In this dissertation, performance analyses for large-scale antennas equipped two-way amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying and heterogeneous network (HetNet) are carried out. Energy-efficiency oriented design becomes more important for the next generation of wireless systems, which motivates us to study the strong candidates, such as massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) combined with cooperative relaying and HetNet. Based on the achievable rate analyses for both massive MIMO two-way AF relaying, effective power allocation schemes are presented to further improve system performance. Focusing on the MIMO downlinks in the HetNet, mean square error (MSE) based precoding schemes are designed and employed by the macro base station (BS) and the small cell (SC) nodes. Considering a HetNet where both macro BS and SC nodes are equipped with large-scale antenna arrays, the capacity lower bounds are derived, followed by the proposed user scheduling algorithms. The work on multi-pair two-way AF relaying with linear processing considers a system where multiple sources exchange information via a relay equipped with massive antennas. Given that channel estimation is non-ideal, and that the relay employs either maximum-ratio combining/maximum-ratio transmission (MRC/MRT) or zero-forcing reception/zero-forcing transmission (ZFR/ZFT) beamforming, we derive two corresponding closed-form lower bound expressions for the ergodic achievable rate of each pair sources. The closed-form expressions enable us to design an optimal power allocation (OPA) scheme that maximizes the sum spectral efficiency under certain practical constraints. As the antenna array size tends to infinity and the signal to noise ratios become very large, asymptotically optimal power allocation schemes in simple closed-form are derived. The capacity lower bounds are verified to be accurate predictors of the system performance by simulations, and the proposed OPA outperforms equal power allocation (EPA). It is also found that in the asymptotic regime, when MRC/MRT is used at the relay and the link end-to-end large-scale fading factors among all pairs are equal, the optimal power allocated to a user is inverse to the large-scale fading factor of the channel from the user to the relay, while OPA approaches EPA when ZFR/ZFT is adopted. The work on the MSE-based precoding design for MIMO downlinks investigates a HetNet system consisting of a macro tier overlaid with a second tier of SCs. First, a new sum-MSE of all users based minimization problem is proposed aiming to design a set of macro cell (MC) and SC transmit precoding matrices or vectors. To solve it, two different algorithms are presented. One is via a relaxed-constraints based alternating optimization (RAO) realized by efficient alternating optimization and relaxing non-convex constraints to convex ones. The other is via an unconstrained alternating optimization with normalization (UAON) implemented by introducing the constraints into the iterations with the normalization operation. Second, a separate MSE minimization based two-level precoder is proposed by considering the signal and interference terms corresponding to the macro tier and the individual SCs separately. Furthermore, robust precoders are designed correspondingly with estimated imperfect channel. Simulation results show that the sum-MSE based RAO algorithm provides the best MSE performance among the proposed schemes under a number of system configurations. When the number of antennas at the macro-BS is sufficiently large relative to the number of MUEs, the MSE of the separate MSE-based precoding is found to approach those of RAO and UAON. Together, this thesis provides a suite of three new precoding techniques that is expected to meet the need in a broad range of HetNet environments with balance between performance and complexity. The work on a large-scale HetNet studies the performance for MIMO downlink systems where both macro BS and SC nodes are equipped with large-scale antenna arrays. Suppose that the large-scale antenna arrays at both macro BS and SC nodes employ MRT or ZFT precoding, and transmit data streams to the served users simultaneously. A new pilot reuse pattern among small cells is proposed for channel estimation. Taking into account imperfect CSI, lower capacity bounds for MRT and ZFT are derived, respectively, in closed-form expressions involving only statistical CSI. Then asymptotic analyses for massive arrays are presented, from which we obtain the optimal antenna number ratio between BS and SCs under specific power scaling laws. Subsequently, two user scheduling algorithms, that is, greedy scheduling algorithm and asymptotical scheduling algorithm (ASA), are proposed based on the derived capacity lower bounds and asymptotic analyses, respectively. ASA is demonstrated to be a near optimal user scheduling scheme in the asymptotic regime and has low complexity. Finally, the derived closed-form achievable rate expressions are verified to be accurate predictors of the system performance by Monte-Carlo simulations. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the asymptotic analysis and the proposed user scheduling schemes. / Graduate / 0544 / 0984

