages, which then requires the study of the bidirectional broadcast channel (BBC) with common and confidential messages. This channel generalizes the broadcast channel with receiver side information considered by Kramer and Shamai. Low complexity polar codes are constructed that achieve the capacity region of both the degraded symmetric BBC, and the BBC with common and confidential messages. The use of polar codes allows an intuitive interpretation of how to incorporate receiver side information and secrecy constraints as different sets of frozen bits at the different receivers for an optimal code design. In order to show that the constructed codes achieve capacity, a tighter bound on the cardinality of an auxiliary random variable used in the converse is found using a method by Salehi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperative communication has been proven effective in enhancing the performance of wireless networks, anda variety of techniques have been investigated to exploit the spatial diversity gain to provide reliable physical layer communications with multiple quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we propose an adaptive multi-relay selection with power allocation mechanism to offer energy fairness at each node for a cooperative network. Unlike traditional approaches where all nodes are considered to transmit in a collaborative manner, weexplicitly consider the situation where nodes exhibit some degree of selfish behavior. Specifically, we introduce anovel concept of the selfishness index and incorporate it into a utility function which denotes the degree a node can benefit from cooperative transmission. Theoretical analysis and extensive simulation results are supplemented toshow advantages in maximizing the network lifetime and guaranteeing the QoS in realistic wireless environments. We also consider the practical situation when nodes consume energy in mode switching, and carefully study the behavior of inter-cluster relay switching and the trade-off among network lifetime, switching cost and switching frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a specific interference-limited wireless relay system that comprises several cooperation units (CUs) which are defined as a source and destination node pair with an associated relay node. In the wireless relay system, all source nodes simultaneously transmit their own signals and the relay node in each CU then forwards the received signal to the destination node, causing co-channel interference at both the relay node and the destination node in each CU. The co-channel interference at the relay node is closely related to that at the destination node in each CU. We first derive the end-to-end outage probability in a CU over Rayleigh slow-fading channels with interference for the decode-and-forward (DF) relaying strategy. Then, on the assumption that each CU is allocated with equal power we design an optimal power allocation between the source node and the relay node in each CU to minimize the outage probability of the investigated CU. At last, in the case that each CU is not allocated with equal power and the sum of their power is constrained, we present an optimal power allocation between CUs to minimize the sum of the outage probability of all CUs. The analytical results are verified by simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The throughput benefits of random linear network codes have been studied extensively for wirelined and wireless erasure networks. It is often assumed that all nodes within a network perform coding operations. In energy-constrained systems, however, coding subgraphs should be chosen to control the number of coding nodes while maintaining throughput. In this paper, we explore the strategic use of network coding in the wireless packet erasure relay channel according to both throughput and energy metrics. In the relay channel, a single source communicates to a single sink through the aid of a half-duplex relay. The fluid flow model is used to describe the case where both the source and the relay are coding, and Markov chain models are proposed to describe packet evolution if only the source or only the relay is coding. In addition to transmission energy, we take into account coding and reception energies. We show that coding at the relay alone while operating in a rateless fashion is neither throughput nor energy efficient. Given a set of system parameters, our analysis determines the optimal amount of time the relay should participate in the transmission, and where coding should be performed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This work addresses the radio resource allocation problem for cooperative relay assisted OFDMA wireless network. The relays adopt the decode-and-forward protocol and can cooperatively assist the transmission from source to destination. Recent works on the subject have mainly considered symmetric source-to-relay and relay-to-destination resource allocations, which limits the achievable gains through relaying. In this paper we consider the problem of asymmetric radio resource allocation, where the objective is to maximize the system throughput of the source-to-destination link under various constraints. In particular, we consider optimization of the set of cooperative relays and link asymmetries together with subcarrier and power allocation. We derive theoretical expressions for the solutions and illustrate them through simulations. The results show clear additional performance gains through asymmetric cooperative scheme compared to the other recently proposed resource allocation schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a discrete network corresponding to any Gaussian wireless network that is obtained by simply quantizing the received signals and restricting the transmitted signals to a finite precision. Since signals in the discrete network are obtained from those of a Gaussian network, the Gaussian network can be operated on the quantization-based digital interface defined by the discrete network. We prove that this digital interface