IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 10, NO.

1, FEBRUARY 2014 615

Relay-Assisted Wireless Communication Systems in

Mining Vehicle Safety Applications
Wei Ni, Member, IEEE, Iain B. Collings, Senior Member, IEEE, Ren Ping Liu, Member, IEEE, and
Zhuo Chen, Member, IEEE

Abstract—Relays enabled with multiuser MIMO techniques
have great potential to mining vehicle safety applications. How-
ever, they are yet to be practical due to high scheduling overhead in
mobile, radio-unfriendly, mining environments. A new decentral-
ized relay-assisted multiuser MIMO approach is proposed, which
cuts the overhead by 80% and enables relay-assisted multiuser
MIMO to be implemented in practice. This approach is a new
distributed participatory downlink transmission method, where
both the relays and destinations participate in the scheduling de-
cisions. A new recursive algorithm is also developed to optimally
quantize the channel conditions of the vehicles, thereby mini-
mizing the feedback requirement. Analytical results, confirmed by
simulations, show that the proposed approach is able to achieve
97.6% of the sum-rate upper bound of the network, using only
three bits to characterize the channel condition of each vehicle.
In terms of throughput, the proposed decentralized scheme can
perform 45.2% better than the existing centralized scheme. The
proposed approach is compatible with industrial communication
standards and can be implemented with commercial industrial
communication systems.
Index Terms—Mining vehicle safety, multiuser MIMO, relay.
I. INTRODUCTION
M ODERN mines are featured with massive scales for pro-
ductivity increasing purpose. For example, the Fimiston
Open Pit gold mine of Western Australia is approximately 3.5
km long, 1.5 km wide, and 570 m deep. As a consequence, the
size of the machinery used is proportionally increased. Mining
vehicles become huge with considerable operator blind spots,
which are one of the major reasons behind the industry-wide
problem of accidents on mine sites [1]. Technologies are being
developed to eliminate the blind spots, such as collision avoid-
ance [2], adaptive cruise control, automatic emergency braking,
pedestrian protection, and autonomous driving [3].
Wireless communication is a key part of those technologies,
delivering critical safety information, such as digital maps, nav-
igation instructions, and traffic conditions, to the vehicles in a
timely manner. Consider a large mine, e.g., the Fimiston Open
Pit. Mining vehicles could be many, which impose high require-
ments to the wireless system in terms of throughput and cov-
erage. To meet these requirements, relay-assisted wireless sys-
tems have great potential [4], especially where the signals of
Manuscript received March 20, 2013; revised July 12, 2013; accepted
August 12, 2013. Date of publication August 15, 2013; date of current
version December 12, 2013. Paper no. TII-13-0146.
The authors are with the Wireless and Networking Technologies
Laboratory, CSIRO, Sydney 2122, Australia (e-mail: wei.ni@csiro.au;
iain.collings@csiro.au; ren.liu@csiro.au; zhuo.chen@csiro.au).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TII.2013.2278617
on-the-ground base stations cannot reach, e.g., the base of the
mines where excavation usually takes place.
Fig. 1 illustrates a relay-assisted wireless system in an
open-cut mine, where there is a fixed wireless gateway (e.g.,
3GPP LTE enhanced Node B) and a number of relays (e.g.,
WiFi access points) and mining vehicles (e.g., equipped with
WiFi handsets). The relays are often deployed with large
coverage overlapping areas so as to provide reliability through
redundancy. Clearly, there are opportunities to enhance the
throughput in those areas by allowing the relays to collaborate.
Multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a
promising relay collaboration technique, where the relays
simultaneously transmit independent data to multiple vehicles.
The technique is attractive in terms of meeting stringent latency
requirements of mining safety [5].
There are three major types of multiuser MIMO technique.
The first type is beamforming, such as dirty paper coding [6]
and zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming [7], [8], where the trans-
mitter produces interference-free radio beams to different re-
ceivers based on the explicit knowledge on the wireless channel
state information (CSI) of the receivers. The sum capacity or the
optimal sum-rate growth rate can be achieved in slow-varying
fading channels [7], [9], [10]. Nevertheless, the type is unsuit-
able for mining vehicles. The reason is that the channels change
too fast and the transmitter’s knowledge is always behind time,
and, as a result, the sum rate degrades significantly [11]. The
second type of multiuser MIMO is opportunistic beamforming
[5], [12]–[14], where a number of beams are randomly gener-
ated and, for each of them, a receiver is connected. However,
this type is also inapplicable to the mining scenario illustrated
in Fig. 1, because the opportunism of connectivity cannot guar-
antee the delivery of critical safety information. In addition,
both of the two types require the relays to be accurately syn-
chronized [15], while the accurate synchronization of a sam-
pling level is hard to achieve between the geographically dis-
tributed relays.
For mining applications, the most practical multiuser MIMO
schemes belong to the third type, where every transmit antenna
sends a different packet at the same time, and the receivers de-
tect all of the packets and discard those irrelevant [16]–[18].
The receivers only feed back a few bits of their channel quality
indicators (CQIs), while the sum-rate growth rate that can be
achieved with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is the same as it is
with full CSI feedback [13], [19]. In addition, the synchroniza-
tion of this type is at a symbol level and is substantially coarser
than that of the other two types. However, to implement this type
at the relays for mining applications, as illustrated in Fig. 1, two
challenges need to be addressed. The first one is the overhead,
as all of the vehicles will send their CQI to compete for a re-

