Wayan Wicke

Buffer-Aided Relaying With Discrete Transmission Rates for the Two-Hop Half-Duplex Relay Network

We consider the two-hop half-duplex (HD) relay network, where the source-to-relay and relay-to-destination links are impaired by block fading. The relay is equipped with a buffer, which enables the relay to receive or transmit in each time slot independent of previous time slots. As a practical constraint, source and relay can transmit only at rates taken from predefined and finite sets. Thereby, it is assumed that for each time slot, the instantaneous qualities of the two links are available. For this network, we derive the optimal scheduling of reception and transmission at the relay and the optimal rate selection at source and relay, such that the throughput is maximized. Since the optimal protocol introduces unbounded delay, we also propose a buffer-aided protocol, which limits the delay. For this delay-limited protocol, we study the achieved delay and throughput by modeling the queue at the buffer as a Markov chain. Our numerical results show that the throughputs achieved with the proposed buffer-aided protocols for discrete transmission rates are significantly larger than the throughputs achieved with conventional relaying protocols where the HD relay switches between reception and transmission in a strictly alternating manner.

Buffer-aided relaying with discrete transmission rates

We consider a slow fading three-node network consisting of a source, a half-duplex decode-and-forward relay, and a destination, where a direct link between the source and the destination does not exist. We assume that the half-duplex relay is equipped with a buffer and employs in each time slot adaptive scheduling of reception and transmission based on the instantaneous qualities of the source-to-relay and relay-to-destination links. Furthermore, as a practical constraint, we assume that in each time slot, the source and the relay can select transmission rates only from a discrete and finite set of available transmission rates. For this network, we design the optimal scheduling of reception and transmission at the relay and the optimal selection of the transmission rates at the source and the relay such that the throughput is maximized. Our numerical results show that the maximum throughput achieved with the proposed buffer-aided protocol for discrete transmission rates is significantly larger than the throughput achieved with conventional relaying protocols with continuous transmission rates.

Biological optical-to-chemical signal conversion interface: a small-scale modulator for molecular communications

Although many exciting applications of molecular communication (MC) systems are envisioned to be at microscale, the MC testbeds reported in the literature so far are mostly at macroscale. This may partially be due to the fact that controlling an MC system at microscale is challenging. To link the macroworld to the microworld, we propose and demonstrate a biological signal conversion interface that can also be seen as a microscale modulator. In particular, the proposed interface transduces an optical signal, which is controlled using a light-emitting diode, into a chemical signal by changing the pH of the environment. The modulator is realized using Escherichia coli bacteria as microscale entity expressing the light-driven proton pump gloeorhodopsin from Gloeobacter violaceus. Upon inducing external light stimuli, these bacteria locally change their surrounding pH level by exporting protons into the environment. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed optical-to-chemical signal converter, we analyze the pH signal measured by a pH sensor, which serves as a receiver. We develop an analytical parametric model for the induced chemical signal as a function of the applied optical signal. Using this model, we derive a training-based channel estimator that estimates the parameters of the proposed model to fit the measurement data based on a least square error approach. We further derive the optimal maximum likelihood detector and a suboptimal low-complexity detector to recover the transmitted data from the measured received signal. It is shown that the proposed parametric model is in good agreement with the measurement data. Moreover, for an example scenario, we show that the proposed setup is able to successfully convert an optical signal representing a sequence of binary symbols into a chemical signal with a bit rate of 1 bit/min and recover the transmitted data from the chemical signal using the proposed estimation and detection schemes. The proposed modulator may form the basis for future MC testbeds and applications at microscale.