Wireless broadband technologies provide ubiquitous broadband access to wireless users, enabling services that were available only to wireline users. At the same time, with the steady growth of real-time streaming applications such as video on demand (VoD), voice over IP (VoIP), massive online gaming, and so forth, the IEEE 802.16 standard (commonly known as WiMAX) has emerged as one of the strongest contenders to provide such kind of broadband wireless access services. WiMAX has specified some advanced lard features at physical (PHY) layer techniques and media access control (MAC) layer protocols, which adopted many Quality of Service (QoS) scheduling algorithms, resource allocation, Hybrid ARQ and so on. Moreover, forward error correction (FEC) and automatic repeat request (ARQ) techniques have already specified in the standard and they are used to support real-time streaming services in all kind of channel conditions. Inside this thesis, we propose an efficient fast feedback algorithm and buffer congestion control improvement scheme for data streaming over WiMAX networks. Two reserved bits in Generic MAC header (GMH) of each MPDU in WiMAX systems are utilized. The first reserved bit is used as a trigger in fast feedback strategy to add more robust coding and choose better feedback channel when the feedback message does not arrive properly within its cycle time trip (CTT) or after timeout. The second reserved bit is used to inform the base station about the serving subscriber stations¡¦ buffers states when their buffers are above the predefine-threshold value. Increasing number of retrieval of the feedback message, which means we can increase restore-bit-error probabilities within each frame, and then the throughput performance shall increase as well. In addition, by having each subscriber stations or service station¡¦s buffer states knowledge, the BS will be able to provide extra bandwidth allocation to the SSs more efficiency and accuracy. Keywords: WiMAX, PHY, MAC, Hybrid ARQ, QoS, Generic MAC header, CTT, Fast Feedback, Buffer Congestion Control Improvement, Real-Time streaming.

Dans les standards actuels tels que HSDPA ou LTE, des protocoles de retransmissions (ARQ: Automatic Repeat reQuest) sont utilisés conjointement au codage de canal afin de palier aux erreurs dues à l'absence ou la mauvaise de connaissance de canal à la transmission. On garantit ainsi la fiabilité du lien physique pour les couches OSI supérieures (du moins un taux d'erreur paquet faible). De tels protocoles sont appelés protocoles de retransmission hybrides (HARQ). L'objet de cette thèse est de proposer des outils permettant l'analyse et l'optimisation des systèmes de communication en présences de protocoles HARQ avec une emphase particulière sur les systèmes cognitifs.Dans la première partie, nous étudierons un système point-à-point dans lequel trois différents protocoles HARQ adaptatifs seront considérés. Dans un premier temps, nous considérerons le régime asymptotique (i.e. codes optimaux gaussiens). Nous proposerons, dans ce cas, deux optimisations possibles : la minimisation de la puissance moyenne sous la contrainte de débit moyen et la maximisation du débit moyen sous une contrainte de puissance moyenne. Nous montrerons que les Processus de Décision Markoviens (MDP) sont des outils adaptés aux problèmes d'optimisation considérés.Dans les standards actuels tels que HSDPA ou LTE, des protocoles de retransmissions (ARQ: Automatic Repeat reQuest) sont utilisés conjointement au codage de canal afin de palier aux erreurs dues à l'absence ou la mauvaise de connaissance de canal à la transmission. On garantit ainsi la fiabilité du lien physique pour les couches OSI supérieures (du moins un taux d'erreur paquet faible). De tels protocoles sont appelés protocoles de retransmission hybrides (HARQ). L'objectif de cette thèse est de proposer des outils permettant l'analyse et l'optimisation des systèmes de communication en présences de protocoles HARQ avec une emphase particulière sur les systèmes cognitifs. La radio cognitive est une approche permettant à des utilisateurs non-licenciés de communiquer dans les mêmes bandes de fréquences que des utilisateurs licenciés afin d'augmenter l'efficacité spectrale des réseaux sans fil. Les utilisateurs secondaires doivent néanmoins limiter les interférences générées sur les signaux des utilisateurs primaires. Dans ce contexte, nous étudierons les débits atteignables par un utilisateur secondaire utilisant l'observation du protocole HARQ de l'utilisateur primaire afin de contrôler son interférence.

