Scheduling and Resource Management in Wireless Networks with Bidirectional Relaying Links

Abstract

In this thesis we study transmission scheduling and resource allocations for wireless networks with bidirectional relaying links (WNBRL). Each link has two end nodes, which communicate through a relay node that can use network coding (NC) to forward packets between them.

We first study an ad hoc WNBRL (Chapter 2), where a single frequency channel is shared by all the transmissions, and therefore co-channel interference is a main problem that requires a scheduling solution to carefully coordinate the transmitting nodes and control their transmission power. Power distributions and time slot allocations are jointly considered, and the objective is to maximize the system throughput. Both digital NC and analog NC are considered. An optimization problem is first formulated, followed by distributed scheduling schemes.

Next, we study a WNBRL with multiple frequency channels, where the emphasis is to jointly allocate frequency channels and time slots for the transmissions of individual nodes. Two objectives are considered, one is to maximize the long-term transmission throughput of the system (Chapter 3), and another is to provide proportional fairness of the average throughput among all the links in the system (Chapter 4). For each objective, both optimization formulation is provided and heuristic solutions are proposed.

We then consider a WNBRL that allows the relay nodes to opportunistically use NC and pure one-way relaying, and study the scheduling and resource allocation with an objective to maximize the total transmission throughput (Chapter 5). Both centralized and distributed topologies are considered. Optimum scheduling is solved, together with different heuristic solutions.