A New Cooperative Wireless Strategy:

Soft Information Forwarding

ECE, NIT Trichy, India
L1: Introduction to cooperative wireless communication

28th April 2021

Scheme for Promotion of Academic & Research Collaboration (SPARC), Ministry of Human Resource
Development, India under the SPARC/2018-2019/P145/SL.

Prof. Dush Nalin Jayakody, Ph. D (Dublin)

IEEE Senior Member , Fellow, IET
Head, Infocomm Lab
Tomsk Polytechnic University
RUSSIA

Professor (visiting), University of Jyvaskyla, Finland

Professor, Nanjing University of Science & Technology, China
Professor, Sri Lanka Technological Campus, Sri Lanka
 Why Cooperation ??
Part 1

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 Gains
Pathloss Gain

The pathloss, and hence the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), is known to be

inversely proportional to the propagation distance “x” and n is the pathloss
exponent

where 2 (line-of-sight) <n<6 (highly cluttered environments).

e.g. the communication path between source and destination into two equal
distances and allocating to each part half of the power, the gain w.r.t. direct
communication assuming a pathloss coefficient of n = 4 is quantified as

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 Gains
Pathloss Gain

Ex 1. A communication path between source and destination into two equal

distances and allocating to each part half of the power.
Compute the gain w.r.t. direct communication assuming a pathloss coefficient
of n = 4

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 Diversity Gain
Diversity Gain

Providing additional independent copies of the same information via independent

shadowing and fading channels yields diversity gains.

Outage probability depends on the rate R in a similar fashion and is known to be

related to the diversity gain at asymptotically high SNRs as

where d is the diversity gain or diversity order, and const(R) is some constant
depending on R.

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 Diversity Gain
Ex 2. Having one relay and a direct link offers two independent copies of the same
information, yields d = 2. At the same level of performance metric, for example,
requiring an outage probability of 1%, how much Tx power can be saved?

dB= 10 log (2) = 3dB

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 Multiplexing Gain
In an asymptotic SNR regime, the achievable data rate R is known to be
proportional to the logarithm of the SNR

r is referred to as the rate or multiplexing gain and is equal to the degrees of

freedom of the channel (that is the number of independent channels over which different
information can be sent).

Note: Using a relay in addition to the direct link, allows under certain conditions
the creation of a second channel, hence doubling the multiplexing gain and thus
the communication rate, assuming the SNR is kept constant.

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 Diversity Gain
Ex 2. Having one relay and a direct link offers two independent copies of the same
information, yields d = 2. At the same level of performance metric, for example,
requiring an outage probability of 1%, how much Tx power can be saved?

dB= 10 log (2) = 3dB

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 Canonical Relay Architectures 1

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 Canonical Relay Architectures 2

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 Canonical Relay Architectures 3

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 Cellular Capacity and Coverage
 Capacity
Each cell is assigned a limited amount of resources in terms of
bandwidth and allowed transmission power

 Coverage
The limit in transmission power has a profound impact on the
coverage of the cell

 Interference
Users at the cell edge not only experience insufficient power levels
from their associated base station but also interference power from
adjacent cells using the same frequency starts to become a
dominant detrimental performance factor

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 Cellular Scenario

a
c

Cellular scenario: relaying boost performance of users that are coverage limited due to range (a) capacity
limited (b); interference (c).

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 System Tradeoffs

Performance Gains.

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 Transparent Relaying Protocols
A relay does not modify the information represented by chosen
waveform. Very simple operations are usually performed; simple
amplification, phase rotation, etc.

1. Amplify and Forward (AF)

The signal received by the relay is amplified, frequency translated and
retransmitted

2. Linear-Process and Forward (LF);

This relaying method includes some other simple linear operations, which are
performed on the signal in the analog domain after amplification.

3. Nonlinear-Process and Forward (nLF);

This method performs some nonlinear operations on the received analog method
prior to retransmission.

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 Important Design Issues
 Constant Output Power
Node transmits at a constant output power that has been set during node
manufacturing

 Fixed Gain Amplification

The amplification factor is typically an inverse function of the average channel gain
between source and relay.

In poor channel conditions, this may lead to very large amplification factors and
hence high output powers.