1551-3203 © 2013 IEEE

616
Fig. 1. Example of relay-assisted wireless systems, which provides coverage to the areas where the signals of the base station are too weak to be detectable.
ceiving opportunity. This problem becomes even more severe
when the number of vehicles increases. The second challenge is
the unpredictable packet loss at the relays [20], [21], which in-
troduces the uncertainty that the relays may have no packets to
send even in good channel conditions. This makes existing ap-
proaches where the transmit antennas always have data to send,
such as [16], inapplicable.
In this paper, a new decentralized relay-assisted multiuser
MIMO transmission scheme is proposed to address the two
challenges of the overhead and unpredictable packet loss. In
particular, the scheme can cut the overhead by 80% by enabling
both the relays and vehicles to participate in the scheduling
decisions. To be specific, each vehicle preselects a relay,
minimizing feedback on CQI while each relay, on its own,
decides the packets to be forwarded (at the largest data rate) to
one of the vehicles that preselected the relay, hence avoiding
centralized coordination and the associated overhead.
The CQI quantization levels are optimized for the proposed
scheme, which substantially improve the data rate with few
CQI bits per vehicle. A new recursive algorithm is carried out
to reach the optimum, where the CQI levels are characterized
based on one of them. Optimizing that one only, all of the other
optimal levels can be computed in a recursive manner.
Closed-form expressions for the sum rate are derived to
characterize the proposed scheme, together with the upper
bound (that can only be approached in a globally coordinated,
centralized manner). Confirmed by simulations, the expressions
show that the new scheme is able to achieve 97.6% of the upper
bound, using only 3-b CQI. In terms of throughput, since the
proposed scheme requires significantly low overhead, for a
given total bandwidth it can be 45.2% better than the one that
provides the sum rate upper bound.
The proposed scheme is compatible with industrial com-
munication standards and can be implemented with limited
software/middleware change to commercial wireless commu-
nication devices. In contrast, other multiuser MIMO solutions,
such as [5], [7], [9]–[14], [22] require significant effort to
build new devices/hardware. Let alone introducing relays into
the system.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 10, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2014
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In
Section II, the system model is presented. In Section II, the
architecture of the proposed scheme is delineated, closed-form
expressions for the sum rate are derived, and the CQI levels
are optimized. In Section III, the sum rate upper bounds are
analyzed as a benchmark. In Section IV, the performance of
the new scheme is evaluated, confirming its superiority of
overhead reduction and throughput, followed by conclusions
in Section V.
II. DESIGN OF RELAY-ASSISTED MULTIUSER MIMO
ARCHITECTURE FOR MINING APPLICATIONS
The designed architecture of relay-assisted wireless systems
for mining applications is illustrated in Fig. 1. Let be the
number of relays that have an overlapping coverage area and
be the number of vehicles that are within the overlapping
coverage area. We assume each relay has a single antenna and
each vehicle is equipped with antennas, . We also
define to be the index of relays, .
Different air–interface technologies can be implemented on
the link between the gateway and relays and the link between
the relays and the vehicles that the relays serve. Particularly,
3GPP Long-Term Evolution (LTE) that is able to provide wide
coverage to a big mine [23] and IEEE 802.11 WiFi that is able to
provide high-speed local wireless access [24] are considered on
the two links, respectively. No hardware change is required to
these industrial communication systems. Such a design would
facilitate implementing the system and reduce the cost, using
off-the-shelf equipment.
A. 3GPP LTE Gateway-Relay Link
On this link, the gateway broadcasts every packet to all the
relays, as specified by LTE Standard. It does not perform beam-
forming to send different packets to different relays, because
it is impossible for the gateway to foresee which relay would
provide the best connection to a certain vehicle in a mobile
environment. In addition, the broadcast can increase the suc-
cess rate of the packets at the relays, which is critical to the
end-to-end success rate of crucial vehicle safety messages.
NI et al.: RELAY-ASSISTED WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS IN MINING VEHICLE SAFETY APPLICATIONS 617

Fig. 2. Example of buffering in the relays, where there are two relays and three vehicles, and buffer is for vehicle ( , 2, 3). Each buffer consists of four
segments, denoted by a block. Gray segments are occupied, and white segments are vacant due to packet loss on the gateway-relay link.

