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Abstract-We develop and analyze low-complexity cooperative diversity protocols that combat fading induced by multipath propagation in wireless networks. The underlying techniques exploit space diversity available through cooperating terminals' relaying signals for one another. We outline several strategies employed by the cooperating radios, including fixed relaying schemes such as amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward, selection relaying schemes that adapt based upon channel measurements between the cooperating terminals, and incremental relaying schemes that adapt based upon limited feedback from the destination terminal. We develop performance characterizations in terms of outage events and associated outage probabilities, which measure robustness of the transmissions to fading, focusing on the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Except for fixed decode-and-forward, all of our cooperative diversity protocols are efficient in the sense that they achieve full diversity (i.e., second-order diversity in the case of two terminals), and, moreover, are close to optimum (within 1.5 dB) in certain regimes. Thus, using distributed antennas, we can provide the powerful benefits of space diversity without need for physical arrays, though at a loss of spectral efficiency due to half-duplex operation and possibly at the cost of additional receive hardware. Applicable to any wireless setting, including cellular or ad hoc networks-wherever space constraints preclude the use of physical arrays-the performance characterizations reveal that large power or energy savings result from the use of these protocols.

The capacity of the two-user Gaussian interference channel has been open for thirty years. The understanding on this problem has been limited. The best known achievable region is due to Han-Kobayashi but its characterization is very complicated. It is also not known how tight the existing outer bounds are. In this work, we show that the existing outer bounds can in fact be arbitrarily loose in some parameter ranges, and by deriving new outer bounds, we show that a simplified Han-Kobayashi type scheme can achieve to within a single bit the capacity for all values of the channel parameters. We also show that the scheme is asymptotically optimal at certain high SNR regimes. Using our results, we provide a natural generalization of the point-to-point classical notion of degrees of freedom to interference-limited scenarios.

Multiuser diversity is a form of diversity inherent in a wireless network, provided by independent time-varying channels across the different users. The diversity benefit is exploited by tracking the channel fluctuations of the users and scheduling transmissions to users when their instantaneous channel quality is near the peak. The diversity gain increases with the dynamic range of the fluctuations and is thus limited in environments with little scattering and/or slow fading. In such environments, we propose the use of multiple transmit antennas to induce large and fast channel fluctuations so that multiuser diversity can still be exploited. The scheme can be interpreted as opportunistic beamforming and we show that true beamforming gains can be achieved when there are sufficient users, even though very limited channel feedback is needed. Furthermore, in a cellular system, the scheme plays an additional role of opportunistic nulling of the interference created on users of adjacent cells. We discuss the design implications of implementing this scheme in a complete wireless system.

In communications, the multiuser Gaussian channel model is commonly used to capture fundamental features of a wireless channel. Over the past couple of decades, study of multiuser Gaussian networks has been an active area of research for many scientists. However, due to the complexity of the Gaussian model, except for the simplest networks such as the one-to-many Gaussian broadcast channel and the many-to-one Gaussian multiple access channel, the capacity region of most Gaussian networks is still unknown. For example, even the capacity of a three node Gaussian relay network, in which a point to point communication is assisted by one helper (relay), has been open for more than 30 years.To make further progress, we present a linear finite-field deterministic channel model which is analytically simpler than the Gaussian model but still captures two key wireless channels: broadcast and superposition. The noiseless nature of this model allows us to focus on the interaction between signals transmitted from different nodes of the network rather than background noise of the links.Then, we consider a model for a wireless relay network with nodes connected by such 1 deterministic channels, and present an exact characterization of the end-to-end capacity when there is a single source and a single destination and an arbitrary number of relay nodes. This result is a natural generalization of the celebrated max-flow min-cut theorem for wireline networks. We also characterize the multicast capacity of linear finite-field deterministic relay networks when one source is multicasting the same information to multiple destinations, with the help of arbitrary number of relays.Next, we use the insights obtained from the analysis of the deterministic model and present an achievable rate for general Gaussian relay networks. We show that the achievable rate is within a constant number of bits from the information-theoretic cut-set upper bound on the capacity of these networks. This constant depends on the number of nodes in the network, but not the values of the channel gains. Therefore, we uniformly characterize the capacity of Gaussian relay networks within a constant number of bits, for all channel parameters. For example, we approximate the unknown capacity of the three node Gaussian relay channel within one bit/sec/Hz.Finally, we illustrate that the proposed deterministic approach is a general tool and can be applied to other problems in wireless network information theory. In particular we demonstrate its application to make progress in two other problems: two-way relay channel and relaying with side information.