A drastic increase in traffic of mobile broadband is seen in the past few years, which is further accelerated by the increase in usage of smart phones and its applications. The availability of good smart phones and better data connectivity are encouraging mobile users to use video services. This huge increase in usage will pose a lot of challenges to the wireless networks. The wireless network has to become content aware in order to offer enhanced quality of video service through efficient utilization of the wireless spectrum. This thesis focuses on improving the Quality of Experience (QoE) for video transmission over Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks by imparting the content awareness to the system and providing unequal error protection for critical video packets. Two different schemes for the improvement of video quality delivery over LTE networks are presented in this thesis. Using content awareness, the retransmission count of Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) are changed dynamically such that the most important video frame gets more number of retransmission attempts, which increases its success for delivery in-turn increasing the received video quality. Since Radio Link Control (RLC) is the link layer for radio interface, the second approach focuses on optimizing this layer for efficient video transmission. As part of this scheme, a new operation mode called Hybrid Mode (HM) for RLC is defined. This mode performs retransmission only for the critical video frames, leaving other frames to unacknowledged transmission. The simulation results of both proposed schemes provide significant improvement in achieving good video quality without affecting the system performance.

A drastic increase in traffic of mobile broadband is seen in the past few years, which is further accelerated by the increase in usage of smart phones and its applications. The availability of good smart phones and better data connectivity are encouraging mobile users to use video services. This huge increase in usage will pose a lot of challenges to the wireless networks. The wireless network has to become content aware in order to offer enhanced quality of video service through efficient utilization of the wireless spectrum. This thesis focuses on improving the Quality of Experience (QoE) for video transmission over Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks by imparting the content awareness to the system and providing unequal error protection for critical video packets. Two different schemes for the improvement of video quality delivery over LTE networks are presented in this thesis. Using content awareness, the retransmission count of Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) are changed dynamically such that the most important video frame gets more number of retransmission attempts, which increases its success for delivery in-turn increasing the received video quality. Since Radio Link Control (RLC) is the link layer for radio interface, the second approach focuses on optimizing this layer for efficient video transmission. As part of this scheme, a new operation mode called Hybrid Mode (HM) for RLC is defined. This mode performs retransmission only for the critical video frames, leaving other frames to unacknowledged transmission. The simulation results of both proposed schemes provide significant improvement in achieving good video quality without affecting the system performance.

The objective of this thesis is to improve the performance of real-time communication overa wireless channel, by means of specifically tailored channel coding. The deadlinedependent coding (DDC) communication protocol presented here lets the timeliness and thereliability of the delivered information constitute quality of service (QoS) parametersrequested by the application. The values of these QoS parameters are transformed intoactions taken by the link layer protocol in terms of adaptive coding strategies.Incremental redundancy hybrid automatic repeat request (IR-HARQ) schemes usingrate compatible punctured codes are appealing since no repetition of previously transmittedbits is made. Typically, IR-HARQ schemes treat the packet lengths as fixed and maximizethe throughput by optimizing the puncturing pattern, i.e. the order in which the coded bitsare transmitted. In contrast, we define an IR strategy as the maximum number of allowedtransmissions and the number of code bits to include in each transmission. An approach isthen suggested to find the optimal IR strategy that maximizes the average code rate, i.e., theoptimal partitioning of n-kparity bits over at most M transmissions, assuming a givenpuncturing pattern. Concatenated coding used in IR-HARQ schemes provides a new arrayof possibilities for adaptability in terms of decoding complexity and communication timeversus reliability. Hence, critical reliability and timing constraints can be readily evaluatedas a function of available system resources. This in turn enables quantifiable QoS and thusnegotiable QoS. Multiple concatenated single parity check codes are chosen as examplecodes due to their very low decoding complexity. Specific puncturing patterns for thesecomponent codes are obtained using union bounds based on uniform interleavers. Thepuncturing pattern that has the best performance in terms of frame error rate (FER) at a lowsignal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is chosen. Further, using extrinsic information transfer (EXIT)analysis, rate compatible puncturing ratios for the constituent component code are found.The puncturing ratios are chosen to minimize the SNR required for convergence.The applications targeted in this thesis are not necessarily replacement of cables inexisting wired systems. Instead the motivation lies in the new services that wireless real-time communication enables. Hence, communication within and between cooperatingembedded systems is typically the focus. The resulting IR-HARQ-DDC protocol presentedhere is an efficient and fault tolerant link layer protocol foundation using adaptiveconcatenated coding intended specifically for wireless real-time communications. / Doktorsavhandlingar vid Chalmers tekniska högskola. Ny serie, 2198, Technical report. D, 29,