"Fading is one of the most fundamental impairments to wireless communications. The standard approach to combating fading is by adding redundancy - or diversity - to help increase coverage and transmission speed. Motivated by the results in multiple-input multiple-output technologies, which are usually used at base stations or access points, cooperation commutation has been proposed to improve the performance of wireless networks which consist of low-cost single antenna devices. While the majority of the research in cooperative communication focuses on flat fading for its simplicity and easy analysis, in practice the underlying channels in broadband wireless communication systems such as cellular systems (UMTS/LTE) are more likely to exhibit frequency selective fading. In this dissertation, we consider a frequency selective fading channel model and explore distributed diversity techniques in broadband wireless relay networks, with consideration to practical issues such as channel estimation and complexity-performance tradeoffs. We first study a system model with one source, one destination and multiple decode-and-forward (DF) relays which share a single channel orthogonal to the source. We derive the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) for several relaying strategies: best relay selection, random relay selection, and the case when all decoding relays participate. The best relay selection method selects the relay in the decoding set with the largest sum-squared relay-to-destination channel coefficients. This scheme can achieve the optimal DMT of the system at the expense of higher complexity, compared to the other two relaying strategies which do not always exploit the spatial diversity offered by the relays. Different from flat fading, we find special cases when the three relaying strategies have the same DMT. We further present a transceiver design and prove it can achieve the optimal DMT asymptotically. Monte Carlo simulations are presented to corroborate the theoretical analysis. We provide a detailed performance comparison of the three relaying strategies in channels encountered in practice. The work has been extended to systems with multiple amplify-and-forward relays. We propose two relay selection schemes with maximum likelihood sequential estimator and linear zero- forcing equalization at the destination respectively and both schemes can asymptotically achieve the optimal DMT. We next extend the results in the two-hop network, as previously studied, to multi-hop networks. In particular, we consider the routing problem in clustered multi-hop DF relay networks since clustered multi-hop wireless networks have attracted significant attention for their robustness to fading, hierarchical structure, and ability to exploit the broadcast nature of the wireless channel. We propose an opportunistic routing (or relay selection) algorithm for such networks. In contrast to the majority of existing approaches to routing in clustered networks, our algorithm only requires channel state information in the final hop, which is shown to be essential for reaping the diversity offered by the channel. In addition to exploiting the available diversity, our simple cross-layer algorithm has the flexibility to satisfy an additional routing objective such as maximization of network lifetime. We demonstrate through analysis and simulation that our proposed routing algorithm attains full diversity under certain conditions on the cluster sizes, and its diversity is equal to the diversity of more complicated approaches that require full channel state information. The final part of this dissertation considers channel estimation in relay networks. Channel state information is vital for exploiting diversity in cooperative networks. The existing literature on cooperative channel estimation assumes that block lengths are long and that channel estimation takes place within a fading block. However, if the forwarding delay needs to be reduced, short block lengths are preferred, and adaptive estimation through multiple blocks is required. In particular, we consider estimating the relay-to-destination channel in DF relay systems for which the presence of forwarded information is probabilistic since it is unknown whether the relay participates in the forwarding phase. A detector is used so that the update of the least mean square channel estimate is made only when the detector decides the presence of training data. We use the generalized likelihood ratio test and focus on the detector threshold for deciding whether the training sequence is present. We also propose a heuristic objective function which leads to a proper threshold to improve the convergence speed and reduce the estimation error. Extensive numerical results show the superior performance of using this threshold as opposed to fixed thresholds."