There are first-in first-out (FIFO) buffers at every relay, Suppose that vehicle ( ) is the vehicle the
each associated with a vehicle. In each buffer, there are seg- th relay will send packets to in the multiuser MIMO mode.
ments, and each segment can store a packet from the gateway. The received signal vector at the vehicle is given by [28, eq. 2]
Each relay can manage its buffers as follows. When the relay
succeeds in decoding a packet from the gateway, it puts the
packet into a segment of the associated buffer. When it fails
to decode the packet, it leaves the segment empty. Fig. 2 illus-
trates such buffer management, where it is clear that the buffer
management allows the sequence of the packets to be synchro- where is the 1 channel vector from the th relay to
nized across all the relays in a decentralized manner. The syn- vehicle , is the transmit signal of the th relay, and
chronized packet sequences are important, preventing different is the 1 additive white complex Gaussian noise vector at
relays repeatedly sending the same packets. vehicle with the variance of . . is the
This buffer management method can be extended to guar- transmit power of all the relays. denotes the expectation.
antee that all vehicles are served in a timely manner. In the case Consider an i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channel on the link, the
where a vehicle fails to be served by any relay for a period of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) (or, in other
time due to its low SINR, the corresponding buffers for the ve- words, the CQI) of vehicle is given by [9], [17]
hicle at the relays and the gateway are built up. The gateway can (1)
then send a message to the relays to designate high priority to
the vehicle. Next time, the priority vehicle feeds back its pre-se-
lection, and the preselected relay will serve that vehicle. where is the channel matrix of ve-
Consider independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) hicle , , and denotes the conjugate transpose.
channel fading on the link. The probability of a nonempty are i.i.d. for all [16].
segment in buffer of the th relay is identical for
all and , denoted by . Algorithm 1 Proposed decentralized relay-assisted scheme
, where is the bit error
rate, is the packet size (i.e., the size of a buffer segment in STEP 1:
bits), and is the error-correcting capability of the channel The relays send the pilot signals.
code used by the gateway on the link. for all do
for all do
Vehicle calculates based on the pilots, using (1).
end for
B. WiFi Relay-Vehicle Link
Vehicle preselects the relay with the SINR

On this link, a TDMA WiFi technique is exploited, which

is an industrial communication solution for long-distance,
high-throughput connectivities [25]–[27]. In this new design, and quantizes to .
the relays (i.e., WiFi access points) simultaneously transmit the end for
packets destined for the vehicles, where the ZF detectors [16]
are employed to receive the packets and suppress interference. STEP 2:
Standard WiFi does not support such simultaneous trans- for all do
missions, as collisions could occur. Fortunately, very limited Vehicle sends and the associated relay index.
software change can specify common time slots for individual end for
relays, as if there is a single WiFi relay. The relays discard the previously delivered packets.
618 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 10, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2014

Fig. 3. Diagram of the proposed five-step decentralized relay-assisted multiuser MIMO scheme, where the gateway-relay link and the relay-vehicle link use
different air–interfaces and therefore are drawn on different time axes.

The gateway broadcasts new packets. The approach starts by the relays sending pilot signals for
the vehicles to measure channel conditions on the relay-vehicle
STEP 3:
link in STEP 1. Then each vehicle independently preselects one
for all do
of the relays, and feeds back the pre-selection result and the
for all the new packets relay successfully decodes do
corresponding SINR to the relays in STEP 2. As a result, the
Relay sends an ACK to the gateway.
feedback rate is low. In the step, the gateway also sends data
end for
packets to the relays on the gateway-relay link. Every packet
The th relay sends the packets to the vehicle
that is successfully decoded at a relay is transferred into the
(2) buffer of the relay, as described in Section II-A. In STEP 3,
each relay makes its own decision on the vehicle to be served,
based on the preselection of the vehicles and the buffer status.
where is the set of vehicles, the packets destined for The relays proceed to send packets to the independently se-
which are ready to send at the -th relay; and is the set lected vehicles, forming multiuser MIMO on the relay-vehicle
of vehicles that preselected the -th relay. link, as described in Section II-B. In STEP 4, the vehicles re-
end for turn their acknowledgement (ACK) or non-acknowledgement
STEP 4: (NACK), which is then interpreted to the information useful for
for all do the gateway to control transmission of new packets. This infor-
Vehicle sends ACK or non-ACK (NACK) to the relays mation is finally passed to the gateway in STEP 5. Details are
in regards to the packets forwarded. provided in Algorithm 1.
end for How many packets the gateway should broadcast and whom
the packets are destined for in STEP 2 can be specified as fol-
STEP 5: lows. When the system has become stationary, for any given ve-
for all do hicle, the gateway broadcasts the same number of new packets
The th relay sends the index and the number of as those that were successfully delivered to the vehicle in the
successful packets for vehicle to the gateway. previous STEP 3. This number was fed back to the gateway in
end for the previous STEP 5. The gateway will also retransmit the old
packets that were sent in the previous STEP 2 with no ACK re-
C. Proposed Decentralized Relay-Assisted Multiuser MIMO ceived in the previous STEP 3. As such, the buffers at the relays
Coupling the gateway-relay link and the relay-vehicle link would not overflow.
is a new decentralized relay-assisted multiuser MIMO scheme. In STEP 2, the relays discard any successfully delivered
Fig. 3 illustrates the proposed approach. packets based on the ACK messages the vehicles sent in the
NI et al.: RELAY-ASSISTED WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS IN MINING VEHICLE SAFETY APPLICATIONS 619