The objective of the proposed research is to design and evaluate end-to-end solutions to support the Quality of Experience (QoE) for the Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) service. IPTV is a system that integrates voice, video, and data delivery into a single Internet Protocol (IP) framework to enable interactive broadcasting services at the subscribers. It promises significant advantages for both service providers and subscribers. For instance, unlike conventional broadcasting systems, IPTV broadcasts will not be restricted by the limited number of channels in the broadcast/radio spectrum. Furthermore, IPTV will provide its subscribers with the opportunity to access and interact with a wide variety of high-quality on-demand video content over the Internet. However, these advantages come at the expense of stricter quality of service (QoS) requirements than traditional Internet applications. Since IPTV is considered as a real-time broadcast service over the Internet, the success of the IPTV service depends on the QoE perceived by the end-users. The characteristics of the video traffic as well as the high-quality requirements of the IPTV broadcast impose strict requirements on transmission delay. IPTV framework has to provide mechanisms to satisfy the stringent delay, jitter, and packet loss requirements of the IPTV service over lossy transmission channels with varying characteristics. The proposed research focuses on error recovery and channel change latency problems in IPTV networks. Our specific aim is to develop a content delivery framework that integrates content features, IPTV application requirements, and network characteristics in such a way that the network resource utilization can be optimized for the given constraints on the user perceived service quality. To achieve the desired QoE levels, the proposed research focuses on the design of resource optimal server-based and peer-assisted delivery techniques. First, by analyzing the tradeoffs on the use of proactive and reactive repair techniques, a solution that optimizes the error recovery overhead is proposed. Further analysis on the proposed solution is performed by also focusing on the use of multicast error recovery techniques. By investigating the tradeoffs on the use of network-assisted and client-based channel change solutions, distributed content delivery frameworks are proposed to optimize the error recovery performance. Next, bandwidth and latency tradeoffs associated with the use of concurrent delivery streams to support the IPTV channel change are analyzed, and the results are used to develop a resource-optimal channel change framework that greatly improves the latency performance in the network. For both problems studied in this research, scalability concerns for the IPTV service are addressed by properly integrating peer-based delivery techniques into server-based solutions.

A drastic increase in traffic of mobile broadband is seen in the past few years, which is further accelerated by the increase in usage of smart phones and its applications. The availability of good smart phones and better data connectivity are encouraging mobile users to use video services. This huge increase in usage will pose a lot of challenges to the wireless networks. The wireless network has to become content aware in order to offer enhanced quality of video service through efficient utilization of the wireless spectrum. This thesis focuses on improving the Quality of Experience (QoE) for video transmission over Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks by imparting the content awareness to the system and providing unequal error protection for critical video packets. Two different schemes for the improvement of video quality delivery over LTE networks are presented in this thesis. Using content awareness, the retransmission count of Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) are changed dynamically such that the most important video frame gets more number of retransmission attempts, which increases its success for delivery in-turn increasing the received video quality. Since Radio Link Control (RLC) is the link layer for radio interface, the second approach focuses on optimizing this layer for efficient video transmission. As part of this scheme, a new operation mode called Hybrid Mode (HM) for RLC is defined. This mode performs retransmission only for the critical video frames, leaving other frames to unacknowledged transmission. The simulation results of both proposed schemes provide significant improvement in achieving good video quality without affecting the system performance.