is near optimal for Gaussian relay networks and the capacities of the Gaussian and the discrete networks are within a bounded gap of O(M^2) bits, where M is the number of nodes. We also prove that any near-optimal coding strategy for the discrete network can be naturally transformed into a near-optimal coding strategy for the Gaussian network merely by quantization. We exploit this property by designing a linear coding strategy for the case of layered discrete relay networks. The linear coding strategy is near optimal and achieves all rates within O(M^2) bits of the capacity, independent of channel gains or signal-to-noise ratio. The linear code is therefore a near-optimal strategy for layered Gaussian relay networks and can be used as on the Gaussian network after simply quantizing the signals. The relays in the linear code need not know the channel gains on either the incoming or the outgoing links. The transmit and receive signals at all relays are simply quantized to binary tuples of the same length n, which is all that the nodes need to know. The linear network code is a particularly simple scheme and requires all the relay nodes to collect the received binary tuples into a long binary vector and apply a linear transformation on the long vector. The resulting binary vector is split into smaller binary tuples for transmission by the relays. The quantization requirements of the linear network code are completely defined by the parameter n, which therefore also determines the resolution of the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters that are required for operating the network within a bounded gap of the network's capacity. As evident from the description, the linear network code explicitly connects network coding for wireline networks with codes for Gaussian networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We consider the Gaussian “diamond” or parallel relay network, in which a source node transmits a message to a destination node with the help of N relays. Even for the symmetric setting, in which the channel gains to the relays are identical and the channel gains from the relays are identical, the capacity of this channel is unknown in general. The best known capacity approximation is up to an additive gap of order N bits and up to a multiplicative gap of order N^2, with both gaps independent of the channel gains. In this paper, we approximate the capacity of the symmetric Gaussian N-relay diamond network up to an additive gap of 1.8 bits and up to a multiplicative gap of a factor 14. Both gaps are independent of the channel gains and, unlike the best previously known result, are also independent of the number of relays N in the network. Achievability is based on bursty amplify-and-forward, showing that this simple scheme is uniformly approximately optimal, both in the low-rate as well as in the high-rate regimes. The upper bound on capacity is based on a careful evaluation of the cut-set bound. We also present approximation results for the asymmetric Gaussian N-relay diamond network. In particular, we show that bursty amplify-and-forward combined with optimal relay selection achieves a rate within a factor O(\log^4(N)) of capacity with preconstant in the order notation independent of the channel gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT We consider joint power allocation (PA) and relay positioning in a dual-hop regenerative relay system with multiple antennas equipped at the destination. With a fixed relay location, an adaptive PA strategy at the source and relay under a sum power constraint that minimizes the system outage probability is presented. With a fixed PA strategy, the optimal relay location is derived. We then propose to jointly optimize PA and relay location. It is shown that employing more destination antennas and/or choosing an appropriate relay location can significantly save the power needed at the relay. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed PA and relay positioning algorithms. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

general equivalent circuit model is developed for a wireless energy transfer system composed of multiple coils via coupled magnetic resonances. To verify the developed model, four types of wireless energy transfer systems are fabricated, measured, and compared with simulation results. To model a system composed of n-coils, node equations are built in the form of an n-by-n matrix, and the equivalent circuit model is established using an electric design automation tool. Using the model, we can simulate systems with multiple coils, power sources, and loads. Moreover, coupling constants are extracted as a function of the distance between two coils, and we can predict the characteristics of a system having coils at an arbitrary location. We fabricate four types of systems with relay coils, two operating frequencies, two power sources, and the function of characteristic impedance conversion. We measure the characteristics of all systems and compare them with the simulation results. The flexibility of the developed model enables us to design and optimize a complicated system consisting of many coils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of introducing network-coded packets as redundancy was proposed to improve the reliability of end-to-end packet transmissions in wireline/wireless networks, and the corresponding rate–reliability tradeoff has been studied in the literature. However, little attention has been focused on how to design a network code to reduce end-to-end packet transmission delay and even further on analyzing the corresponding rate–delay tradeoff. In this paper, we propose a packet-combining scheme based on network coding to reduce packet transmission delay between a source and destination pair connected by multiple disjoint paths. Improving the reliability of packet transmission is also addressed. Moreover, both rate–delay tradeoff and rate–reliability tradeoff of the proposed scheme are studied. New tradeoff points with fine granularity are achieved compared with the traditional repetition-based