A cross-layer cooperation strategy for cellular networks.

Abstract

Cooperation is seen as a means to improve the signal in OFDMA wireless networks by overcoming the inter-cell interference. Such co-operation can be deployed in both the physical layer and the MAC layer. In this thesis, a cross-layer cooperation strategy is considered. Firstly, in the physical layer, a cooperative coding scheme with private information sharing is proposed based on dirty paper coding; this is analyzed in a scenario with two transmitters and two receivers. To implement the cooperation, a rate limited link is deployed at the transmitters’ side in order to share the information. A new achievable rate region is established in both strong interference regime and weak interference regime. Secondly, in the MAC layer, a graph-based dynamic coordinated clustering scheme is proposed. An interference weighted graph is constructed to assist dynamic coordinated clustering for inter-cell interference mitigation and to improve the cell-edge user performance. Only 2 bits are allowed for the signalling exchange between transmitters and this reduces the overhead of the approach. The system throughput and cell-edge throughput with different user distributions are used to evaluate the performance. Thirdly, a transmit antenna selection algorithm is presented to optimize system performance with the constraint of fairness. A graph is generated by using the channel condition between the transmit antennas and Mobile Stations. Based on the graph, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to choose the transmit antenna for each user in order to improve the system performance and guarantee the user fairness. Finally, combining the cooperative coding scheme and cooperative clustering scheme, a cross-layer cooperation scheme is presented. In the physical layer, the cooperation coding scheme mitigates the interference and increases the transmission rate; in the MAC layer, the cooperative clustering scheme provides efficient cooperative transmission. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively increase both the system throughput and cell-edge throughput.