Special Issue on: Cooperative and Distributed Wireless Communications

Abstract

Recent advances in radio technology as well as in hardware and software design have resulted in new possibilities for future mobile communication networks. Among those, cooperative communications among the peer nodes of a cellular network could create much anticipated improvement in coverage and capacity of the cellular systems. Such cooperation would generate a distributed network topology where the abundant processing power and storage capacity of the nodes can be shared for carrying out complex tasks. Distributed wireless communications would also enable mobile computing within the mobile cloud. In this context, the 23rd Annual Symposium on Personal Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC 2012) served as a major international telecommunication forum for researchers and technologists to discuss original contributions and results in all fields of personal, indoor and mobile communication systems, including those related to the above topic of cooperative and distributed wireless communications. This special issue is based upon a selection of a very limited number of papers presented at IEEE PIMRC2012. Authors of the top 15 papers from the symposium were invited to submit an extended version of their papers to this special issue. Among those, we are happy to present you with four papers that have been accepted after a rigorous peer review process. The first paper, New Diversity Combining Receivers for Cooperative Multiplexing in Wireless Multiuser Relay Networks, by Chang Kyung Sung, Iain B. Collings, Maged Elkashlan, and Phee Lep Yeoh, proposes two new diversity combining receivers that support cooperative multiplexing in two-hop wireless multiuser relay networks. Cooperative multiplexing has the potential to double the achievable throughput by allowing the base station (BS) and the relay station (RS) to transmit to different users at the same time in the second time slot of the half time division duplexed (TDD) relay transmission. This throughput improvement comes at a cost of performance degradation due to interuser interference between the BS and the RS. To overcome this degradation, two new receivers for the relay-link users are proposed: (1) cooperative multiplexing optimum combining (CMOC) and (2) cooperative multiplexing selection combining (CMSC). Exact closed-form expressions are derived for the moment generation function, probability density function, and the cumulative distribution function of the output SINR, and new analytical expressions for the outage probability, symbol error rate, and achievable throughput are presented. The authors show that the symbol error rate performance and achievable throughput were notably improved relative to the standard single-channel receiver in the high interference regime. The second paper, Improving Cooperative Transmission Feasibility by Network Reconfiguration in Limited Backhaul Networks, by Martin Draxler, Thorsten Biermann, and Holger Karl, develops a mixed integer linear program (MILP) and a BS selection heuristic for Coordinated MultiPoint (CoMP) that takes into account both aspects of the wireless channels and the backhaul network status. This heuristic can also identify which bottlenecks in the A. Jamalipour (&) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: a.jamalipour@ieee.org