Cooperative Strategies in Multi-Terminal Wireless Relay Networks

Abstract: Smart phones and tablet computers have greatly boosted the demand for services via wireless access points, keeping constant pressure on the network providers to deliver vast amounts of data over the wireless infrastructure. To enlarge coverage and enhance throughput, relaying has been adopted in the new generation of wireless communication systems, such as in the Long-Term Evolution Advanced standard,  and will continue to play an important role in the next generation wireless infrastructure. Depending on functionality, relaying can be characterizing into three main categories: amplify-and-forward (AF), compression-and-forward (CF), and decode-and-forward (DF).  In this thesis, we investigate different cooperative strategies in wireless networks when relaying is in use.We first investigate  the capacity outer and inner bounds for a wireless multicast relay network where two sources, connected by error-free backhaul, multicast to two destinations with the help of a full-duplex relay node.  For high-rate backhaul scenarios, we find the exact cut-set bound of the capacity region by extending the proof of the converse for the Gaussian relay channel. For low-rate backhaul scenarios, we present two genie-aided outer bounds by extending the previous proof and introducing two lemmas on conditional (co-)variance. Our inner bounds are derived from various cooperative strategies by combining DF/CF/AF relaying with network coding schemes. We also extend the noisy network coding scheme and the short-message noisy network coding approach to correlated sources. For low-rate backhaul, we propose a new coding scheme, partial-decode-and-forward based linear network coding. We derive the achievable rate regions  for these schemes and measure the performance in term of achievable rates over Gaussian channels. By numerical investigation we observe significant gains over benchmark schemes and demonstrate that the gap between upper and lower bounds is in general not large. We also show that for high-rate backhaul, the cut-set bound can be achieved  when the signal-to-noise ratios lie in the sphere defined by the source-relay and relay-destination channel gains.For wireless networks with independent noise, we propose a simple framework to get capacity outer and inner bounds based on the ``one-shot'' bounding models. We first extend the models for two-user broadcast channels to many-user scenarios and then establish the gap between upper and lower bounding models. For networks with coupled links, we propose  a channel decoupling method which can decompose the network into overlapping multiple-access channels and broadcast channels.  We then apply the one-shot models and create an upper bounding network with only  bit-pipe connections. When developing the lower bounding network, we propose a  two-step update of these models for each coupled broadcast and multiple-access channels. We demonstrate by some examples that the resulting upper bound is in general very good and the gap between the upper and lower bounds is usually not large.For relay-aided downlink scenarios, we propose a cooperation scheme by cancelling interference at the transmitter. It is indeed a symbol-by-symbol approach to one-dimension dirty paper coding (DPC). For finite-alphabet signaling and interference, we derive the optimal (in terms of maximum mutual information) modulator under a given power constraint. A sub-optimal modulator is also proposed by formulating an optimization problem that maximizes the minimum distance of the signal constellation, and this non-convex optimization problem is approximately solved by semi-definite relaxation.  Bit-level simulation shows that the optimal and sub-optimal modulators can achieve significant gains over the Tomlinson-Harashima precoder (THP) benchmark and over non-DPC reference schemes, especially when the power of the interference is larger than the power of the noise.