 Variable Gain Amplification

Amplification gain is adapted to instantaneous changes in the channel and network

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 Regenerative Relay Protocols
 Estimate and Forward (EF)
The analog signal is amplified and down-converted to baseband, after which some
detection algorithms aim at recovering the original representation of the signal.

 Compress and Forward (CF)

It relays a compressed version of the detected information stream to the destination

 Decode and Forward (DF)

DF detects the signal, decodes it and re-encodes it prior to retransmission

 Purge and Forward (PF)

Allows for interference between the different relaying streams and deals with it by
eliminating as much of it as possible at each relay node.

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 Regenerative Relay Protocols
 Gather and Forward (GF)
is an extension to CF, relay node not only performs source coding over the
sampled information but also on the information itself. This aggregates over a
few communication slots

 Component Forwarding
It is depends upon the modulation schemes constellation diagram where part
of the signal bearing component only forward to offer an orthogonally

 Harvesting then Cooperate

Source and relay harvest energy from an AP in the downlink and work
cooperatively in the uplink for the source's information transmission

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 Design Issues
 Choice of Channel Code
It basically trades encoding/decoding complexity and power with coding
gains in form of transmit power reduction

 Choice of Interleaver
The role of the interleaver is to break long sequences of errors so that they can be
corrected more easily.

Since it breaks long error bursts into several short ones, the application of interleavers
is useful in block fading environments where the channel remains constant over a few
symbols

 Choice of Waveform and Modulation

An important design factor in relays is the choice of modulation, which comprises three
important issues

 Power Control
In addition, the regenerative relay may use adaptive amplification factors, mainly to
facilitate power control and hence manage interference
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 Basic Relay Model

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 Basic Relay
We will focus on BPSK modulation, in which the encoded bits c are mapped
onto the symbols x = 2c − 1, i.e., the binary values 0 and 1 are mapped to 1
and −1, respectively, where 1 denotes the all-ones vector.

The received signals at the relay and the destination are given by, respectively,

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 Cont…
 In time slot 2, the relay forwards a processed version of the source’s signal to the D, and
this can be represented as

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 Amplify & Forward Relaying
 In the AF relaying protocol, the relay transmits to the destination an amplified
version of the received signal

 This helps to equalize the effect of the channel fading between the source
and the relay

 The relay processing function is denoted by

 The relay satisfies the following power constraint, can you compute what
is Beta ??

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  Have you got this?

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 LLR Computation
 LLR is also an important concept in SIR

 An LLR measures the likelihood of a binary random variable being a zero

or a one.

 The corresponding LLR is defined

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 Cont…
 The variable ysr has a conditional probability density function (PDF) as
follows

 In the case of BPSK, this is (can you compute)?

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 Cont…
 The variable ysr has a conditional probability density function (PDF) as
follows

 In the case of BPSK, this is (can you compute)?

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 Soft Information Relay
 A basic issue associated with coded cooperation is that in order to avoid
error propagation, the relay has to decode the source message correctly

 In general, in order to detect the residual decoding error, a frame check

sequence can be appended, generated by a cyclic redundancy check (CRC)
code, to the transmitted information symbols

 In such a relay scheme, when the relay detects message in error, the relay
has two main options

1. The relay could remain silent in order to avoid the deteriorating effect
of error propagation to the next node
The relay has to discard the information symbols obtained by the source(s) resulting in
a waste of transmission time and power

2. The relay can forward the erroneous signal to the next node at the risk of
error propagation

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  In SIR, the relay detects/decodes the received signals at the
relay and computes the corresponding soft information estimate
of x

 The soft symbol estimate ˜x can be calculated as follows (this is

also the relay function of estimate and forward (EF)

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 Relay functions for AF, DF and SIR; ySR is the received signal at the relay and
f(ySR) is the relay function. We have assumed BPSK modulation and average
transmit power constraint

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 Summery

 Why Cooperation ?
 Benefits of Cooperative Relays
 Canonical Relay Architectures
 System Tradeoff
 Transparent Relaying Protocols
 Regenerative Relay Protocols
 Basic Relay model
 Soft Information Relaying

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 Thanks
Acknowledgement: Scheme for Promotion of Academic & Research Collaboration (SPARC), Ministry of
Human Resource Development, India under the SPARC/2018-2019/P145/SL.

nalin@tpu.ru

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