Different from multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, a major challenge for cooperative communications is the problem of synchronization because multiple transmissions undertaken by cooperative systems may not be synchronized in time and/or frequency. With synchronization errors, conventional space-time (ST) codes may not be directly applicable any longer. To tackle the problem of timing synchronization, space-frequency (SF) coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) cooperative systems have recently been proposed to achieve asynchronous diversity due to their insensitivity to timing errors. However, these systems still need to face the problem of multiple carrier frequency offsets (CFOs). Since each node in a cooperative system is equipped with its own oscillator, the received signals from different relay nodes may have multiple CFOs which cannot be compensated simultaneously at the destination node. For SF coded OFDM cooperative systems, this problem becomes more complicated because CFOs can lead to inter-carrier interference (ICI). To address this challenge, in this thesis we consider the signal detection problem in cooperative systems having multiple CFOs. / First, we investigate the effect of multiple CFOs on two classic ST codes. They are delay diversity and the Alamouti code. For delay diversity, we find that both its achieved diversity order and diversity product are not decreased by multiple CFOs arising from maximum-likelihood (ML) detection. For the Alamouti code, the diversity product may be decreased by multiple CFOs. In the worst case situation, full diversity order 2 cannot be achieved. / For deeper insights into the SF coded communication system with multiple CFOs, we then carry out diversity analysis. By treating the CFOs as part of the SF codeword matrix, we show that if all the absolute values of normalized CFOs are less than 0.5, then the full diversity order for the SF codes are not affected by the multiple CFOs in the SF coded OFDM cooperative system. We further prove that this full diversity property can still be preserved if the zero forcing (ZF) method is used to equalize the multiple CFOs. This method, by some reasonable approximations, is actually equivalent to the MMSE-F detection method. To improve the robustness of the SF codes to multiple CFOs, we propose a novel permutation method. With this method, the achieved diversity order of SF codes remains the same even when the absolute values of normalized CFOs are equal to or greater than 0.5. To reduce computational complexity, we further propose two full diversity achievable detection methods, namely the ZF-ML-Zn and ZF-ML-PIC detection methods, which are suitable for the case when the ICI matrix is singular. / In summary, in this study, we demonstrate that with proper design, the SF coded OFDM approach can be made robust to both timing errors and CFOs in a cooperative communication system. / Since OFDM systems are robust to timing errors, we turn to an SF coded cooperative communication system with multiple CFOs, where the SF codes are rotational based and can achieve both full cooperative and full multipath diversity orders. We begin with the traditional way of ICI mitigation. To preserve the performance of the SF code, we suggest increasing the SINR of each subcarrier but not equalizing the SF precoding matrix. By exploiting the structure of the SF codes, we propose three signal detection methods to deal with the multiple CFOs problem in SF coded OFDM systems. They are the minimum mean-squared filtering (MMSE-F) method, the two-stage simple frequency shift Q taps (FS-Q-T) method, and the multiple fast Fourier transform (M-FFT) method, all of which offer different tradeoffs between performance and computational complexity. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed detection methods perform well as long as the CFOs between nodes are small. / Tian, Feng. / Adviser: Ching Pak-Chung. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 71-01, Section: B, page: 0559. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-160). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

The development of magnetic technologies employing microfabricated magnetic structures for the production of integrated electronic components is a driving topic in the electronic industry. Despite the large amount of work reported in the literature towards the production of magnetic devices that can be integrated into conventional silicon technology, the published research has only achieved moderate success. The research presented in this thesis was conducted with the aim to progress towards the production of a magnetic MEMS relay based on electro-deposited NiFe that combines magnetic and electrostatic actuation and that can be integrated in a standard IC processing chain. This work includes a comprehensive design study for the proposed MEMS device and presents the development of the manufacturing processes required for its fabrication. As the theoretical performance of the device is found to be crucially reliant on the mechanical and magnetic properties of the microformed structures, a series of novel test methodologies has been devised and implemented with the aim of acquiring knowledge on the behaviour of the NiFe films. Novel mechanical test routines employing microfabricated test structures are presented and applied to build a systematic and robust system for the characterisation of the electrodeposited films. The quantitative mapping of residual stress at the wafer level using microfabricated test structures has been demonstrated for the first time and applied to optimise processes and tools. A complete fabrication process flow for manufacturing the designed magnetic MEMS switch has been proposed and the fabrication of the actuated section of the switch has been demonstrated, comprising all the functional electric and magnetic components. The fabricated magnetic devices have been tested to monitor their response to an external magnetic force and prove their viability for use in MEMS actuators. Additional work was finally conducted towards the development of a reliable and robust process aimed at increasing the device yield and thus facilitating the eventual commercialisation of magnetic MEMS switches.

