Wireless communications final project report

Topic:

Reliable Multimedia Transmission over Cognitive Radio Networks Using Fountain Codes

ECEN 5060-376 Professor: Dr. Qi Cheng Ali Talari April 2008

Report Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Problem and Solution 3. Back ground 3.1. Cognitive radio 3.2. Fountain codes 3.3. GOP concept 4. Streaming over cognitive radio 4.1. Formulation 4.2. Simulation Results 5. Summery 5.1. Conclusion 5.2. Future work 5.3. References

Wireless communications final project report

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1. Introduction: With the explosive growth of wireless multimedia applications over the wireless Internet in recent years, the demand for radio spectral resources has increased significantly In order to meet the quality of service, delay, and large bandwidth requirements, various techniques such as source and channel coding, distributed streaming, multicast etch have been considered In this paper, we discuss on this issue according to the paper Reliable Multimedia Transmission over Cognitive Radio Networks Using Fountain Codes by R. Chandramouli, which proposes a technique for distributed multimedia transmission over the secondary user network that makes use of opportunistic spectrum access with the help of cognitive radios. We use digital fountain codes to distribute the multimedia content over unused spectrum and also to compensate for the loss incurred due to primary user interference. Primary user traffic is modeled as a Poisson process. We develop the techniques to select appropriate channels and study the tradeoffs between link reliability, spectral efficiency and coding overhead. The papers simulation results are partly discussed and the report will end up with a summarization. 2. Problem and solution Wireless multimedia applications require significant bandwidth and they often have to satisfy relatively tight delay constraints. Radio spectrum is a scarce resource Limited available bandwidth is considered as one of the major bottlenecks for high quality multimedia wireless services. To over come this scars BW problem we will use cognitive radio, described in the next section. In this approach we propose to make use of digital fountain codes, in order to remedy the aforementioned coordination problems. In fact, the use of fountain codes achieves two goals simultaneously. Firstly, it renders it feasible to distribute the scalable media to different SCs with no need of coordination between them. Secondly, it acts as a channel code to combat the effect of loss against PU inference and other channel conditions. Fountain codes are a class of erasure correcting codes that produce an endless supply of packets from a set of K input packets, out of which any N packets can be used to recover the original K packets with a certain probability of error , where N is slightly greater than K. 3. Background 3.1 Cognitive radio

Wireless communications final project report

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Cognitive radio is a wireless communication paradigm in which either the network or the wireless node itself changes particular transmission or reception parameters to execute its tasks efficiently without interfering with the licensed users or other cognitive radios. A reason for this is due to the fact that a major portion of the spectrum has already been allocated. Fig 1 shows the spectrum map used in North America. It can be significantly seen that whole spectrum is licensed to primary users.

Figure 1 spectrum allocation in north America On the other hand, actual measurements taken on the 0-6 GHz band in downtowns and on licensed bands, such as TV bands, show the significant under utilization of the spectrum. Recent FCC Proceedings propose the notion of secondary spectrum access to improve the spectrum utilization. This allows dynamic access to the unused parts of the spectrum owned by the primary license holder, called a primary user (PU), to become available temporarily for a secondary (non-primary) user (SU). This dynamic access of spectrum by secondary users, which is facilitated by the use of cognitive radios, is one of the promising ideas that can mitigate spectrum scarcity, potentially without major changes to infrastructures. The cognitive cycle consists of three major components: sensing of radio frequency (RF) stimuli, cognition/management and action. 1. Sensing of RF stimuli encompasses the following: 1.1. detection of spectrum holes;

Wireless communications final project report

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1.2. estimation of channel state information; 1.3. prediction of channel capacity for use by the transmitter 1.4. estimation of interference temperature 2. Cognition/spectrum management includes: 2.1. spectrum management which controls the opportunistic spectrum access 2.2. optimal transmission rate control 2.3. traffic shaping; 2.4. routing 2.5. quality of service provision 3. Examples of actions are: 3.1. transmit-power control, adaptive modulation and coding We use the spectrum pooling concept to select a set of sub channels (SC) in order to establish a communication link. Cognitive radio networks do not require the selected sub-channels or bands to be contiguous. Figure 2 shows sub channels and non contiguous sub channels selected for a link.

