Analysis and scheduling of practical network coding in OFDMA relay networks

In order to mitigate inter-cell interference and cope with network, traffic, and channel fluctuations in space and time, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based cellular networks should be equipped with dynamic frequency and power allocation algorithms. Although dynamic frequency and power allocation has been well studied separately, very few results have been reported on dynamic joint frequency and power allocation. In this paper, we propose a dynamic frequency and power allocation algorithm for the DownLink (DL) of OFDMA-based cellular networks, where frequency resources are allocated to cells by a central broker to minimize long-term cell-edge inter-cell interference. Moreover, each cell independently assigns its available frequency resources and power to users in a way that its total DL transmission power is minimized while meeting the throughput demands of its users. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm provides significant improvements in network outage performance, capacity, and throughput as compared with existing schemes.

In this paper, we propose a joint resource allocation, routing, and connection admission control (CAC) scheme for uplink transmission in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) relay networks with cooperative relaying. For cooperative relaying, relay station can relay uplink data from mobile station (MS) to base station with cooperation of the MS using transmit diversity. Transmit diversity can be achieved by virtual MISO via distributed space---time coding. The proposed scheme jointly allocates OFDMA resources and selects path for each user with CAC to maximize the upink throughput of cooperative OFDMA relay networks. The basic OFDMA resource unit is considered as a resource element which is one subcarrier over one OFDMA symbol. An efficient multi-choice multi-dimensional knapsack (MMKP) algorithm is presented for the proposed scheme. The proposed MMKP algorithm provides a unified framework which is applicable to OFDMA networks with and without cooperative relaying. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme with and without cooperative relaying in a hilly terrain with heavy tree density by using OPNET-based simulation. We show that the cooperative relaying improve the uplink system throughput compared with non-cooperative relaying, and the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional link quality-based scheme in both cooperative and non-cooperative relay networks.

We investigate the optimal design of a multihop wireless mesh network equipped with multiple orthogonal wireless channels and multiple radios. Specifically, we focus on solutions that can efficiently utilize the limited resource to support multiple unicast applications by routing and network coding. We propose a cross-layer optimization framework where the broadcasting feature of the wireless environment, which plays an important role in realizing the achievable gain of network coding, is taken into account. Moreover, we propose a network code construction scheme based on linear programming, with which the possible achievable Coding+MAC gain could be significantly increased. The proposed network design based on cross-layer optimization results in significant increase in network throughput.

Quadrature Orthogonal Frequency Division multiple access (Q-OFDMA) has been renowned as a promising technique which provides a solution to the high PAPR (Peak to average power ratio), sensitivity to carrier frequency offset (CFO) problem and design complexity as introduced by the normal OFDMA systems. Exploiting this Q-OFDMA systems on the Multi-Input Multi-Output (MEMO) architecture, leads to a remarkable improvement in achievable rates. A critical part of this technology is to design the full-rate diversity codes for two transmit and two receive antennas. This paper endeavours to identify key factors and trade-offs issues associated with designing Q-OFDMA systems. We proposed a Space Time Block Codes and spatial multiplexing technique as well as low complexity detection methods for more than 2×2 antennas at the cost of low complexity. This performs well for different fading channel environments and improves the overall system performance such as diversity gain, SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio), Coding gain and BER (bit error rate. The proposed scheme can be easily applied in OFDMA and Single-Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) by adjusting the parameters of Q-OFDMA.

In this chapter, we target to give extensive performance analyses about application of network coding (NC) in wireless systems, referred to as network coded cooperation (NCC), brings both diversity and multiplexing gains. We use the diversity-multiplexing trade-off (DMT) to determine performance bounds of NCC systems. Within the scope of this study, NCC is integrated with orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) and the corresponding system model is characterized by specifically focusing on frequency diversity gain. DMT expressions of the NCC-OFDMA system is given. A real-time implementation of the NCC-OFDMA system is presented by creating a testbed NI USRP-2921, NI PXIe-5644R, NI PXI-6683H software defined radio (SDR) modules and LabVIEW software. Obtained real-time performance measurements are essential to demonstrate the practical advantages or disadvantages of the usage of the NCC-OFDMA system. Overall, we aim to present a detailed overview of the fundamental performance bounds of NCC and its extension to the practical applicability of NCC in wireless networks.

The Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) and the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) are promising techniques for next-generation wireless systems. Although much attention in the literature considered these techniques, an effective combination between such systems as hybrid multiple access (HMA) needs more attention. For this reason, this paper devotes to proposing two different scenarios of HMA using multi-user OFDM (MU-OFDM) and power domain (PD) NOMA for downlink transmission to overcome the limitations of both Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA) and NOMA. Due to the randomness of a wireless channel, different user grouping strategies and dynamic power allocation (DPA) strategies are employed to satisfy users’ requirements. The proposed systems give high flexibility utilizing bitrate allocation and user fairness. System results show superior performance to traditional OMA and NOMA systems. The achieved variety of fairness is helpful for the diversity of applications which is a principal requirement for beyond-fifth-generation (B5G) networks. The next step in this analysis is to enhance the proposed systems’ spectral efficiency (SE) by introducing beamforming for massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems. The bit error rate (BER) result of the proposed system achieves almost the same error floor with a benefit of approximately 10 dB signalto-noise ratio (SNR) when 90 resource blocks (RBs) are used.

Connectivity, losses, and buffering are factors that directly affect the performance of network coding. These factors affect the ability of intermediate nodes to generate useful encodings; these are encodings that contribute in propagating and recovering data at receiver node(s). It has been shown that in particular scenarios network coding performance can be improved by simply increasing the generation size (k); however, this leads to increasing transmission overhead, encoding complexity and (more importantly) buffer sizes at intermediate nodes. In this paper, we propose a new network coding approach where we employ Multi-Generation Mixing (MGM). MGM eliminates the need to increasing buffer sizes while improving the performance of network coding. Under MGM, we define a mixing set of size m generations that can be network coded (mixed) together. Within each MGM mixing set, a new set of generation packets are mixed with previously transmitted (network coded) generations. This generalized approach provides a great deal of resilience against losses when compared with traditional generation-based network coding. Our analysis of the performance of MGM-based network coding demonstrates significant reduction in required overhead for a given recovery performance at the receivers. We also illustrate the performance of MGM using extensive simulations that provide a useful insight into the viability of MGM-based network coding.

In this paper, we investigate the power allocation problem in downlink orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) networks. Different from previous researches on power allocation, we take into account various practical factors, such as the stochastic traffic arrival, the time-varying channel, the queue stability requirements of all users, the channel estimation cost and the corresponding effect of imperfect channel state information (CSI) on data transmission rate. The power allocation problem is formulated as maximizing the time-averaged data transmission rate by optimizing pilot and data power allocation subject to the queue stability and the maximum transmit power constraints. The data transmission rate is defined in terms of the pilot transmit power, the data transmit power and the channel estimation error, which is non-concave. To solve the non-concave and stochastic optimization problem, a dynamic pilot and data power allocation (DPDPA) algorithm is proposed with the aids of approximate transformation, Lyapunov optimization and Lagrange dual formulation. Moreover, we derive the bounds of performances, in terms of the time-averaged data transmission rate and queue length.

The reductions of peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and block error rate (BLER) are two challenges in wireless systems employing orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)/orthogonal frequency-division multiple access. High BLER renders the system unreliable, and high PAPR is associated with power inefficiency and nonlinearity of the system. These two issues have separately been studied in the literature, but few works have studied simultaneous reductions of PAPR and BLER. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to jointly reduce and tradeoff PAPR and BLER in OFDM systems using random network coding (NC). In our proposed scheme, different representations of the input information block are generated using a special form of NC matrices, for which we prove it achieves the minimum BLER. We then propose an additional step to our proposed scheme to tradeoff a further improvement in PAPR against degradation in BLER using encoded block puncturing. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves the same PAPR as conventional selective mapping (C-SLM) schemes while achieving the minimum BLER. We also show through simulations the PAPR gains achieved by our proposed additional step over C-SLM and the tradeoff of this gain against BLER degradation. Simulations finally show that our proposed scheme achieves the same results for the recently developed cubic metric.

Network coding has recently been applied to wireless networks and has achieved some initial success. Researches in wireless network coding have been mostly focusing on utilizing the broadcast nature of the wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a novel network coding framework for wireless relay networks that also takes into consideration the fading and error prone nature of the wireless networks. First, we extend the traditional network coding in lossless networks which operates on 0-1 bits, to a new framework which defines network coding on the posterior probability of each bit. This new framework allows an imperfect decode-recode process at a relay node and avoids possible error propagation when a hard decision is made at the relay node. It implicitly integrates decode-and-forward and estimate-and-forward strategies for wireless network coding to address the technical issues of channel fading and transmission errors. The proposed approach is validated through both theoretical analysis and extensive simulations. Both analysis and simulation confirm that this new framework is able to achieve significant gain over traditional network coding. This new framework also enables the introduction of adaptive scheme into network coding. We demonstrate a basic adaptation scheme and present some preliminary experimental results. The proposed adaptive scheme will lay down an essential foundation in this emerging field of wireless network coding in order to address issues related to link heterogeneity.