The ubiquitylation cascade regulates multiple cellular functions and is involved in numerous diseases. The distinct transfer cascade, involving E1-E2-E3 enzymes, serves as a promising target for drug development. However, E3 ligases (E3s) represent an important class of enzymes yet there are currently no effective tools for profiling their activity. Herein, a new class of E3 activity-based probe (ABP) is presented which is built by re-engineering ubiquitin (Ub)-charged E2 conjugating enzymes. The utility of these probes has been demonstrated by the rapid dissection of the activation determinants of the RING-Between-RING E3 (RBR) E3, Parkin. Furthermore, biotin-E3 ABPs allow us to systematically discover and dissect the E3 activities of a broad spectrum of E3s that are associated with different diseases. By interfacing the ABPs with mass spectrometry, we establish an activity based protein profiling (ABPP) system and apply it to uncover a new class of E3. We show that MYCBP2 is an E3 ligase with a novel mechanism of action that ubiquitylates threonine residues. MYCBP2 contains a RING domain, that recruits the ubiquitin-loaded E2, and a novel Zn-binding fold that contains two catalytic cysteine residues which relay the Ub to substrate via two thioester intermediates (RING-Cys-Relay, RCR). This discovery demonstrates the power and potential of our E3 activity based protein profiling (ABPP) system.

IEEE 802.16標準中，有所謂Multi-hop Relay (MR)的概念，其中存在很多問題需要解決，所以在IEEE 802.16j標準中提出中繼傳輸站(Relay Station，RS)來延伸原來的涵蓋範圍及解決遮蔽效應造成訊號衰弱的問題。但在MR中由於多了中繼傳輸站來傳遞資料，網路拓樸變得相對複雜，資料從發送端到接收端的路徑變長了，在資料大量傳輸的狀況下，會因干擾及壅塞的問題變得嚴重而導致整個網路效能低落。本研究提出一套具干擾感知的排程方法，可有效提升網路效能。本方法分為三個部分，首先在允入控制階段盡可能選取高調變的連線，其次利用空間距離的分群概念提出TZG (Time Zone Grouping)方法，以逆時針的方式區分不同RS傳輸的時區，最後以調整分區內non-real time服務的頻寬需求，減少RS在access zone頻寬的浪費。我們利用NS2進行模擬實驗分析，驗證所提出的方法在利用分區傳送避免碰撞下，UGS的delay time相較於未分群的方法可有效改善約33%，ertPS可改善約29%，rtPS可改善約20%，而系統throughout相較於其他僅選擇最大access link的頻寬需求作為access zone大小的方法最多可提升約15.5%的效能。 / As we know, there is Multi-hop Relay concept in standard of IEEE 802.16. But there are still many problems unsolved in WiMAX, so IEEE 802.16j propose a new station type, relay station, to extend signal coverage and improve the signal intensity which affected by shadow fading. Since there are many relay stations in the coverage of base station, data transmission and path routing become more complexity. At the same time, the transmissions become close, more interference and network congestion will decrease the efficiency of data transmission in the network. This research proposes a frame scheduling with interference aware, which consist of three parts. First, we make the better modulation of links get higher priority; Second, we use concept of distance to proposed Time Zone grouping (TZG), which set RS into different group in counterclockwise way to reduce interference; Third, adjusting bandwidth allocation in access zone to decrease bandwidth waste in access zone. We implement our algorithm in NS2 simulator, the result shows that our method can improve delay of UGS about 33%, ertPS about 20%, rtPS about 20% than RTDS(Real time Distributed Scheduling ), and the system throughput can grow about 15.5% than the mechanism that just choose maximum requirement in access link of all BS/RS as access zone.

