CIF: Small: Network Beamforming: A Distributed Source Coding Perspective

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Wireless networks have influenced our life tremendously through the promise of portability, mobility, and accessibility. Spectrum is the most valuable resource in a wireless network. As the number of users in a wireless network is increased, different users compete for the same portion of the available spectrum. The result of such a competition may be a lower quality of service, dropping of some users, higher prices and so on. One promising idea to resolve some of these challenges is to let the users cooperate in addition to compete with each other. The study of such a multi-user cooperative communications system is the main goal of this proposal. Most of the emphasis in cooperative communications has been on improving the performance of a single-user (point-to-point) communication. The insights from the single-user setting are not sufficient to address the challenges of multi-user communication networks. When shifting the paradigm from single-user to multi-user, the natural question that arises is the following - what are the benefits of cooperation in a multi-user network setting suffering from interference and how to achieve them? We start by defining new performance measures called generalized diversity orders. Then, we study different aspects of the above question including the maximum possible diversity orders in different multi-user cooperative communications network scenarios. We also propose to design practical systems that achieve these maximum diversity orders.