There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Coding strategies that exploit node cooperation are developed for relay networks. Two basic schemes are studied: the relays decode-and-forward the source message to the destination, or they compress-and-forward their channel outputs to the destination. The decode-and-forward scheme is a variant of multihopping, but in addition to having the relays successively decode the message, the transmitters cooperate and each receiver uses several or all of its past channel output blocks to decode. For the compress-and-forward scheme, the relays take advantage of the statistical dependence between their channel outputs and the destination's channel output. The strategies are applied to wireless channels, and it is shown that decode-and-forward achieves the ergodic capacity with phase fading if phase information is available only locally, and if the relays are near the source node. The ergodic capacity coincides with the rate of a distributed antenna array with full cooperation even though the transmitting antennas are not colocated. The capacity results generalize broadly, including to multiantenna transmission with Rayleigh fading, single-bounce fading, certain quasi-static fading problems, cases where partial channel knowledge is available at the transmitters, and cases where local user cooperation is permitted. The results further extend to multisource and multidestination networks such as multiaccess and broadcast relay channels.

Cooperative strategies and capacity theorems for relay networks

This comprehensive treatment of network information theory and its applications provides the first unified coverage of both classical and recent results. With an approach that balances the introduction of new models and new coding techniques, readers are guided through Shannon's point-to-point information theory, single-hop networks, multihop networks, and extensions to distributed computing, secrecy, wireless communication, and networking. Elementary mathematical tools and techniques are used throughout, requiring only basic knowledge of probability, whilst unified proofs of coding theorems are based on a few simple lemmas, making the text accessible to newcomers. Key topics covered include successive cancellation and superposition coding, MIMO wireless communication, network coding, and cooperative relaying. Also covered are feedback and interactive communication, capacity approximations and scaling laws, and asynchronous and random access channels. This book is ideal for use in the classroom, for self-study, and as a reference for researchers and engineers in industry and academia.

Network Information Theory

Information Theory and Reliable Communication

Wireless networks are fundamentally limited by the intensity of the received signals and by their interference. Since both of these quantities depend on the spatial location of the nodes, mathematical techniques have been developed in the last decade to provide communication-theoretic results accounting for the networks geometrical configuration. Often, the location of the nodes in the network can be modeled as random, following for example a Poisson point process. In this case, different techniques based on stochastic geometry and the theory of random geometric graphs -including point process theory, percolation theory, and probabilistic combinatorics-have led to results on the connectivity, the capacity, the outage probability, and other fundamental limits of wireless networks. This tutorial article surveys some of these techniques, discusses their application to model wireless networks, and presents some of the main results that have appeared in the literature. It also serves as an introduction to the field for the other papers in this special issue.

/pdf/stochastic-geometry-and-random-graphs-for-the-analysis-and-1e671n4af3.pdf

Stochastic geometry and random graphs for the analysis and design of wireless networks

How much information can be carried over a wireless network with a multiplicity of nodes, and how should the nodes cooperate to transfer information? To study these questions, we formulate a model of wireless networks that particularly takes into account the distances between nodes, and the resulting attenuation of radio signals, and study a performance measure that weights information by the distance over which it is transported. Consider a network with the following features. I) n nodes located on a plane, with minimum separation distance /spl rho//sub min/>0. II) A simplistic model of signal attenuation e/sup -/spl gamma//spl rho////spl rho//sup /spl delta// over a distance /spl rho/, where /spl gamma//spl ges/0 is the absorption constant (usually positive, unless over a vacuum), and /spl delta/>0 is the path loss exponent. III) All receptions subject to additive Gaussian noise of variance /spl sigma//sup 2/. The performance measure we mainly, but not exclusively, study is the transport capacity C/sub T/:=sup/spl Sigma/on/sub /spl lscr/=1//sup m/R/sub /spl lscr///spl middot//spl rho//sub /spl lscr//, where the supremum is taken over m, and vectors (R/sub 1/,R/sub 2/,...,R/sub m/) of feasible rates for m source-destination pairs, and /spl rho//sub /spl lscr// is the distance between the /spl lscr/th source and its destination. It is the supremum distance-weighted sum of rates that the wireless network can deliver. We show that there is a dichotomy between the cases of relatively high and relatively low attenuation. When /spl gamma/>0 or /spl delta/>3, the relatively high attenuation case, the transport capacity is bounded by a constant multiple of the sum of the transmit powers of the nodes in the network. However, when /spl gamma/=0 and /spl delta/<3/2, the low-attenuation case, we show that there exist networks that can provide unbounded transport capacity for fixed total power, yielding zero energy priced communication. Examples show that nodes can profitably cooperate over large distances using coherence and multiuser estimation when the attenuation is low. These results are established by developing a coding scheme and an achievable rate for Gaussian multiple-relay channels, a result that may be of interest in its own right.