Figure 2 Sub channels and primary users Thus, a cognitive radio can send packets over non-contiguous spectrum bands. Since a link is composed of multiple different SCs at different frequencies, it adds path diversity in the network, and thus helps in achieving distributed streaming of the multimedia content through multiple paths with a higher overall throughput to the client. For example, it has been shown that the usage of multiple streaming servers provide better robustness in case one of the channels becomes congested. The multi-band spectral diversity also helps to improve the reliability of secondary spectrum access. For example, if a primary user appears in a particular spectral band, the secondary user has to vacate this band. The other available bands, in this situation, will still help in secondary link maintenance. However the inherent problem of distributing media over multiple SCs is the coordination required between the SCs. Packet scheduling strategies need to be carefully coordinated in order to efficiently

Wireless communications final project report

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------utilize the scarce spectral resources. This could make such a distributed streaming system overly complex and cumbersome, especially in a secondary user environment where primary user arrival is unpredictable. The problem of how to select the set of appropriate SCs to meet the QoS requirements of the multimedia communication are of great interest. We propose a novel metric to evaluate the quality of different SCs. The encoded packets are distributively transmitted through multiple sub-channels selected from the spectrum pool based on the new channel quality metric and the QoS requirement of the media steaming application. Theoretic analysis is presented to show that the proposed method will optimally allocate the data rate to different sub-channels to achieve the target requirement. In this paper, we model primary user arrival as a Poisson process whose parameter can be estimated by a maximum likelihood estimator. We use these models to investigate the spectrum effciency of the SU link with respect to the PU arrival rate and the number of selected sub-channels S. We also study the trade-off between and S. 3.2. Fountain codes

Figure 3 LT Coding Fountain code is a rateless code, first introduced by Luby in LT codes and then extended to raptor codes b shokrollahi. In LT codes as shown in figure 3 input source packets are coded in this way. First a degree is chosen according to a table of degree distribution. According to this degree some input packets are chosen uniformly random among all packets and are XORed together to form the encoded packet. This packet is sent over a network with a negligible header which shows which sources symbols were uses in forming this coded packet. Shokrollahi used a two layer coding which introduced a capacity approaching code called raptor codes. This his scheme first data is encoded with a very low conventional rate code like LDPC or hamming codes, then the encoded packets are coded again with a specific LT code. This scheme is depicted in figure 4.

Wireless communications final project report

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------For decoding if (1+)*K packets are received then we can recover K source packets. The point and innovation in this code is that users can be heterogeneous and no feedback is required from user to server. Users with lower BW or a lossy channel must wait more to collect required number of packets.

Figure 4 Raptor coding and decoding 3.3. GOP concept [From Wiki] In MPEG encoding, a group of pictures, or GOP, specifies the order in which intra-frames and inter frames are arranged. The GOP is a group of successive pictures within an MPEG-coded video stream. Each MPEG-coded video stream consists of successive GOPs from the MPEG pictures contained in it the visible frames are generated. A GOP can contain the following picture types: 1. I-picture or I-frame (intra coded picture) reference picture, corresponds to a fixed image and is independent of other picture types. Each GOP begins with this type of picture. 2. P-picture or P-frame (predictive coded picture) contains motion-compensated difference information from the preceding I- or P-frame.

Wireless communications final project report

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3. B-picture or B-frame (bidirectionally predictive coded picture) contains difference information from the preceding and following I- or P-frame within a GOP. A GOP always begins with an I-frame. Afterwards several P-frames follow, in each case with some frames distance. In the remaining gaps are B-frames. With the next I-frame a new GOP begins. The GOP structure is often referred by two numbers, for example M=3, N=12. The first one tells the distance between two anchor frames (I or P). The second one tells the distance between two full images (I-frames), it is the GOP length. For the above example, the GOP structure is IBBPBBPBBPBB. Instead of the M parameter one can use the maximal count of B-frames between two consecutive anchor frames. The more I-frames the MPEG stream has, the more it is editable. However, having more I-frames increases the stream size. In order to save bandwidth and disk space, videos prepared for internet broadcast often have only one I-frame per GOP. The I-frames contain the full image; they don't require any additional information to reconstruct the image. Therefore any errors in the streams are corrected by the next I-frame (an error in the I-frame propagates until the next I-frame). Errors in the P-frames propagate until the next anchor frame (I or P). B-frames do not propagate errors. The structure of a GOP is shown in figure 5. The frames dependencies are also shown in this figure. The first row shows the raw video stream captured from camera. The last row shows complete GOP and the dependent frames.