previous STEP 4. The relays then fill the gaps of the discarded For any vehicle, the probabilities of being equal to and less
packets by shifting their segments towards the output of the than the th CQI level can be given by
buffers. This frees the segments at the input of the buffers to
accommodate new packets from the gateway.
Given the ways in which the gateway decides the packets
to broadcast and the relays discard the delivered packets, the (6)
queue lengths in the buffers are stationary (so is the system),
and the packet sequence is synchronous. Another advantage of (7)
the proposed decentralized scheme is that each individual relay
can behave without being aware of the existence of the other
where , is the th CQI interval, and
relays. This reduces the impact of the scheme on the standard
.
WiFi devices (i.e., access points) to the minimum.
Using (6) and (7), the PMF of the SINR for vehicle can
be obtained, as given by
D. CQI Level Optimization for STEP 1
We start by evaluating in (2) for the th
relay, where denotes the cardinality. Clearly, are
dependent and . The joint probability mass
function (PMF) of can be given by

where is obtained by exploiting order statistics of discrete

random variables [29], and is obtained by substituting (6)
and (7) into .
Expanded binomially, can be rewritten as
(3)

where is the probability of a given relay being prese-

lected by a vehicle, , , and
. Specifically, accounts for the probability In practical wireless systems, signals are encoded and mod-
of vehicles preselecting the th relay. ulated based on ( ) to reduce packet loss. Therefore,
accounts the probability of (of the ) vehicles having their the aggregate data rate on the relay-vehicle link is given by
packets successfully decoded at the -th relay and the other
vehicles do not. Multiple sums collect all possible
combinations of .
We consider the case where , as this is the case
where the largest number of vehicles can be served at the same
time. For this reason, we suppress to avoid notational con-
fusion in the remainder of the paper. In this case, the proba-
bility and cumulative distribution functions, i.e., PDF and CDF,
of are [16]

(4)

Exploiting order statistics [29], the PDF and CDF of can be

(8)
given by

where accounts for all combinations of

yielding .
(5) Clearly, (8) depends on the CQI quantization levels. It will be
used to derive the optimal CQI levels that maximize the average
where the subscript of is suppressed, since are sum rate of the system. To this end, a constrained optimization
i.i.d., as mentioned in Section II-B. problem is formulated with respect to ( ), as
Based on (3) and (5), the aggregate data rate (i.e., the given by
so-called sum rate) is evaluated in the case where (
is considered) and the case where is finite ( is used). is
the number of bits to quantize a SINR. (9)
620 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 10, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2014

where is provided by (8). Unfortunately, the maxima or on the boundary of the region of the function. Equa-
inequality constraints and the nonconvexity make it difficult tion (10) is the first-order necessary condition and an indicator
for many nonlinear programming algorithms, such as Newton’s of a local optimum. Based on (10), we derive the unique expres-
methods [30], to solve (9). (The nonconvexity will be discussed sion for every quantization level with respect to and solve
later in this section.) . The results of , satisfying (10), give local optima.
A new recursive algorithm is developed to solve (9). Appar- However, to confirm a local optimum to be a local maximum,
ently, the partial derivative of with respect to is only we need to run a second derivative test for every individual
dependent on its adjacent CQI quantization levels, and result of , i.e., the second-order derivative must be nega-
(in case of , only ), and itself, . The par- tive for a local maximum [30]. In other words, the first-order
tial derivative is given in (10), shown at the bottom of the page. derivative (10) must be decreasing at a local maximum (as will
In the case of where , exploiting be shown in Fig. 4). There may be multiple local maxima that
the first-order necessary condition of a local maximum (i.e., pass the second derivative test. We substitute them into (8). The
[30]) on (10), is obtained, as given in global maximum is one of the local maxima that maximizes (8).
(11), shown at the bottom of the page. Likewise, for Clearly, it is impossible for the global maximum to be on the
, is obtained, as given in (12), shown at the bottom of boundary of the region of the function (9), as
the page. does not have closed boundaries.
The new recursive algorithm can be presented as follows. Take an example of to demonstrate the recursive al-
Step 1) Substitute (11) into (12) recursively to express gorithm. To obtain (11) is essentially to solve (10) equal to 0,
with respect to . which can be solved by using a bisection method. For illustra-
Step 2) Solve since . tion purpose, Fig. 4 plots (10), where the abscissa is the variable
Step 3) Substitute into (11) and then (12) to calculate . It can be seen that, in the region of , (10) always
to one after another. has a root which is the optimal 1-bit CQI level. It is noticed that
Note that the objective function (9) is nonconvex. The global the curves are descendent when crossing the axis. For ,
maximum of the nonconvex function exists at one of the local (10) is descendent, and therefore the second-order necessary

(10)

(11)

(12)
NI et al.: RELAY-ASSISTED WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS IN MINING VEHICLE SAFETY APPLICATIONS 621

where is the incomplete Gamma function.