Dans les systèmes de communications sans fil, la transmission de grandes quantités d'information et à faible coût énergétique sont les deux principales questions qui n'ont jamais cessé d'attirer l'attention de la communauté scientifique au cours de la dernière décennie. Récemment, il a été démontré que la communication coopérative est une technique intéressante notamment parce qu'elle permet d'exploiter la diversité spatiale dans le canal sans fil. Cette technique assure une communication robuste et fiable, une meilleure qualité de service (QoS) et rend le concept de coopération prometteur pour les futurs générations de systèmes cellulaires. Typiquement, les QoS sont le taux d'erreurs paquet, le débit et le délai. Ces métriques sont impactées par le délai, induit par les mécanismes de retransmission Hybrid-Automatic Repeat-Request (HARQ) inhérents à la réception d'un paquet erroné et qui a un retard sur la QoS demandée. En revanche, les mécanismes HARQ créent une diversité temporelle. Par conséquent, l'adoption conjointe de la communication coopérative et des protocoles HARQ pourrait s'avérer avantageux pour la conception de schémas cross-layer. Nous proposons tout d'abord une stratégie de maximisation de débit total dans un réseau cellulaire hétérogène. Nous introduisons un algorithme qui alloue la puissance optimale à la station de base (BS) et aux relais, qui à chaque utilisateur attribue de manière optimale les sous-porteuses et les relais. Nous calculons le débit maximal atteignable ainsi que le taux d'utilisateurs sans ressources dans le réseau lorsque le nombre d'utilisateurs actifs varie. Nous comparons les performances de notre algorithme à ceux de la littérature existante, et montrons qu'un gain significatif est atteint sur la capacité globale. Dans un second temps, nous analysons théoriquement le taux d'erreurs paquet, le délai ainsi que l'efficacité de débit des réseaux HARQ coopératifs, dans le canal à évanouissements par blocs. Dans le cas des canaux à évanouissement lents, le délai moyen du mécanisme HARQ n'est pas pertinent à cause de la non-ergodicité du processus. Ainsi, nous nous intéressons plutôt à la probabilité de coupure de délai en présence d'évanouissements lents. La probabilité de coupure de délai est de première importance pour les applications sensibles au délai. Nous proposons une forme analytique de la probabilité de coupure permettant de se passer de longues simulations. Dans la suite de notre travail, nous analysons théoriquement l'efficacité énergétique (bits/joule) dans les réseaux HARQ coopératifs. Nous résolvons ensuite un problème de minimisation de l'énergie dans les réseaux coopératifs en liaison descendante. Dans ce problème, chaque utilisateur possède une contrainte de délai moyen à satisfaire de telle sorte que la contrainte sur la puissance totale du système soit respectée. L'algorithme de minimisation permet d'attribuer à chaque utilisateur la station-relai optimale et sa puissance ainsi que la puissance optimale de la BS afin de satisfaire les contraintes de délai. Les simulations montrent qu'en termes de consommation d'énergie, les techniques assistées par relais prédominent nettement les transmissions directes, dans tout système limité en délai. En conclusion, les travaux proposés dans cette thèse peuvent promettre d'établir des règles fiables pour l'ingénierie et la conception des futures générations de systèmes cellulaires énergétiquement efficaces. / In wireless systems, transmitting large amounts of information with low energetic cost are two main issues that have never stopped drawing the attention of the scientific community during the past decade. Later, it has been shown that cooperative communication is an appealing technique that exploits spatial diversity in wireless channel. Therefore, this technique certainly promises a robust and reliable communications, higher quality-of-service (QoS) and makes the cooperation concept attractive for future cellular systems. Typically, the QoS requirements are the packet error rate, throughput and delay. These metrics are affected by the delay, where each erroneous packet is retransmitted several times according to Hybrid-Automatic Repeat-Request (HARQ) mechanism inducing a delay on the demanded QoS but a temporal diversity is created. Therefore, adopting jointly cooperative communications and HARQ mechanisms could be beneficial for designing cross-layer schemes. First, a new rate maximization strategy, under heterogeneous data rate constraints among users is proposed. We propose an algorithm that allocates the optimal power at the base station (BS) and relays, assigns subcarriers and selects relays. The achievable data rate is investigated as well as the average starvation rate in the network when the load, i.e. the number of active users in the network, is increasing. It showed a significant gain in terms of