This paper considers subcarrier allocation for the multihop orthogonal frequency division multiple-access (OFDMA) broadcast networks consisting of one source, multiple destinations, and one amplify-and-forward (AF) relay. In this paper, proportional fair (PF) based subcarrier allocation is discussed to get a tradeoff between the system transmission rate and fairness. First, the problem is formulated as an optimization problem with prohibitive complexity. Second, by analyzing the optimal solution for the subcarrier allocation problem without PF constraint, two suboptimal schemes are proposed. The simulation results indicate that with the same fairness performance, the proposed schemes achieve considerable capacity gain compared with the conventional PF scheduling method which is extended simply from the single-hop system.

It has been shown in the literature that Network Coding (NC) can boost the performance of wireless networks. However, to really obtain the potential gain of NC, efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols that operate with awareness of the NC functions are necessary. In this paper, we propose a novel NC-aware MAC protocol for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks that combines k-batch transmissions and multiple receiver-initiated reverse direction exchanges involving NC data to boost the overall network performance. The proposed protocol allows any node to transmit a burst of data packets in a single channel access invocation. Then, an intermediate node can transmit an NC data packet when receiving a valid data packet from a source node, without contending for channel access. Both analytical and simulation results presented in this paper show the high throughput and energy efficiency of the proposed protocol with gains ranging from 33% to 298% when compared to existing mechanisms based on the IEEE 802.11 Standard.∗

Traffic patterns associated with different primary user (PU) channels may provide different spectral access and energy harvesting opportunities in wireless-powered cognitive radio networks (WP-CRNs). Considering this, we propose traffic-specific optimal spectrum sensing policy such that the expected transmission rate of secondary user (SU) is maximized under the energy causality and PU collision constraints in orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA)-based WP-CRN. Toward this, we cluster $N$ subcarriers (subchannels) into $K$ clusters (where $K \leq N$ ) and derive an optimal energy detection threshold for the SU under each traffic pattern. Using traffic features, we propose an unsupervised and nonparametric classification technique to determine the number of unique traffic patterns $K$ over all subchannels. Then, the traffic patterns are used to predict the idle/busy period statistics for subchannels, based upon which SU identifies harvest and transmit PU subchannels for energy harvesting and data transmission, respectively. We derive an optimal detection threshold based on the harvested energy such that it maximizes the expected transmission rate of SU while protecting PU from collision. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of rate gains under design constraints and show the optimal detection threshold under various energy arrival rates.

Multi-Generation Mixing (MGM) is a generalized approach of Network Coding (NC) that has its improvements when applied in packet loss networks. In this paper we apply MGM network coding in networks communicating video contents. NC has shown viable improvements when applied in packet loss networks. With practical network coding (generation based network coding), packets are grouped in chunks called generations. Generation is the unit of network coding encoding and decoding. The generation grouping of packets is necessary for the practical deployment of network coding. On the other hand it increases the cost of NC losses. NC losses reduce the ability of receiver to decode packets, and hence can severely degrade the quality of recovered video. Video is encoded in layers with Scalable Video Coding (SVC) a base layer and one or more enhancement layers. MGM employs the layering of scalable video to enhance the reliability of communication. MGM provides different levels of reliable communication for the different video layers to improve the overall reliability of video communication. SVC enhancement layers are dependent on lower layers to be recovered. With MGM enhancement layers support the recovery of lower layers. This is done by network encoding lower video layers in higher layers. Through extensive simulations, we show that MGM highly improves the quality of recovered video.

Single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) has been adopted as uplink multiple access scheme for 3GPP LTE as it combines the advantages of orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) and the low envelope variation properties of single carrier (SC) transmission. Moreover, the classical transmit antenna diversity technique as space-time block code (STBC) and space-frequency block code (SFBC) can improve the uplink performance combination with SC-FDMA schemes. In this paper, a signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) performance analysis method of SC-FDMA is proposed for STBC and SFBC schemes, respectively. The closed-form SINR expressions based on the modified SC-preserved implementation structure and MMSE equalization for receivers are derived by channel frequency response and noise variance, considering inter-symbol interference. Moreover, it can be easily extended to multi-receive antennas. By simulation results it is shown that with proposed equivalent SINR, the BLock Error Rate (BLER) performance of MIMO-SC-FDMA over slow fading channel is well matched with that over AWGN channel.