Performance analysis and cross-layer design of wireless relay networks

Abstract

With increasing demands for the wireless communication, there have been lots of efforts to make the communication in the wireless channel more reliable and faster in the literature. To achieve these goals, many works on the wireless networks are focused on the fading of a wireless channel, which is the random fluctuation in signal strength over time and frequency. Since a reliable communication cannot be guaranteed when the signal strength is weak, which is called deep fading, various diversity schemes have been proposed to alleviate the fading of wireless channel. The cooperative diversity which will be considered in this dissertation is one of them. The cooperative diversity is generated from the independence of signals from multiple nodes which are spatially apart. To achieve this diversity, a wireless network with relay nodes is adopted. A relay node is defined as a node in a wireless network that gives relay service between the source node and the destination node. A wireless network which contains at least one relay node is said to be a wireless relay network. In most of the previous works, the wireless relay networks are examined and studied in the sense of physical layer performances, e.g., information-theoretic capacity, outage probability and bit error rate. However as well as the physical layer performances, the performance measures in the data link layer, e.g., average packet delay or system latency, are also crucial to the quality of service that a end user experiences. From this reason, we investigate the performance in the data link layer of the wireless relay networks and propose a relay selection scheme that minimize average packet delay in this dissertation. We also investigate a capacity optimal design of a two-hop wireless relay network. In Chapter 3, we analyze the performances of a cooperative automatic repeat request(ARQ) protocol under Poisson arrivals and the time-correlated Rayleigh fading channel environment. The conventional non-coop...