global capacity compared to literature. Second, in block fading channel, theoretical analyses of the packet error rate, delay and throughput efficiency in relayassisted HARQ networks are provided. In slow fading channels, the average delay of HARQ mechanisms w.r.t. the fading states is not relevant due to the non-ergodic process of the fading channel. The delay outage is hence invoked to deal with the slow fading channel and is defined as the probability that the average delay w.r.t. AWGN channel exceeds a predefined threshold. This criterion has never been studied in literature, although being of importance for delay sensitive applications in slow fading channels. Then, an analytical form of the delay outage probability is proposed which might be useful to avoid lengthy simulations. These analyses consider a finite packet length and a given modulation and coding scheme (MCS) which leads to study the performance of practical systems. Third, a theoretical analysis of the energy efficiency (bits/joule) in relay-assisted HARQ networks is provided. Based on this analysis, an energy minimization problem in multiuser relayassisted downlink cellular networks is investigated. Each user has an average delay constraint to be satisfied such that a total power constraint in the system is respected. The BS is assumed to have only knowledge about the average channel statistics but no instantaneous channel state information (CSI). Finally, an algorithm that jointly allocates the optimal power at BS, the relay stations and selects the optimal relay in order to satisfy the delay constrains of users is proposed. The simulations show the improvement in terms of energy consumption of relay-assisted techniques compared to nonaided transmission in delay-constrained systems. Hence, the work proposed in this thesis can give useful insights for engineering rules in the design of the next generation energyefficient cellular systems.

Digital communication systems which use Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) are now widely used and have many advantages. The main disadvantage is the requirement for highly linear analogue electronics including the high power amplifier (HPA). This requirement cannot be met in all circumstances because of the occurrence of symbols with high peak to average power ratio (PAPR). Such symbols may be non-linearly distorted by limiting. Approaches to solve this problem have been either to reduce the PAPR at the transmitter or to try to mitigate the effect of the non-linearity at the receiver. Soft-limiting, i.e. applying limiting in software prior to the HPA is a simple way to reduce the PAPR. It produces non-linear distortion which will cause an increase in the bit-error-rate (BER) at the receiver. This thesis surveys existing alternatives ways of reducing the effect of non-linearity and proposes some new ones. Two iterative receiver techniques, based on statistical analysis of the nature of the non-linearity, have been implemented and investigated. These are the ‘Bussgang Noise Cancellation’ (BNC) technique and the ‘Decision Aided Reconstruction’ (DAR) techniques. As these techniques are valid for any memory-less nonlinearity, an alternative form of limiting, named as Inverted-Wraparound (IWRAP) has been included in the BNC investigation. A new method is proposed which is capable of correcting the received time-domain samples that are clipped, once they have been identified. This is named the ‘Equation-Method’ and it works by identifying constellation symbols that are likely to be correct at the receiver. If there are a sufficient number of these and they are correctly identified, the FFT may be partitioned to produce a set of equations that may be solved for the clipped time-domain samples. The thesis proposes four enhancements to this new method which improve its effectiveness. It is shown that the best form of this method outperforms conventional techniques especially for severe clipping levels. The performance of these four enhancements is evaluated over channels with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) in addition to clipping distortion. A technique based on a ‘margin factor’ is designed to make these methods work more effectively in the presence of AWGN noise. A new combining algorithm referred as ‘HARQ for Clipping’ is presented where soft bit decisions are combined from multiple transmissions. ‘HARQ for Clipping’ has been combined with the best version of the Equation-Method, and the performance of this approach is evaluated in terms of the BER with different levels of AWGN. It has been compared to other approaches from the literature and was found to out-perform the BNC iterative receiver by 3dB at signal to noise ratios around 10dB. Without HARQ, the best version of the Equation-Method performs better than the BNC receiver, at signal-to-nose ratios above about 17dB.