A significant challenge for fourth generation cellular systems is the reliable delivery of high speed (up to 1 gigabit per second) data to mobile or nomadic users throughout a cluttered urban environment. The wireless channel is a difficult channel over which to achieve high rate reliable communications. The wireless channel suffers many impairments such as small-scale multipath fading, shadowing, high path loss, co-channel interference, and Doppler shift due to mobility of the terminals and mobility in the propagation environment. Since radio spectrum is a scarce resource it is necessary to build cellular networks with high spectral efficiency. Two promising methods to solve this problem are multihop (MH) relaying and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna techniques. The most difficult mobile users to serve reliably are those close to cell edges and those shadowed by large objects such as buildings. With MH relaying, a number of simple and inexpensive wireless relays are deployed throughout the cell to relay transmissions around obstacles and to reduce the path loss to distant mobile users. Also, MH relaying enables the deployment of small subcells throughout the cell, increasing the system's area averaged spectral efficiency. Various MIMO techniques can be used in scattering channels to increase capacity and reliability of data links in a wireless network. MH relaying and MIMO are key inclusions in emerging cellular standards such as IEEE 802.16 and LTE-Advanced, so it is necessary to study how these may be used jointly in a cellular environment. We look at various techniques available in MH relaying and MIMO, and assess the benefits and difficulties of these techniques when used in cellular systems. We put together a realistic cellular system model, with typical cellular topologies and well-accepted propagation models, and assess the performance of a multihop MIMO system. We find that there are tradeoffs in using these techniques jointly since they provide gains by somewhat conflicting methods. MH relaying lowers path loss and mitigates scattering in the channel, while MIMO benefits from significant scattering. As a result, it is necessary to understand how to design a MH-MIMO network carefully in order to maximize the net benefit. / Communications

There is an increasing demand to support high data rate multimedia applications over the current day wireless networks which are highly prone to errors. Relay channels, by virtue of their spatial diversity, play a vital role in meeting this demand without much change to the current day systems. A compress-forward relaying scheme is one of the exciting prospects in this regard owing to its ability to always outperform direct transmission. With regards to video transmission, there is a serious need to ensure higher protection for the source bits that are more important and sensitive. The objective of this thesis is to develop a practical scheme for transmitting video data over a relay channel using a compress-forward relaying scheme and compare it to direct and multi-hop transmissions. We also develop a novel scheme whereby the relay channel can be used as a means to provide the required unequal error protection among the MPEG-2 bit stream. The area of compress-forward (CF) relaying has not been developed much to date, with most of the research directed towards the decode-forward scheme. The fact that compress-forward relaying always ensures better results than direct transmission is an added advantage. This has motivated us to employ CF relaying in our implementation. Video transmission and streaming applications are being increasingly sought after in the current generation wireless systems. The fact that video applications are bandwidth demanding and error prone, and the wireless systems are band-limited and unreliable, makes this a challenging task. CF relaying, by virtue of their path diversity, can be considered to be a new means for video transmission. To exploit the above advantages, we propose an implementation for video transmission over relay channels using a CF relaying scheme. Practical gains in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) have been observed for our implementation compared to the simple binary-input additive white Gaussian noise (BIAWGN) and two-hop transmission scenarios.