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Figure 5 GOP structure and frames dependencies 4. Streaming over cognitive radio 4.1 Formulation In this Section, we first introduce the spectrum pooling concept. This is the basis for our secondary usage model used for finding out vacant channels to be considered for distributing multimedia contents over them Then we describe the PU arrival model and after that we discuss digital fountain codes which are used to distribute the multimedia contents over different SCs that help in compensating for the PU interference. In the secondary usage scenario, the availability of the radio spectrum is dependent on the PUs usage statistics. So in order to transmit multimedia content, first we need to isolate a portion of the radio spectrum which is not in use by the primary users. Since PUs use their bands intermittently, SUs get the opportunity to exploit the temporarily available spectral resources to accomplish their own communication needs. This concept was shown in figure 2. We consider a compressed video transmission application for the secondary user. SU link is set up by selecting a set of S sub-channels out of S0 available sub-channels from different PU bands of the spectrum pool. Then the SU starts transmitting packets over this link at t=0. The PU arrival process on SC i, for i=1,2,,S0, is modeled as a Poisson process with arrival rate i .So the inter-arrival time i is exponentially distributed with mean-arrival time i=1/i. Each SC has a loss probability and channel capacity Ri.

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If the ith sub-channel is reclaimed by the primary user at time ti, then all packets transmitted on that subchannel after i will be lost due to the evacuation of the secondary user. In order to recover these packets, some error correcting mechanisms are needed. In our approach we will use fountain codes as described in the last section. The sub channels and PU arrival and total time is shown in figure 6.

Figure 6 sub-channes and PU arrivals Since the Fountain decoder only needs any N output packets to recover original K input packets with probability 1- , irrespective of the loss model of the channel, it is robust against the packet loss caused by the PU interference. But if the PU interference is high then it will cause additional delay to receive the correct N output packets for decoding to begin. In our model, if out of S SCs, some of them are occupied by PUs during transmission, then the decoder waits longer to receive the N packets on the remaining SCs. But for multimedia applications, which are delay-constrained, if the decoder does not receive N packets within Dmax, the maximum tolerable delay as shown in figure 6, then it results in a decoding error. In order to receive N packets with a high probability, we can increase the number of SCs which will distribute the N packets over a larger number of SCs, thereby reducing the average required packets per sub-channel. Therefore, depending upon the PU arrival rate, we can optimize the number of SCs that will give the maximum effective throughput and spectral efficiency. We first note that blindly applying a fountain code on a media bit stream would mix the timedependencies and the intra-layer dependencies that are present in the original scalable media stream. We propose to create one fountain per layer and per GOP of the original bit stream, as depicted in figure 7.

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Figure 7 Fountain coding over different GOPs The vertical arrows show the hierarchical dependence in the bit stream, in the original bit stream, which are essential for the scalable delivery of the stream. Then, each selected sub-channel is used to send different packets from the same Fountain, such that the receiver does not receive any duplicated packets. In this paper we assume the arrival of the primary traffic to follow a Poisson process. Different wireless channels may have different channel qualities in the sense of error probabilities. In this paper, we assume the selected sub-channel has a packet loss probability i(1 < i < S). We assume that the available channel set S0 and parameters is and is are known to the secondary devices. The main problems addressed in this paper are as follows: 1) determine the optimal number of sub-channels, S, required in order to receive successfully a total N packets with high probability 2) Determine the overhead (X) such that N=(1+X)K, for a SU link which maximizes the spectral efficiency of the distributed multimedia application with maximum tolerable delay Dmax. At the start of every GOP, the SU first performs sensing of the spectrum to find out the unused bands and then it selects the required number of SCs from that pool to set-up the secondary user link before starting the transmission. Let Psuccess denote the probability that for secondary receiver more than N packets are received successfully from S number of SCs. Then the spectral effciency (sul) for the SU link is given by

