Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Committee Chair

Daryl Reynolds.

Abstract

In the mid 1990's wireless researchers discovered that additional antennas located at the transmitter, receiver or both could help combat the unpredictable nature of the wireless channel. This field of research, known as MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output), became very active and has been thoroughly studied. Manufacturers have sought to incorporate these performance gains into their devices by including multiple transmit and receive antennas. However, as wireless devices such as mobile phones become smaller it becomes impractical to design a handset with multiple antennas.;Cooperative diversity is a technique that may be employed when device sizes are too small to incorporate a local antenna array. Using cooperative diversity, multiple wireless nodes cooperate to pass a message from a source to a destination. This leads to a virtual antenna array, allowing single-antenna devices to enjoy the benefits of a MIMO system. While cooperative diversity offers benefits, it motivates additional wireless nodes in the network. Even without cooperative diversity, our lives are increasingly dependent on a growing number of wireless devices. It's obvious that the density of wireless devices in daily use will increase, and that rise in popularity demands the most optimal use of node resources.;Unfortunately, it has been shown that as the density of wireless devices for a given area increases, in the limit, the capacity of the network goes to zero. Even with advances such as MIMO and cooperative diversity, it's obvious that a wireless-only future is impossible. For non-diminishing throughput, as wireless networks continue to grow in size, networks of the future will continue to incorporate additional modes of communication; wired, infrared, ultrasonic or other. In our work, we provide a strategy for harnessing these additional modes and optimizing across all the available modes of communication.;In this thesis, we present a protocol for wireless relay networks with an additional non- fading mode of communication available. As an example, we assume the presence of an additional wired channel in a relay network operating under the Laneman protocol, and we find analytical expressions for outage probability assuming communications over the wired and wireless channels are jointly optimized. We consider two cases: adding a channel between the source and a relay, and adding a channel between a relay and the destination. We show that a channel placed between the source and a relay separated by a poor wireless channel improves performance with few assumptions on the characteristics of the wire and over a wide range of wire channel transmit powers.

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