Pervasive micro-sensing and actuation may revolutionize the way in which we understand and manage complex physical systems: from airplane wings to complex ecosystems. The capabilities for detailed physical monitoring and manipulation offer enormous opportunities for almost every scientific discipline, and it will alter the feasible granularity of engineering. We identify opportunities and challenges for distributed signal processing in networks of these sensing elements and investigate some of the architectural challenges posed by systems that are massively distributed, physically-coupled, wirelessly networked, and energy limited. 1.

In this paper we review the most peculiar and interesting information-theoretic and communications features of fading channels. We first describe the statistical models of fading channels which are frequently used in the analysis and design of communication systems. Next, we focus on the information theory of fading channels, by emphasizing capacity as the most important performance measure. Both single-user and multiuser transmission are examined. Further, we describe how the structure of fading channels impacts code design, and finally overview equalization of fading multipath channels.

Contents 1 Wireless Networks 1 1.1 Introduction ...................................... 1 1.1.1 History of Wireless Networks ........................ 2 1.1.2 Wireless Data Vision ............................. 5 1.1.3 Technical Challenges ............................. 7 1.2 The Wireless Channel ................................. 8 1.2.1 Path loss ................................... 9 1.2.2 Shadow Fading ................................ 10 1.2.3 Multipath Flat-fading and Intersymbol Interference ............. 11 1.2.4 Doppler Frequency Shift ........................... 12 1.2.5 Interference .................................. 13 1.2.6 Infrared versus Radio ............................ 13 1.2.7 Capacity Limits of Wireless Channels .................... 14 1.3 Link Level Design .................................. 15 1.3.1 Modulation Techniques ............................ 15 1.3.2 Channel Coding and Link Layer Retransmission .............. 16 1.3.3 Flat-Fading Countermeasures ..

Abstract — We study communication networks of arbitrary size and topology and communicating over a general vector discrete memoryless channel. We propose an information-theoretic constructive scheme for obtaining an achievable rate region in such networks. Many well-known capacity-defining achievable rate regions can be derived as special cases of the proposed scheme. A few such examples are the physically degraded and reverselydegraded relay channels, the Gaussian multiple-access channel, and the Gaussian broadcast channel. The proposed scheme also leads to inner bounds for the multicast and allcast capacities. Applying the proposed scheme to a specific wireless network   of nodes located in a region of unit area, we show that a transport capacity of ¡£ ¢ bit-meters/sec is feasible in a certain family of networks, as compared to the best possible transport capacity ¡£¢§ ¦   ¨ ¤ of bit-meters/sec in [16] where the receiver capabilities were limited. Even though the improvement is shown for a specific class of networks, a clear implication is that designing and employing more sophisticated multi-user coding schemes can provide sizable gains in at least some large wireless networks. Index Terms — Discrete memoryless channels, Gaussian channels, multiuser communications, network information theory,

We present an “opportunistic ” transmission scheduling policy that exploits time-varying channel conditions and maxi-mizes the system performance stochastically under a certain resource allocation constraint. We establish the optimality of the scheduling scheme, and also that every user experiences a performance improvement over any non-opportunistic scheduling policy when users have independent performance values. We demonstrate via simulation results that the scheme is robust to es-timation errors, and also works well for nonstationary scenarios, resulting in performance improvements of 20–150 % compared with a scheduling scheme that does not take into account channel conditions. Last, we discuss an extension of our opportunistic scheduling scheme to improve “short-term ” performance.

We present a method, called opportunistic scheduling, for exploiting the time-varying nature of the radio environment to increase the overall performance of the system under certain quality of service/fairness requirements of users. We first introduce a general framework for opportunistic scheduling, and then identify three general categories of scheduling problems under this framework. We provide optimal solutions for each of these scheduling problems. All the proposed scheduling policies are implementable online; we provide parameter estimation algorithms and implementation procedures for them. We also show how previous work by us and others directly fits into or is related to this framework. We demonstrate via simulation that opportunistic scheduling schemes result in significant performance improvement compared with non-opportunistic alternatives.

Integrated cellular and ad hoc relaying systems (iCAR) is a new wireless system architecture based on the integration of cellular and modern ad hoc relaying technologies. It addresses the congestion problem due to unbalanced traffic in a cellular system and provides interoperability for heterogeneous networks. The iCAR system can efficiently balance traffic loads between cells by using ad hoc relaying stations (ARS) to relay traffic from one cell to another dynamically. This not only increases the system's capacity cost effectively, but also reduces transmission power for mobile hosts and extends system coverage. In this paper, we compare the performance of the iCAR system with conventional cellular systems in terms of the call blocking/dropping probability, throughput, and signaling overhead via analysis and simulation. Our results show that with a limited number of ARSs and some increase in the signaling overhead (as well as hardware complexity), the call blocking/dropping probability in a congested cell and the overall system can be reduced.

this paper, see [14], [21], [25], [34], and [35]

Direct Sequence (DS) Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) is a promising technology for wireless environments with multiple simultaneous transmissions because of several features: asynchronous multiple access, robustness to frequency selective fading, and multipath combining. The capacity

We study the Shannon capacity of adaptive transmission techniques in conjunction with diversity combining. This capacity provides an upper bound on spectral efficiency using these techniques. We obtain closed-form solutions for the Rayleigh fading channel capacity under three adaptive policies: optimal power and rate adaptation, constant power with optimal rate adaptation, and channel inversion with fixed rate. Optimal power and rate adaptation yields a small increase in capacity over just rate adaptation, and this increase diminishes as the average received carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) or the number of diversity branches increases. Channel inversion suffers the largest capacity penalty relative to the optimal technique, however, the penalty diminishes with increased diversity. Although diversity yields large capacity gains for all the techniques, the gain is most pronounced with channel inversion. For example, the capacity using channel inversion with two-branch diversity exceeds that of a single-branch system using optimal rate and power adaptation. Since channel inversion is the least complex scheme to implement, there is a tradeoff between complexity and capacity for the various adaptation methods and diversity-combining techniques.