Wireless communications final project report

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Where TGOP= Tsensing + Dmax. Let the sub-channel i have a loss probability i and PU arrival rate i. Let each sub-channel have the same channel capacity R0. Let the total number of packets to be transmitted per GOP from layer l be Kl and the total number of encoded-packets needed for successful decoding of layer l be Nl. Then the total number of packets per GOP required for decoding is N = Nl. We assume that packets from different layers are uniformly mixed in the same proportion as in the original source. Now suppose that the total number of available sub channels is S0. The SU needs to make a selection of S = S0 SCs before starting our transmission. The optimal rate allocation scheme states that: 1) As long as the channel with the highest quality can carry all the packets that are needed, all the packets are transmitted on that sub-channel. 2) The channel with the second highest quality is used only when the one with the highest quality has been exhausted. In our scenario, there are two events that affect the quality of the SCs. A channel is considered good if PU arrives after the duration of one GOP and packets are not lost due to channel fading and noise. Since these two events are independent, we can multiply the probabilities of these two events and define a metric i to measure the quality of the SCs as follows: i=(1- i)*exp(-i*Dmax) . We use this metric to order the available SCs in the decreasing order of their quality so that if we require S number of SCs to establish the transmission link then we just select the first S of the SCs from the pool of S0 SCs. Since the required number of sub-channels S depends on the required value of Psuccess, we first derive an analytical expression for Psuccessin terms of S. An analytical expression for Psuccess can be derived in the following manner. Let total number of packets needed to be received from all the layers and S SCs be N0. Let Ni be a random variable denoting the number of packets received on SC i, Then

Where Ni is proportional to the available time on SC i denoted by a random variable Ti and is given by

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Some complicated parts are omitted in this report and interested readers are encouraged to refer to the main paper for complete formulation. Hence the probability density function (pdf) of Ti is given by

Where u(n)is the unit step function and d(t)is the dirac delta function. Figure 8 shows the pdf of Ti. After transforming Ti to Ni according to above formula, the pdf of Ni is given by

where

Figure 8 Probability density function of Ti

Now, in order to compute Psuccess pdf of be denoted by fN(n)then

by convolving all pdfs for i=1,2,...,S. Let the pdf of

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Wireless communications final project report

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Where the cross sign represents convolution. Finally we can calculate the Psuccess as follows:

If we consider a more ideal case where all PU arrival rates is are equal and the channel is error free then a closed form solution for Psuccess can be derived. Here all SCs have the same channel capacity: R0 packets per GOP and PU arrival rate . Then the total time (computed over all the SCs) needed to receive N0 packets is T0=(N/R0)*TGOP. Let ith PU arrive on SC i at i, then Psuccess is the probability that the total available time T computed over all the SCs before time Dmax on each SC is greater than T0. Let Cr be a configuration as in figure 6, such that exactly r of the is out of S are less than Dmax and let Tr be a random variable denoting the total available time (computed over all the SCs) in Cr. Then

With following definitions:

where

and

Where Ar is calculated from the below equation

(These are just the main formulas required for Psuccess definition, interested reader may refer to the main paper for more complete proof.

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Wireless communications final project report

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4.2. Simulation results We would like to optimize the spectral efficiency based on the following parameters: 1. PU Arrival Rate () 2. Number of SCs available (S) 3. Number of packets to be transmitted (K) 4. Overhead required for LT Decoding (X) Therefore, given and the delay constraint Dmax, we investigate the required number of SCs (S) and the overhead (X) that will result in maximum spectral efficiency (). Since computing closed-form solution to this problem is combinatorially complex, we present some simulation results to illustrate the fundamental trade-offs involved in this optimization problem. For our simulation purposes, we make the following assumptions: Packets are lost only due to PU arrival 1. Losses due to other channel conditions are not considered 2. There is no secondary user arrival 3. Once a SC is lost due to PU arrival, it is considered unusable during that GOP duration i.e., even if PU leaves the channel after some time, no further transmission is done until the next GOP PU mean arrival time is comparable to the maximum tolerable delay (Dmax) Estimation of Number of Required Sub-Channels: For the general case, where all SCs have different PU arrival rate and loss probability, figure 9 shows the dependence of Psuccess on the number of subchannels S for various values of N0 with the following set of parameters: R=1000 packets, Dmax=1, S0=15 and = [0.3 0.2 0.1 0.25 0.36 0.4 0.6 0.24 0.32 0.15 0.25 0.36 0.4 0.6 0.24], = [0.03 0.04 0.01 0.02 0.05 .025 0.06 0.01 0.03 0.015 0.04 0.01 0.02 0.05 .025]