III. SUM-RATE UPPER BOUNDS

The upper bounds of the sum rate (i.e., the aggregate data
rate) are also derived for the relay-assisted multiuser MIMO
system diagrammed in Fig. 1. The upper bounds are provided by
a globally coordinated, centralized algorithm, where the SINRs
of every vehicle pertaining to all the relays are gathered at the
gateway, and the gateway selects the largest SINRs one by one
to maximize the aggregate data rate [21]. Specifically, up to
pairs of vehicle and relay are serially picked up, of which the
SINRs are the largest among all of the unselected vehicles and
relays. For such a serial algorithm, we introduce a new index
to indicate the th pair that is picked up. Let denote the th
picked vehicle ( is different from defined in Section II
which is the vehicle the th relay independently selects in the
Fig. 4. Plot of (10), where , , (i.e., 20 in dB), and proposed decentralized approach), and let denote the total
ranges from 5 to 30. The packet size is 500 b. number of candidate pairs of relays and vehicles from which the
th pair is picked up. Therefore, . We still let
condition of a local maximum [30], , is sat- denote the index of relays, and therefore .
isfied at those roots. Note that the first-order and second-order
necessary conditions are the sufficient and necessary condition
of a local maximum [30]. The roots shown in the figure are the
local optimum of . In fact, the roots are also the global op- A. Absolute Upper Bound ( )
timum, because they are the only roots. Prior to the first selection, there is the joint probability
In Fig. 4, it is also seen that (10) is not a monotonic function in
case of , which means is not convex or concave
[30]. It would be difficult for other multivariate optimization
methods [31] to solve (9). The proposed recursive algorithm is
a simple and effective way to derive the optimal CQI levels.
(15)
Only optimizing a single CQI level and substituting it for the
others, the recursive algorithm can be accomplished off-line or
in real-time (when or changes).
For comparison, the performance under precise CQI is also Here, defines the number of vehicles the th relay can send
analysed. In this case, for the th relay, is the one packets to (i.e., is the number of vehicles that can be paired
which has the largest of the SINRs. Exploiting Order Statis- with the th relay). is the probability of
tics [29] on (5), differentiating the resulted CDF, and carrying . Clearly, .
out binomial expansion, the PDF of can be obtained as
The set are continually updated, such that, once
the th relay is selected, is removed from the set. Each time
a vehicle is selected, any unselected relay that can be paired with
the vehicle has its corresponding element in the set subtracted
(13) by one. We let denote the number of vehicles with which
Then, the closed-form expression for the sum rate on the relay- the th relay can be paired right before the th relay is selected.
vehicle link with precise CQI is given by .
Without loss of generality, we assume that relays 1 to
are serially selected as the first to th picked relays. Before
the th relay is picked up, are the respective
numbers of vehicles that the unselected relays can
be paired with. After the th relay is picked up,
are the respective num-
bers of vehicles with which the remaining unselected relays
can potentially be paired. (
) indicates whether the th relay can be paired
with the th selected vehicle . If the relay can, ; oth-
(14) erwise, . Clearly, .
622 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 10, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2014

We have the joint conditional probability of the numbers of Integrating (17), the recurrence expression for can
vehicles that each unselected relay can be paired with before be written as
and after the th relay is selected, as given by

(18)

Exploit Order Statistics on (17) and (18). is given by

(19)

Recursively, can be presented by

using (19). Details are suppressed due to limited space. For
, substitute (4) into (19). can be obtained as

(20)
(16)

From (15) and (16), the PMF of can be obtained. Likewise, for and , we have
Note that ( ; ) is i.i.d. (as
mentioned in Section II-B), and so will be the SINRs of the ve-
hicles for the th selection. Let and denote
the PDF and CDF of for the th selection, and
and denote the PDF and CDF of . ,
since every time the upper-bound approach picks up the pair of
relay and vehicle of which the SINR is the largest among un-
picked relays and vehicles. Write the PDF of under the
condition that as
(21)

and (22), shown at the bottom of the page, where is a

multinomial coefficient.
which is based on the Order Statistics equation [17, Lem. 1].
Clearly, ( ) is a polynomial
Integrate the product of the conditional PDF and
with respect to the term . As a result, the abso-
with respect to and obtain , as given by
lute upper bound is given by (23), shown at the bottom
of the next page, where the conditional probability is
obtained by using (16). is ob-
(17)
tained from (19), because (19) is in fact dependent on

(22)
NI et al.: RELAY-ASSISTED WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS IN MINING VEHICLE SAFETY APPLICATIONS 623

. is the closed-form expression The bisection method can be used to solve the condition. The
for the integral in the right-hand side of the first equa- result is then substituted into (24), achieving the bound.
tion, which can be obtained by using an integral identity
IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
[17] on (20), (21), and (22). In this section, a thorough evaluation of the proposed decen-
tralized relay-assisted multiuser MIMO scheme is provided, on
B. Lower Upper Bound ( ) three key aspects: sum rate, overhead, and throughput. System
parameters considered are as follows. On the gateway-relay
In this case, the CQI, with a value of either or , is link, a 1/2-rate convolutional code with the polynomial (171,
indicative of whether a vehicle preselects a relay. A vehicle may 133) and 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) are used.
preselect multiple relays, as opposed to the proposed scheme The average SNR is 20 dB. Therefore, and .
where each vehicle preselects one relay. On the relay-vehicle link, an i.i.d. flat Rayleigh fading channel
Note that, when selecting a vehicle for the -th relay, the is considered. The packet size is , and the number
number of unselected vehicles is ( ) in the upper-bound of buffer segments is 20 per vehicle.
approach. Exploiting Discrete Order Statistics, the probability To the best of our knowledge, limited research has been
of the SINR of the vehicle to be selected for the th relay can conducted in terms of optimizing the CQI levels of multiuser
MIMO systems [19]. The only two existing quantization
be given by
methods that we are aware of were proposed in [32], where
non-relay multiuser MIMO systems were originally consid-
ered. For comparison purpose, we extend the methods to the
relay-assisted multiuser MIMO systems.
Both of the two methods in [32] formulated their quantiza-
where , 2 and . tion levels as , , where
As a result, in the case of , the upper bound of the is the CDF of the SINR. The first method, referred to as
aggregate data rate is given by pre-scheduling law, was based on the CDF of the SINR before
selecting the relays. For the proposed decentralized scheduling
scheme, is given by (5). The second method, referred to as
post-scheduling law, was based on the CDF of the SINR after
selecting the relays. For the proposed decentralized scheduling
scheme, can be given by
(24)