http://cesg.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ps_files/net_inf_theory.pdf

A network information theory for wireless communication: scaling laws and optimal operation

For the multiple-level relay channel, an achievable rate formula, and a simple coding scheme to achieve it, are presented. Generally, higher rates can be achieved with this coding scheme in the multiple-level relay case than previously known. For a class of degraded channels, this achievable rate is shown to be the exact capacity. An application of the coding scheme to the allcast problem is also discussed.

/pdf/an-achievable-rate-for-the-multiple-level-relay-channel-pltomvoqob.pdf

An achievable rate for the multiple-level relay channel

We consider networks consisting of nodes with radios, and without any wired infrastructure, thus necessitating all communication to take place only over the shared wireless medium. The main focus of this paper is on the effect of fading in such wireless networks. We examine the attenuation regime where either the medium is absorptive, a situation which generally prevails, or the path loss exponent is greater than 3. We study the transport capacity, defined as the supremum over the set of feasible rate vectors of the distance weighted sum of rates. We consider two assumption sets. Under the first assumption set, which essentially requires only a mild time average type of bound on the fading process, we show that the transport capacity can grow no faster than O(n), where n denotes the number of nodes, even when the channel state information (CSI) is available noncausally at both the transmitters and the receivers. This assumption includes common models of stationary ergodic channels; constant, frequency-selective channels; flat, rapidly varying channels; and flat slowly varying channels. In the second assumption set, which essentially features an independence, time average of expectation, and nonzeroness condition on the fading process, we constructively show how to achieve transport capacity of /spl Omega/(n) even when the CSI is unknown to both the transmitters and the receivers, provided that every node has an appropriately nearby node. This assumption set includes common models of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) channels; constant, flat channels; and constant, frequency-selective channels. The transport capacity is achieved by nodes communicating only with neighbors, and using only point-to-point coding. The thrust of these results is that the multihop strategy, toward which much protocol development activity is currently targeted, is appropriate for fading environments. The low attenuation regime is open.

/pdf/the-transport-capacity-of-wireless-networks-over-fading-4vlwf40ajf.pdf

The transport capacity of wireless networks over fading channels

Feedback is used primarily for reducing the effects of the plant uncertainty on the performance of control systems, and as such understanding the following questions is of fundamental importance: How much uncertainty can be dealt with by feedback? What are the limitations of feedback? How does the feedback performance depend quantitatively on the system uncertainty? How can the capability of feedback be enhanced if a priori information about the system structure is available? As a starting point toward answering these questions, a typical class of first-order discrete-time dynamical control systems with both unknown nonlinear structure and unknown disturbances is selected for our investigation, and some concrete answers are obtained in the paper. In particular, we find that in the space of unknown nonlinear functions, the generalized Lipschitz norm is a suitable measure for characterizing the size of the structure uncertainty, and that the maximum uncertainty that can be dealt with by the feedback mechanism is described by a ball with radius 3/2+/spl radic/2 in this normed function space.

/pdf/how-much-uncertainty-can-be-dealt-with-by-feedback-317xvjch8h.pdf

How much uncertainty can be dealt with by feedback

With the technique of random binning, the idea of network coding is extended and applied to multiuser channel coding problems. Specially, a two-way relay channel and a three-way broadcast channel are considered in this paper, and the corresponding achievable rate regions are determined.

/pdf/network-coding-and-random-binning-for-multi-user-channels-531i0zztay.pdf

Liang-Liang Xie

Papers

A network information theory for wireless communication: scaling laws and optimal operation

An achievable rate for the multiple-level relay channel

The transport capacity of wireless networks over fading channels

How much uncertainty can be dealt with by feedback

Network Coding and Random Binning for Multi-User Channels