Digital microprocessor based relays are currently being utilized for safe, reliable and efficient operation of power systems. The overcurrent protection relay is the most extensively used component to safeguard power systems from the detrimental effects of faults. Wrong settings in overcurrent relay parameters can lead to false tripping or even bypassing fault conditions which can lead to a catastrophe. Therefore it is important to validate the settings of power protection equipment and to confirm its performance when subject to different fault conditions. This paper presents the modeling of an overcurrent relay in SimPowerSystems (\textsc {matlab}/Simulink). The overcurrent relay has the features of instantaneous, time definite and inverse  definite minimum time (IDMT) characteristics. A power system is modeled in SimPowerSystems and this overcurrent relay model is incorporated in the test case. The overall model is then simulated in real-time using Opal-RT's eMEGAsim real-time simulator to analyze the relay's performance when subjected to faults and with different characteristic settings in the relay model. Finally Hardware-in-the-Loop validation of the model is done by using the overcurrent protection feature in Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories Relay SEL-487E. The event reports generated by the SEL relays during Hardware-in-the-Loop testing are compared with the results obtained from the standalone testing and software model to validate the model. / <p>QC 20130215</p>

Smart phones and tablet computers have greatly boosted the demand for services via wireless access points, keeping constant pressure on the network providers to deliver vast amounts of data over the wireless infrastructure. To enlarge coverage and enhance throughput, relaying has been adopted in the new generation of wireless communication systems, such as in the Long-Term Evolution Advanced standard,  and will continue to play an important role in the next generation wireless infrastructure. Depending on functionality, relaying can be characterizing into three main categories: amplify-and-forward (AF), compression-and-forward (CF), and decode-and-forward (DF).  In this thesis, we investigate different cooperative strategies in wireless networks when relaying is in use. We first investigate  the capacity outer and inner bounds for a wireless multicast relay network where two sources, connected by error-free backhaul, multicast to two destinations with the help of a full-duplex relay node.  For high-rate backhaul scenarios, we find the exact cut-set bound of the capacity region by extending the proof of the converse for the Gaussian relay channel. For low-rate backhaul scenarios, we present two genie-aided outer bounds by extending the previous proof and introducing two lemmas on conditional (co-)variance. Our inner bounds are derived from various cooperative strategies by combining DF/CF/AF relaying with network coding schemes. We also extend the noisy network coding scheme and the short-message noisy network coding approach to correlated sources. For low-rate backhaul, we propose a new coding scheme, partial-decode-and-forward based linear network coding. We derive the achievable rate regions  for these schemes and measure the performance in term of achievable rates over Gaussian channels. By numerical investigation we observe significant gains over benchmark schemes and demonstrate that the gap between upper and lower bounds is in general not large. We also show that for high-rate backhaul, the cut-set bound can be achieved  when the signal-to-noise ratios lie in the sphere defined by the source-relay and relay-destination channel gains. For wireless networks with independent noise, we propose a simple framework to get capacity outer and inner bounds based on the ``one-shot'' bounding models. We first extend the models for two-user broadcast channels to many-user scenarios and then establish the gap between upper and lower bounding models. For networks with coupled links, we propose  a channel decoupling method which can decompose the network into overlapping multiple-access channels and broadcast channels.  We then apply the one-shot models and create an upper bounding network with only  bit-pipe connections. When developing the lower bounding network, we propose a  two-step update of these models for each coupled broadcast and multiple-access channels. We demonstrate by some examples that the resulting upper bound is in general very good and the gap between the upper and lower bounds is usually not large. For relay-aided downlink scenarios, we propose a cooperation scheme by cancelling interference at the transmitter. It is indeed a symbol-by-symbol approach to one-dimension dirty paper coding (DPC). For finite-alphabet signaling and interference, we derive the optimal (in terms of maximum mutual information) modulator under a given power constraint. A sub-optimal modulator is also proposed by formulating an optimization problem that maximizes the minimum distance of the signal constellation, and this non-convex optimization problem is approximately solved by semi-definite relaxation.  Bit-level simulation shows that the optimal and sub-optimal modulators can achieve significant gains over the Tomlinson-Harashima precoder (THP) benchmark and over non-DPC reference schemes, especially when the power of the interference is larger than the power of the noise. / <p>QC 20121015</p>