where the optimal can be obtained by solving the first-order

necessary condition:

(25)

which is obtained by first integrating (13) to get the CDF of

and then adding up all combinations of .
It is revealed in [32] that the post-scheduling quantization
law outperforms the pre-scheduling quantization law. This is
because the CDF of the post-scheduling SINR takes the system
configurations (i.e., and the way of selecting the vehicles)

(23)
624 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 10, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2014
Fig. 5. Sum rate versus the number of vehicles , where , 20 dB,
and ranges from 0 to 40. In the figure, the analytical results of the new de-
centralized scheme are obtained by using (8) in the cases of and 4, and
by using (14) in the case of . The analytical results of the upper bounds
are obtained by using (24) in the case of , and by using (23) in the case
of .
into account, whereas the CDF of the pre-scheduling quantiza-
tion law does not.
There is another 1-b CQI quantization method proposed in
[18] for nonrelay multiuser MIMO. It is a special case of the new
CQI levels developed in Section II-D, as it was also obtained by
solving the first-order necessary condition of maximizing the
sum rate. However, the new CQI levels supports relay-assisted
networks and more quantization bits, due to the recursive algo-
rithm developed in Section II-D.
A. Sum Rate (Aggregate Data Rate)
Figs. 5–7 show that the proposed decentralized relay-assisted
multiuser MIMO scheme is able to approach the upper bounds
of the aggregate data rate derived in Section III. Particularly,
when , the approach can achieve the absolute upper
bound using precise CQI and 98% of the bound using only 4-b
CQI. When , the gap between the approach and the
absolute upper bound is less than 2.5 dB, as shown in Fig. 5.
Note that the gap between the proposed decentralized method
and the absolute upper bound is much larger when
than it is when . The reason is that, when the number
of vehicles is small, some relay transmit antennas may not
be preselected by any vehicle in the proposed decentralized
scheme (because the vehicles preselect the relay transmit
antennas in a decentralized, independent way). As a result, the
achieved throughput may be lower. In contrast, the centralized
approach that presents the absolute upper bound pairs relay
transmit antennas and vehicles in a globally optimal way. Every
relay transmit antenna can be used, and high throughput can be
achieved. However, the signalling overhead for such globally
optimal pairing is high, as will be revealed in Section IV-B.
Fig. 6. Sum rate versus , where . is considered, because
the new CQI levels are much effective for small values, as show in Fig. 5.
is also considered, because this value is of practical significance as
will be discussed later.
In the case of , Figs. 5 and 6 also show that the pro-
posed decentralized scheme can achieve 93.1% of the lower
upper bound (24). This can be seen when . The gap
between them is halved, from 9.4% to 4.6%, when declines
from five to three, as shown in Fig. 7.
In Fig. 6, it is noted that the gap of sum rate between the
proposed decentralized method and the centralized method in-
creases with in the case of and . The reason is
that, when the number of vehicles is small, some relay transmit
antennas may not be preselected by any of the vehicles in the
proposed decentralized scheme, while all of the relay transmit
antennas can be selected in the centralized method. In other
words, fewer relay transmit antennas send data in the decen-
tralized scheme than they do in the centralized scheme. Since
the data rate of each relay transmit antenna increases with , the
gap of sum rate between the two schemes also increases. How-
ever, when increases, the gap diminishes, as every relay can
be efficiently utilized in the proposed decentralized scheme. For
example, when and , the gap becomes negligible,
as shown in the figure.
In Fig. 7, it is noted that the sum rate of both the proposed de-
centralized scheme and the centralized scheme grows with the
number of relays, because more relays would enhance channel
diversity of each vehicle and subsequently increase its data rate.
However, the gap of sum rate between the two schemes enlarges
with the number of relays, especially in the case of . The
reason is that for a given number of vehicles, the increasing
number of relays would lead to a probabilistic growth of uns-
elected relays in the proposed decentralized scheme. Besides,
large quantization errors of would lead to a further prob-
abilistic growth of unselected relays, as in this case the number
of vehicles that can be selected for each relay can be smaller than
the number of vehicles that preselect the relay (i.e., some vehi-
cles preselect the relay but their CQI is 0). These two factors
NI et al.: RELAY-ASSISTED WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS IN MINING VEHICLE SAFETY APPLICATIONS
Fig. 7. Sum rate versus the number of relays , where
is considered, because the gain of the new CQI levels in this case is not as
significant as it is in cases of smaller , as shown in Fig. 5. This figure reveals
that the gain becomes obvious with the growth of .
explain the sum rate gap of the decentralized scheme in com-
parison to the centralized approach where the relays are always
selected. However, when is increased, the gap diminishes.
When , the gap is negligible, as shown in the figure.
Figs. 5–7 also confirm the superiority of the optimized CQI
levels by comparing to the state of the art. For , the
