Elza Erkip

User cooperation diversity. Part II. Implementation aspects and performance analysis

For pt.I see ibid., p.1927-38. This is the second of a two-part paper on a new form of spatial diversity, where diversity gains are achieved through the cooperation of mobile users. Part I described the user cooperation concept and proposed a cooperation strategy for a conventional code-division multiple-access (CDMA) system. Part II investigates the cooperation concept further and considers practical issues related to its implementation. In particular, we investigate the optimal and suboptimal receiver design, and present performance analysis for the conventional CDMA implementation proposed in Part I. We also consider a high-rate CDMA implementation and a cooperation strategy when assumptions about the channel state information at the transmitters are relaxed. We illustrate that, under all scenarios studied, cooperation is beneficial in terms of increasing system throughput and cell coverage, as well as decreasing sensitivity to channel variations.

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.

Millimeter-Wave Cellular Wireless Networks: Potentials and Challenges

Millimeter-wave (mmW) frequencies between 30 and 300 GHz are a new frontier for cellular communication that offers the promise of orders of magnitude greater bandwidths combined with further gains via beamforming and spatial multiplexing from multielement antenna arrays. This paper surveys measurements and capacity studies to assess this technology with a focus on small cell deployments in urban environments. The conclusions are extremely encouraging; measurements in New York City at 28 and 73 GHz demonstrate that, even in an urban canyon environment, significant non-line-of-sight (NLOS) outdoor, street-level coverage is possible up to approximately 200 m from a potential low-power microcell or picocell base station. In addition, based on statistical channel models from these measurements, it is shown that mmW systems can offer more than an order of magnitude increase in capacity over current state-of-the-art 4G cellular networks at current cell densities. Cellular systems, however, will need to be significantly redesigned to fully achieve these gains. Specifically, the requirement of highly directional and adaptive transmissions, directional isolation between links, and significant possibilities of outage have strong implications on multiple access, channel structure, synchronization, and receiver design. To address these challenges, the paper discusses how various technologies including adaptive beamforming, multihop relaying, heterogeneous network architectures, and carrier aggregation can be leveraged in the mmW context.

Millimeter Wave Channel Modeling and Cellular Capacity Evaluation

With the severe spectrum shortage in conventional cellular bands, millimeter wave (mmW) frequencies between 30 and 300 GHz have been attracting growing attention as a possible candidate for next-generation micro- and picocellular wireless networks. The mmW bands offer orders of magnitude greater spectrum than current cellular allocations and enable very high-dimensional antenna arrays for further gains via beamforming and spatial multiplexing. This paper uses recent real-world measurements at 28 and 73 GHz in New York, NY, USA, to derive detailed spatial statistical models of the channels and uses these models to provide a realistic assessment of mmW micro- and picocellular networks in a dense urban deployment. Statistical models are derived for key channel parameters, including the path loss, number of spatial clusters, angular dispersion, and outage. It is found that, even in highly non-line-of-sight environments, strong signals can be detected 100-200 m from potential cell sites, potentially with multiple clusters to support spatial multiplexing. Moreover, a system simulation based on the models predicts that mmW systems can offer an order of magnitude increase in capacity over current state-of-the-art 4G cellular networks with no increase in cell density from current urban deployments.

Cooperative coding for wireless networks

User cooperation represents an effective way of introducing diversity in wireless networks. Spatial diversity gains are obtained through the cooperative use of antennas belonging to several nodes. We design and analyze the performance of channel codes that are capable of achieving the full diversity provided by user cooperation, with the constraint that they also provide the best possible performance in the interuser link. We show that even though the interuser channel is noisy, the codes provide substantial diversity and coding gains over the noncooperative case.

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.

Energy Harvesting Wireless Communications: A Review of Recent Advances

This paper summarizes recent contributions in the broad area of energy harvesting wireless communications. In particular, we provide the current state of the art for wireless networks composed of energy harvesting nodes, starting from the information-theoretic performance limits to transmission scheduling policies and resource allocation, medium access, and networking issues. The emerging related area of energy transfer for self-sustaining energy harvesting wireless networks is considered in detail covering both energy cooperation aspects and simultaneous energy and information transfer. Various potential models with energy harvesting nodes at different network scales are reviewed, as well as models for energy consumption at the nodes.

Cooperative wireless communications: a cross-layer approach

This article outlines one way to address these problems by using the notion of cooperation between wireless nodes. In cooperative communications, multiple nodes in a wireless network work together to form a virtual antenna array. Using cooperation, it is possible to exploit the spatial diversity of the traditional MIMO techniques without each node necessarily having multiple antennas. Multihop networks use some form of cooperation by enabling intermediate nodes to forward the message from source to destination. However, cooperative communication techniques described in this article are fundamentally different in that the relaying nodes can forward the information fully or in part. Also the destination receives multiple versions of the message from the source, and one or more relays and combines these to obtain a more reliable estimate of the transmitted signal as well as higher data rates. The main advantages of cooperative communications are presented

Opportunistic cooperation by dynamic resource allocation

We consider a Rayleigh fading wireless relay channel where communication is constrained by delay and average power limitations. Assuming partial channel state information at the transmitters and perfect channel state information at the receivers, we first study the delay-limited capacity of this system and show that, contrary to a single source-single destination case, a non-zero delay-limited capacity is achievable. We introduce opportunistic decode-and-forward (ODF) protocol which utilizes the relay depending on the channel state. Opportunistic cooperation significantly improves the delay-limited capacity of the system and performs very close to the cut-set bound. We also consider the system performance in terms of minimum outage probability. We show that ODF provides performance close to the cut-set bound from the outage probability perspective as well. Our results emphasize the importance of feedback for cooperative systems that have delay sensitive applications

Cooperative Regions and Partner Choice in Coded Cooperative Systems

User cooperation is an efficient approach to obtain diversity in both centralized and distributed wireless networks. In this paper, we consider a coded cooperative system under quasi-static Rayleigh fading and investigate the partner-choice problem. We find conditions on the interuser and user-to-destination channel qualities for cooperation to be beneficial. Using frame-error rate (FER) as a metric, we define the user cooperation gain (G) for evaluating the relative performance improvement of cooperative over direct transmissions when a particular channel code is used. We introduce the cooperation decision parameter (CDP), which is a function of user-to-destination average received signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), and demonstrate that whether cooperation is useful or not (