Abstract—We develop and analyze low-complexity cooperative diversity protocols that combat fading induced by multipath propagation in wireless networks. The underlying techniques exploit space diversity available through cooperating terminals’ relaying signals for one another. We outline several strategies employed by the cooperating radios, including fixed relaying schemes such as amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward, selection relaying schemes that adapt based upon channel measurements between the cooperating terminals, and incremental relaying schemes that adapt based upon limited feedback from the destination terminal. We develop performance characterizations in terms of outage events and associated outage probabilities, which measure robustness of the transmissions to fading, focusing on the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Except for fixed decode-and-forward, all of our cooperative diversity protocols are efficient in the sense that they achieve full diversity (i.e., second-order diversity in the case of two terminals), and, moreover, are close to optimum (within 1.5 dB) in certain regimes. Thus, using distributed antennas, we can provide the powerful benefits of space diversity without need for physical arrays, though at a loss of spectral efficiency due to half-duplex operation and possibly at the cost of additional receive hardware. Applicable to any wireless setting, including cellular or ad hoc networks—wherever space constraints preclude the use of physical arrays—the performance characterizations reveal that large power or energy savings result from the use of these protocols. Index Terms—Diversity techniques, fading channels, outage probability, relay channel, user cooperation, wireless networks. I.

Abstract—The capacity of a particular large Gaussian relay network is determined in the limit as the number of relays tends to infinity. Upper bounds are derived from cut-set arguments, and lower bounds follow from an argument involving uncoded transmission. It is shown that in cases of interest, upper and lower bounds coincide in the limit as the number of relays tends to infinity. Hence, this paper provides a new example where a simple cut-set upper bound is achievable, and one more example where uncoded transmission achieves optimal performance. The findings are illustrated by geometric interpretations. The techniques developed in this paper are then applied to a sensor network situation. This is a network joint source–channel coding problem, and it is well known that the source–channel separation theorem does not extend to this case. The present paper extends this insight by providing an example where separating source from channel coding does not only lead to suboptimal performance—it leads to an exponential penalty in performance scaling behavior (as a function of the number of nodes). Finally, the techniques developed in this paper are extended to include certain models of ad hoc wireless networks, where a capacity scaling law can be established: When all nodes act purely as relays for a single source–destination pair, capacity grows with the logarithm of the number of nodes. Index Terms—Capacity, CEO problem, joint source–channel coding, network, relay, sensor network, separation theorem, uncoded transmission. I.

Abstract—We determine the capacity region of a degraded Gaussian relay channel with multiple relay stages. This is done by building an inductive argument based on the single-relay capacity theorem of Cover and El Gamal. For an arbitrary distribution of noise powers, we derive the optimal power distribution strategy among the transmitter and the relays and the best possible improvement in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) that can be achieved from using a given number of relays. The time-division multiplexing operation of the relay channel in the wideband regime is analyzed and it is shown that time division does not achieve minimum energy per bit. Index Terms—Capacity, optimal resource allocation, relay channel, wideband channels. I.

Abstract—We consider a wireless network composed of three nodes and limited by the half-duplex and total power constraints. This formulation encompasses many of the special cases studied in the literature and allows for capturing the common features shared by them. Here, we focus on three special cases, namely, 1) relay channel, 2) multicast channel, and 3) three-way channel. These special cases are judicially chosen to reflect varying degrees of complexity while highlighting the common ground shared by the different variants of the three-node wireless network. For the relay channel, we propose a new cooperation scheme that exploits the wireless feedback gain. This scheme combines the benefits of the decode-and-forward (DF) and compress-and-forward (CF) strategies and avoids the noiseless feedback assumption adopted in earlier works. Our analysis of the achievable rate of this scheme reveals the diminishing feedback gain in both the low and high

In this paper, utilizing the relay buffers, we propose an opportunistic decode-wait-and-forward relay scheme for a point-to-point communication system with a half-duplexing relay network to better exploit the time diversity and relay mobility. For instance, we analyze the asymptotic throughput-delay tradeoffs in a dense relay network for two scenarios: (1) fixed relays with microscopic fading channels (multipath channels), and (2) mobile relays with macroscopic fading channels (path loss). In the first scenario, the proposed scheme can better exploit the multi-relay diversity in the sense that with K fixed relays and a cost of O(K) average end-to-end packet delay, it could achieve the same optimal asymptotic average throughput as the existing designs (such as regular decode-and-forward relay schemes) with K 2 fixed relays. In the second scenario, the proposed scheme achieves the maximum throughput of Θ(log K) at a cost of O(K/q) average end-to-end packet delay, where 0 < q ≤ 1 2 measures the speed of relays’ mobility. This system throughput is unattainable for the existing designs with low relay mobility, the proposed relay scheme can exploit the relays ’ mobility more efficiently.