optimal CQI levels can surpass the existing methods by 22%,
as shown in Fig. 5. The gain grows further with , as shown
in Fig. 6. It also grows with , even in cases where it is not
significant in the first place, as revealed in Fig. 7.
Note in Fig. 5 that, for the two existing quantization methods,
the post-scheduling law is outperformed by the pre-scheduling
law. This is opposed to the conclusion drawn for nonrelay
multiuser MIMO systems in [32]. The reason is because the
post-scheduling CDF, as given by (25), which synthesizes
all of , substantially differs from the CDFs at indi-
vidual relays pertaining to a particular ( ). The
conclusion drawn is that the post-scheduling law, originally
designed for non-relay multiuser MIMO systems, is unsuitable
for relay-assisted multiuser MIMO systems. Therefore, it is not
plotted in Figs. 6 and 7.
B. Overhead
A total overhead of
bits per transmission cycle (as illustrated in
Fig. 3) is required in the proposed decentralized scheme,
where bits are the vehicles’ feedback on
the indices of the preselected relays and the associated CQI,
bits are the scheduling decisions that
the relays sent to the gateway, and the other bits
are the ACK/NACK on both links.
In contrast, a total of
bits per transmission cycle is required in the upper-bound cen-
tralized scheme discussed in Section III, where bits are
625
20 dB. Fig. 8. Overhead versus sum rate, where , 20 dB, and from left to
right, the markers of each curve correspond to . The upper-bound,
centralized approach is also plotted, where the result of is based on
(24) and the results of are based on the upper bound given by (23).
Particularly, for , the average overhead per vehicle is 1.72 kbits/s for the
centralized scheme, which is far beyond the top of the figure.
the CQI feedback of the vehicles on both links,
bits are the scheduling decisions that the gateway
sends to the relays, bits are the ACK/NACK of the
relays, and the other bits are the ACK/NACK of
the selected vehicles on both links.
Consider a TTI of 4 ms (in other words, a transmission cycle
is 10 ms). When and , the overhead is 25 kbits/s
for the proposed decentralized scheme, whereas it is 130 kbits/s
for the upper-bound, centralized scheme. The overhead is re-
duced by 80%.
The growth of the overhead along with the sum rate is plotted
in Fig. 8, where it is shown that, for a given sum rate, the pro-
posed decentralized relay-assisted multiuser MIMO scheme
needs substantially lower overhead than the upper-bound ap-
proach. This can be seen because, for and , the
sum rates of the two schemes are almost the same (i.e., 22.9
bits/s/Hz versus 23.1 bits/s/Hz). The overhead is less than 0.4
kbits/s per vehicle for the scheme, while the overhead is more
than 0.9 kbits/s per vehicle for the upper-bound approach. The
gap is over 0.5 kbits/s per vehicle, and it also grows with .
For , the gap is about 1.24 kbits/s.
Fig. 8 also reveals that when and , the gap of
sum rate between our new CQI levels and the precise CQI (i.e.,
) is only 2.4%. In other words, our new CQI levels are
able to achieve 97.6% of the sum rate of precise CSI, which is
higher than the sum rate of the existing pre-scheduling law [32]
using equal to 4. In this sense, the new CQI levels can reduce
the CQI feedback by 1 bit per vehicle.
C. Throughput and Latency
The network throughput is defined as the average rate of
successful data message delivered to all the vehicles in the
626 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 10, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2014
Fig. 9. Comparison on the throughput, where and 20 dB. The
throughput is obtained by multiplying the sum rate by the size of resources
for forwarding packets. For the proposed decentralized scheme, the sum rate
is given by (8). For the existing centralized scheme, the sum rate is given by
(24) for and by (23) for , which gives the asymptotic upper
bound of the throughput the centralized scheme can achieve.
network, measured in bits per second. Given the fact that radio
resources are finite in practical wireless systems, data transmis-
sion and signalling overhead must share the resources. The use
of throughput (for data transmission evaluation purpose) can
reflect the fact, and present the actual data rate that the systems
can achieve under practical configurations. In this sense, the
throughput is of more interest than the sum rate. To evaluate
it, the effect of the requirement to allocate resources to the
overhead must be taken into account. Assume that, in each
TTI, a radio resource of 1000 (unit: s Hz) can be scheduled
to forward packets and send the overhead. Also assume every
overhead bit is spread to 4 bit and sent in QPSK [20], since
reliable modulations are normally used for the signalling over-
head. The remaining part of the resource of 1000 is to forward
packets.
Fig. 9 shows that, in terms of throughput, the proposed de-
centralized relay-assisted multiuser MIMO scheme is 45.2%
better than the upper-bound approach which provides the upper
bounds of the aggregate data rate in a globally coordinated,
centralized manner. This is the result of the significantly lower
overhead of the proposed scheme, which not only allows for
using more accurate CQI (i.e., ) to achieve higher sum
rates, but also spares more radio resources to forward packets. In
fact, for every given , the proposed decentralized scheme sur-
passes the upper-bound, centralized scheme. In the case where
and , the proposed scheme is at least 21.1%
better. In the case where or , the throughput of
the proposed decentralized scheme is even increasingly larger
