New technologies such as pervasive computing, ambient environment, and communication avid applications such as multimedia streaming are expected to impact the way people live and communicate in the wireless networks of the future. The introduction of these new technologies and applications is, however, a challenging task in wireless networks because of their high bandwidth requirements and Quality of Service (QoS) demands. A significant recent advance in wireless communication technology, known as Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) provides unprecedented increase in link capacity, link reliability and network capacity. The main features of MIMO communication are spatial multiplexing, point-to-multipoint and multipoint-to-point transmission as well as interference suppression in contrast to the conventional single antenna (Single-In Single-Output, SISO) networks. In this thesis, we investigate the problem of scheduling flows for fair stream allocation (or, stream scheduling) in ad hoc networks utilizing MIMO antenna technology. Our main contributions include: i) the concept of stream allocation to flowsbased on their traffic demands or class, ii) stream allocation to flows in the network utilizing single user or multiuser MIMO communication, iii) achieving the proportional fairness of the stream allocation in the minimum possible schedule length, and iv)performance comparison of the stream scheduling in the network for single user and multiuser communication and the tradeoff involved therein. We first formulate demand based fair stream allocation as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem whose solution is a schedule that is guaranteed to be contention-free. We then solve this ILP in conjunction with binary search to find a minimum length contention-free schedule that achieves the fairness goals. Performance comparison results show the benefit of multiuser MIMO links over single user links which is predominant at higher traffic workloads in the network. We also implement a greedy heuristic for stream scheduling and compare its performance with the ILP-based algorithm in terms of the fairness goals achieved in a given schedule length. OPNET-based stochastic simulation confirms the benefits of MIMO-based stream scheduling over single antenna links, as shown by our theoretical analysis.

The study of the spatial aspects of multipath in wireless communications environments is an increasingly important addition to the study of the temporal aspects in the search for ways to increase the utilization of the available wireless channel capacity. Traditionally, multipath has been viewed as an encumbrance in wireless communications, two of the major impairments being signal fading and intersymbol interference. However, recently the potential advantages of the diversity offered by multipath rich environments in multiuser communications have been recognised. Space time coding, for example, is a recent technique which relies on a rich scattering environment to create many practically uncorrelated signal transmission channels. Most often, statistical models have been used to describe the multipath environments in such applications. This approach has met with reasonable success but is limited when the statistical nature of a field is not easily determined or is not readily described by a known distribution.¶ Our primary aim in this thesis is to probe further into the nature of multipath environments in order to gain a greater understanding of their characteristics and diversity potential. We highlight the shortcomings of beamforming in a multipath multiuser access environment. We show that the ability of a beamformer to resolve two or more signals in angle directly limits its achievable capacity.¶ We test the probity of multipath as a source of spatial diversity, the limiting case of which is co-located users. We introduce the concept of separability to define the fundamental limits of a receiver to extract the signal of a desired user from interfering users’ signals and noise. We consider the separability performances of the minimum mean square error (MMSE), decorrelating (DEC) and matched filter (MF) detectors as we bring the positions of a desired and an interfering user closer together. We show that both the MMSE and DEC detectors are able to achieve acceptable levels of separability with the users as close as λ/10.¶ In seeking a better understanding of the nature of multipath fields themselves, we take two approaches. In the first we take a path oriented approach. The effects on the variation of the field power of the relative values of parameters such as amplitude and propagation direction are considered for a two path field. The results are applied to a theoretical analysis of the behaviour of linear detectors in multipath fields. This approach is insightful for fields with small numbers of multipaths, but quickly becomes mathematically complex.¶ In a more general approach, we take a field oriented view, seeking to quantify the complexity of arbitrary fields. We find that a multipath field has an intrinsic dimensionality of (πe)R/λ≈8.54R/λ, for a field in a two dimensional circular region, increasing only linearly with the radius R of the region. This result implies that there is no such thing as an arbitrarily complicated multipath field. That is, a field generated by any number of nearfield and farfield, specular and diffuse multipath reflections is no more complicated than a field generated by a limited number of plane waves. As such, there are limits on how rich multipath can be. This result has significant implications including means: i) to determine a parsimonious parameterization for arbitrary multipath fields and ii) of synthesizing arbitrary multipath fields with arbitrarily located nearfield or farfield, spatially discrete or continuous sources. The theoretical results are corroborated by examples of multipath field analysis and synthesis.

This dissertation considers several coding techniques based on Reed-Solomon (RS) and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. These two prominent families of error-correcting codes have attracted a great amount of interest from both theorists and practitioners and have been applied in many communication scenarios. In particular, data storage systems have greatly benefited from these codes in improving the reliability of the storage media. The first part of this dissertation presents a unified framework based on rate-distortion (RD) theory to analyze and optimize multiple decoding trials of RS codes. Finding the best set of candidate decoding patterns is shown to be equivalent to a covering problem which can be solved asymptotically by RD theory. The proposed approach helps understand the asymptotic performance-versus-complexity trade-off of these multiple-attempt decoding algorithms and can be applied to a wide range of decoders and error models. In the second part, we consider spatially-coupled (SC) codes, or terminated LDPC convolutional codes, over intersymbol-interference (ISI) channels under joint iterative decoding. We empirically observe the phenomenon of threshold saturation whereby the belief-propagation (BP) threshold of the SC ensemble is improved to the maximum a posteriori (MAP) threshold of the underlying ensemble. More specifically, we derive a generalized extrinsic information transfer (GEXIT) curve for the joint decoder that naturally obeys the area theorem and estimate the MAP and BP thresholds. We also conjecture that SC codes due to threshold saturation can universally approach the symmetric information rate of ISI channels. In the third part, a similar analysis is used to analyze the MAP thresholds of LDPC codes for several multiuser systems, namely a noisy Slepian-Wolf problem and a multiple access channel with erasures. We provide rigorous analysis and derive upper bounds on the MAP thresholds which are shown to be tight in some cases. This analysis is a first step towards proving threshold saturation for these systems which would imply SC codes with joint BP decoding can universally approach the entire capacity region of the corresponding systems.

本論文は、多端子通信路に対するマルチユーザ符号化および復号の研究成果をまとめたものである。多重接続加算通信路による情報伝送において、複数ユーザの稼働状態を識別するための誤り訂正可能なシグネチャ符号の構成を論ず,全伝送率の高いシグネチャ符号の一般的な構成法を解明する.双方向中継通信路では、2ユーザターボ符号に対する復号の演算量を低減させる復号法を提案する。加法性白色ガウス雑音環境下では復号性能を劣化することなく、レイリーフェージング環境下では僅かな劣化にとどめながら、復号の演算量を約半分程度に低減することができる. / Coding and decoding for multiuser communication systems are investigated. For MAAC, we propose a coding scheme of (k + 1)-ary error-correcting signature codes. We give binary and non-binary signature codes. They are the best error-correcting signature codes for MAAC, in the sense that they have highest sum rates known. For TWRC, we propose a low-complexity two-user turbo decoding scheme when turbo codes are applied in two users. The approximate decoding algorithm preserves low decoding complexity over the Gaussian TWRC, without much performance degradation. / 博士(工学) / Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering / 同志社大学 / Doshisha University