Cooperative Communication in IEEE 802.11 based Wireless Networks

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "Cooperative Communication in IEEE 802.11 based Wireless Networks"

By

Mr. Eric Man-Kit Lo


Abstract

Cooperative communication in wireless network is a promising technique for 
current researches and future implementations. For the nature of broadcast in 
wireless network, the source signal transmitted via wireless medium can be 
overheard by the neighboring nodes. Cooperative communication exploits 
overheard information from the surrounding nodes to achieve higher throughput 
and reliability. Such technique can be used in different types of wireless 
networks, such as, infrastructured networks, ad-hoc networks, and etc.

In the past decade, if the users within a local area are interested in the same 
content from one source, they can only use some simple broadcast techniques to 
solve their need. However, the efficiency is poor especially for mutli-hop 
transmission. The cooperative communication technique is a promising method to 
improve the performance for this problem. We try to utilize it for content 
distribution problem in the IEEE 802.11 based network. A new hybrid 
broadcast-unicast transmission scheme is introduced to exploit spatial 
diversity by using cooperation. The simulation result shows that the scheme 
outperforms existing schemes in terms of network throughput and transmission 
delay.

Moreover, the simulations for wireless network often fail to capture the 
real-world radio signal propagation effects. We also build a cooperative 
testbed on GNU Radio and Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) which is 
one of popular open-source software-defined radio (SDR) platforms. The testbed 
is used to evaluate the real performance of single-relay cooperation and 
multi-relay cooperation without any simulation assumption. The results show 
that the cooperative communication technique has a significant improvement in 
terms of reliability and overall throughput.


Date:			Tuesday, 29 June 2010

Time:			4:00pm – 6:00pm

Venue:			Room 3501
 			Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Qian Zhang (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Gary Chan (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lin Gu


**** ALL are Welcome ****