than the asymptotic throughput upper bounds of the centralized
approach.
It is worth noting that the network throughput of the pro-
posed decentralized method is larger than the asymptotic upper
bound for the existing centralized method in the figure. This is
the result of the significantly lower signalling overhead of the
proposed decentralized scheme than that of the centralized ap-
proach. To be specific, the decentralized method requires much
less radio resources for signalling and therefore can use more re-
sources for data transmission than the centralized method, given
the finite radio resources.
The figure also points out that the maximum throughput of
the relay-assisted multiuser MIMO system corresponds to the
case where and . If there are more vehicles,
to achieve the maximum throughput, the mining vehicles can
be divided into groups with about 30 vehicles per group, and
schedule each group independently.
Another important performance measure of the system is la-
tency. Here, the latency is defined as the delay between the
gateway first time sending a packet and the corresponding ve-
hicle successfully receiving the packet. On average, the new
decentralized approach is able to halve the latency of the cen-
tralized approach that provides the upper bounds of sum rate.
The reason is that in the decentralized scheme, the relays can
forward the selected packets immediately after receiving the
packets from the gateway within a single relay transmission
time interval, as shown in Fig. 3. In contrast, in the centralized
approach, the relays have to feed back their ACK/NACK after
receiving the packets from the gateway. Based on the ACK/
NACK, the gateway makes a scheduling decision. The relays
do not send packets until being informed of the decision. As
such, the latency of a packet consists of at least two relay trans-
mission time intervals in the centralized approach.
V. CONCLUSION
A new decentralized relay-assisted multiuser MIMO trans-
mission scheme is proposed for mining vehicle safety appli-
cations, where both the relays and vehicles participate in the
scheduling decisions in a distributed participatory manner. The
CQI levels are also optimized for the approach, minimizing the
feedback requirement. Analytical results, confirmed by simula-
tions, show that the proposed scheme is able to achieve 97.6% of
the upper bound of the aggregate data rate using only 3-bit CQI,
and cut the overhead by 80%. In terms of throughput, given the
significantly lower overhead, the scheme is 45.2% better than
the approach that provides the upper bounds of the aggregate
data rate.
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Wei Ni (M’09) received the B.E. and Ph.D. degrees
in electronic engineering from Fudan University,
Shanghai, China, in 2000 and 2005, respectively.
Currently, he is a Senior Research Scientist
with the Wireless and Networking Technologies
Laboratory, CSIRO, Sydney, Australia. Prior to this,
he was a Research Scientist and Deputy Project
Leader with Bell Labs R&I Center, Alcatel-Lucent
(2005–2008), and a Senior Researcher with Devices
R&D, Nokia (2008–2009). His research interests
include multiuser MIMO, relay mesh networks,
radio resource management, and scheduling. He serves as an editorial board
member for Hindawi Journal of Engineering since 2012.
Iain B. Collings (S’92–M’95–SM’02) received the
B.E. degree in electrical and electronic engineering
from the University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Aus-
tralia, in 1992, and the Ph.D. degree in systems en-
gineering from the Australian National University,
Sydney, Australia, in 1995.
Currently, he is the Research Director of Wire-
less and Networking Technologies Laboratory,
CSIRO, Sydney, Australia. Prior to this, he was an
Associate Professor with the University of Sydney
(1999–2005), a Lecturer with the University of
Melbourne (1996–1999), and a Research Fellow in the Australian Cooperative
Research Center for Sensor Signal and Information Processing (1995). He has
authored and coauthored over 250 research papers on mobile digital commu-
nications. He has served as an editor for the Elsevier Physical Communication
Journal and a guest editor for the EURASIP Journal on Advanced Signal
Processing.
Dr. Collings has served as an editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS.
Ren Ping Liu (M’09) received the B.E. and M.E. de-
grees from Beijing University of Posts and Telecom-
munications, Beijing, China, and the Ph.D. degree in
electrical and computer engineering from the Univer-
sity of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia.
He joined CSIRO, Sydney, Australia, in 1995,
where he is now a Principle Scientist. He has been
heavily involved with commercial projects ranging
from QoS design and TCP/IP inter-networking to
next generation network architectures. His interests
include modeling, resource allocation and analysis
in IEEE 802.11, Mesh, Sensor and Cognitive Radio Networks.
Zhuo Chen (M’04) received the B.E. degree in
telecommunications engineering from Shanghai Jiao
Tong University, Beijing, China, in 1997, and the
M.E.R. and Ph.D. degrees in telecommunications
from the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, in
2001 and 2004, respectively.
He is now a Senior Research Scientist with
CSIRO, Sydney, Australia. Prior to this, he was
a Research Fellow with the University of Sydney
(2004–2006). His research interests cover the general
areas of wireless communications, more specifically,
space-time coding, MIMO systems, turbo codes, OFDMA, and cooperative
communications system.