Resource allocation and performance metrics analysis in cooperative cellular networks

In wireless systems, transmitting large amounts of information with low energetic cost are two main issues that have never stopped drawing the attention of the scientific community during the past decade. Later, it has been shown that cooperative communication is an appealing technique that exploits spatial diversity in wireless channel. Therefore, this technique certainly promises a robust and reliable communications, higher quality-of-service (QoS) and makes the cooperation concept attractive for future cellular systems. Typically, the QoS requirements are the packet error rate, throughput and delay. These metrics are affected by the delay, where each erroneous packet is retransmitted several times according to Hybrid-Automatic Repeat-Request (HARQ) mechanism inducing a delay on the demanded QoS but a temporal diversity is created. Therefore, adopting jointly cooperative communications and HARQ mechanisms could be beneficial for designing cross-layer schemes. First, a new rate maximization strategy, under heterogeneous data rate constraints among users is proposed. We propose an algorithm that allocates the optimal power at the base station (BS) and relays, assigns subcarriers and selects relays. The achievable data rate is investigated as well as the average starvation rate in the network when the load, i.e. the number of active users in the network, is increasing. It showed a significant gain in terms of global capacity compared to literature. Second, in block fading channel, theoretical analyses of the packet error rate, delay and throughput efficiency in relayassisted HARQ networks are provided. In slow fading channels, the average delay of HARQ mechanisms w.r. t. the fading states is not relevant due to the non-ergodic process of the fading channel. The delay outage is hence invoked to deal with the slow fading channel and is defined as the probability that the average delay w.r. t. AWGN channel exceeds a predefined threshold. This criterion has never been studied in literature, although being of importance for delay sensitive applications in slow fading channels. Then, an analytical form of the delay outage probability is proposed which might be useful to avoid lengthy simulations. These analyses consider a finite packet length and a given modulation and coding scheme (MCS) which leads to study the performance of practical systems. Third, a theoretical analysis of the energy efficiency (bits/joule) in relay-assisted HARQ networks is provided. Based on this analysis, an energy minimization problem in multiuser relayassisted downlink cellular networks is investigated. Each user has an average delay constraint to be satisfied such that a total power constraint in the system is respected. The BS is assumed to have only knowledge about the average channel statistics but no instantaneous channel state information (CSI). Finally, an algorithm that jointly allocates the optimal power at BS, the relay stations and selects the optimal relay in order to satisfy the delay constrains of users is proposed. The simulations show the improvement in terms of energy consumption of relay-assisted techniques compared to nonaided transmission in delay-constrained systems. Hence, the work proposed in this thesis can give useful insights for engineering rules in the design of the next generation energyefficient cellular systems.