approach. Quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning is facilitated by our analysis because the network code can be adjusted to operate at the tradeoff point closest to the system QoS requirement. Finally, design of network codes that can provide multilayered reliability and delay guarantees for packets with different priority levels is investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Adding fixed relay nodes (RNs) to wireless access networks requires additional costly infrastructure. Utilising mobile RNs, that is, user terminals that relay signals intended for other users being the destination nodes (DNs), is an appealing cost-effective solution. However, the changing node topology increases the required signalling for relay selection (RS). The signalling overhead consists of control signals that need to be exchanged between the RNs, the source node (SN) and the DN, to achieve the objectives of cooperation. To reduce signalling without penalising performance, the authors propose a three-step approach exploiting statistical knowledge on the likelihood of attaining performance gains by using RNs as a function of the node position (position of DNs and RNs). In the first step only the cell DNs that are likely to gain from relaying request the assistance of RNs. In the second step, for each DN that requests relaying, a limited set of RN candidates is formed. These decisions are made with the aid of thresholds applied to inter-node distances whose values are based on the acquired statistical knowledge. In the final step, RN candidates feed back the relevant channel state information to the SN that performs RS. Furthermore, the authors investigate the attained gains from mobile RNs as a function of the fading environment and they show that mobile RNs can help overcome the effects of severe fading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data detection or fusion based on output from multiple wireless links often requires channel state information (CSI) about the links' error rate (ER) performance. We consider the scenario that these links include direct source–destination (SD) links and two-hop links that require an intermediate decode-and-forward (DF) node to relay the source signal. Conventional destination-based estimators suffer from slow convergence and are incapable of simultaneously blind estimating all ERs, including, in particular, those of the source–relay (SR) links. They may also require various degrees of CSI about the ERs of the SD and relay–destination (RD) links to remove the ambiguity arising from the insufficient number of links in the network and from that due to the symmetric nature of a cascaded source–relay–destination link's ER as a function of its component SR and RD links' ERs. We propose novel Monte-Carlo-based estimators that overcome all these shortcomings. The estimation process involves injecting noise into the samples received by the destination node to create virtual links and alter link output statistics. We show that the latter scheme exhibits a stochastic resonance effect, i.e., its mean squared estimation error (MSEE) performance is enhanced by injecting proper noise, and there exists an optimal injected noise power level that achieves the maximum improvement. The stochastic resonance effects are analyzed, and numerical examples are provided to display our estimators' MSEE behaviors, as well as to show that the ER performance of the optimal detector using the proposed estimators is almost as good as that with perfect ER information. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Deployment of relay nodes (RNs) in cellular orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems provides an effective solution to increase high data rate coverage and improve cell throughput. However, a challenging issue is that additional interferences caused by RNs may substantially compromise the performance gain if no measure is taken. In this study, the authors address the problem of interference coordination in relay-aided cellular OFDMA systems, aiming at exploiting the benefits of RNs while minimising the negative effects of interferences introduced. The authors first analyse the possible interference scenarios in multi-cell systems. Based on the insights into their analysis, the authors propose resource allocation with interference coordination (RAIC) scheme for cellular OFDMA systems. RAIC selectively perform one of three resource allocation algorithms according to the offered traffic load in the system, to mitigate interferences and thus enhance system throughput. The authors conduct intensive simulation experiments based on the model with realistic broadband channel propagation conditions. Numerical results demonstrate that their proposed RAIC can effectively improve system throughput compared with the resource allocation schemes without appropriate interference coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the performance of two low-complexity combining schemes, which are based on one- or two-phase observation, to mitigate multipath fading in dual-hop amplify-and-forward relaying systems. For the one-phase-based combining, a single-antenna station is assumed to relay information from a multiple-antenna transmitter to a multiple-antenna receiver, and the activation of the receive antennas is adaptively performed based on the second-hop statistics, regardless of the first-hop conditions. On the other hand, the two-phase-based combining suggests using multiple single-antenna stations between the multiple-antenna transmitter and the single-antenna receiver, where the suitable set of active relays is identified according to the precombining end-to-end fading conditions. To facilitate comparisons between the two schemes, formulations for the statistics of the combined signal-to-noise ratio and some performance measures are presented. Numerical and simulation results are shown to clarify the tradeoff between the achieved diversity-array gain, the processing complexity, and the power consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]