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Figure 9 Probability of successfully receiving more than N0 packets vs. number of sub-channels For example, if we need to receive N0=6500 fountain coded packets at the receiver in order to recover original K=6000 packets with high probability of success, i.e. Psuccess. 1, then at least S=10 sub channels are needed as shown in figure 9. The error probability , evaluated via simulation for various packet lengths K and overhead X is shown in figure 10. It is clear from figure 10 that for each value of K, becomes very small after certain overhead X. It is also observed that as K increases the decreases for a fixed value of X.

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Wireless communications final project report

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Figure 10 LT decoding error probability. In Fig. 12-14, the spectral efficiency , is plotted against the overhead X, with number of sub-channels S as a parameter, for =2,5 and 10 respectively. From these figures we make the following observations: 1. For each value of S, attains a maximum value at a specific value of X. 2. Moreover, also attains another maximum at a specific value of S. 3. By comparing the above three figures, we observe that decreases as increases

Figure 11Spectral efficiency for K=5000and =2.

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Figure 12 Spectral efficiency for K=5000and =5.

Figure 13 Spectral efficiency for K=5000and = 10

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----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) Dependence on X: The spectral efficiency initially increases with overhead X. This is because a slight increase in X causes a sharp decrease in LT decoding error probability (Fig. 10) resulting in an increase in . But after a certain value of X, becomes small and stable but an increase in X increases N, the number of output packets to be received, which in-turn increases Tdata. This results in a decrease in after a specific value of X. 2) Dependence on S: Here, for a low value of S, the total time required per SC is large (i.e. Tdata is large) and Psuccess is also low, both of which reduces but as S increases Psuccess increases and becomes one after a certain value of S. Although Tdata does decrease causing a decrease in Tframe yet this decrease is not fast enough as compared to the increases in S due to a constant term Tsensing, so increase in S dominates over decrease in Tframe causing to decrease. 3) Dependence on : monotonically decreases as increases because increase in reduces the availability of the sub-channel, thereby causing Psuccess to decrease and Tframe to increase, both of which decrease the spectral efficiency. By studying the various trade-offs above, we see that for a given and number of original packets K, we can find out the value of the optimum number of SCs and the overhead which give maximum spectral efficiency. 5. Summary and future work and references 5.1. Conclusion: In this project, we propose a scheme for the transmission of distributed multimedia applications over cognitive radio networks with the help of digital fountain codes. We model the primary user arrival as a Poisson process and discuss techniques to estimate the arrival rate. We propose a metric to measure the quality of the sub-channels and then we develop a scheme to select the required sub-channels from the spectrum pool to establish the secondary user link. Then we investigate the problem of optimizing the spectral resources in the secondary usage scenario for multimedia applications with respect to the number of available sub-channels and primary user occupancy of the sub-channels. We also describe the use of the digital fountain codes to compensate for the loss incurred by the primary user interference and its effect on the spectral efficiency of the secondary user link. We observe that there is an optimal number of sub-channels that result in maximum secondary user spectral efficiency for same primary user traffic on all sub-channels and for fixed parameters of the LT code. We also observe that there is an optimal LT code induced overhead that maximizes the secondary user spectral efficiency for a particular set of sub-

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Wireless communications final project report

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------channels. And this efficiency monotonically decreases with the common primary user arrival rate for fixed LT code parameters and number of sub-channels. 5.2. Future work: Future investigations in this area could include the multiple secondary user case and interference issues resulting therefore. Other PU arrival models could be used to investigate the spectral efficiency. Additionally, other coding schemes can be used to investigate the link maintenance. 5.3. References: [1] Michael Mitzenmacher, Digital Fountains:Applications and Related Issues, www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm [2] If a Picture source in not mentioned then it is either from [Harikeshwar Kushwaha, R. Chandramouli, Reliable Multimedia Transmission Over Cognitive Radio Networks Using Fountain Codes] or by myself [3] Wikipedia website, http://en.wikipedia.org/

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