In this paper, the performance of the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) using fixed relay nodes and Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology was evaluated based on the correlated channel capacity of MIMO system and the number of sensor node served by the system. Moreover, the performance evaluation of the proposed algorithm, which is used to find the optimum distance to place the relay nodes from sink node, is done not only with AF relaying and spatial correlation effect, but also with Decode-and-Forward (DF) relaying scheme. The results show that the relay gain (a ratio between the maximum number of sensors satisfying the required channel capacity in 7-cell topology to the number of sensor nodes in sink cell) is affected strongly by the spatial correlation at high required channel capacity but little at low required channel capacity. The results also show that the relay gain can be improved remarkably by using the DF relaying scheme, and that the validity of the proposed algorithm holds for any relaying scheme, spatial correlation effect and different antenna size.

In this letter, we present a closed-form bound of the average bit error rate (BER) performance for the multi-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying systems with fixed gain in Rayleigh fading channel. The proposed bound is derived from the probability density function (PDF) of the overall multi-hop relay channel under the assumption of asymptotic high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at every intermediate relays. When intermediate relays actually operate at finite SNR, the proposed BER bound becomes looser as the SNR of the last hop increases. In order to reflect the effect of all the noise variances of relay links to the BER evaluation, a hop-indexed recursive BER approximation is proposed, in which the proposed bound of BER under asymptotic high SNR is used. The simulation results manifest that the proposed hop-indexed recursive BER approximation can not only guarantee accuracy regardless of the SNR of the last hop but also provide higher accuracy than the previous works.

A semi-distributed resource allocation scheme based on multihop equilibrium is proposed for OFDM-relay networks. This method aims to reduce the amount of feedback information from the relay nodes (RNs). Moreover, it utilizes radio resource by striking an efficient balance between the capacities of the BS-RN link and RN-MS link. Simulation results show that the proposed semi-distributed scheme achieves good performances in terms of throughputs and fraction of satisfied users.

Using the transient current switch circuit in parallel with the energizing switching contacts for timely control of breaking operation, the increase of contact voltage is suppressed at the last stage of the breaking of electric contacts. Breaking contact voltage Vc and current Ic of electromagnetic relays with Ag contacting electrodes were measured with 12.5-50 V and 0.1-20 A for two hinge springs (Spring constants; 2 N/mm and 0.2 N/mm). The current-decreasing process was clearly measured at the melting voltage Um. After Vc=Um, the breaking time of contact current did not depend on mechanical motion controlled by the two hinge springs and energizing power-supply voltage, but depended on the contact current. The residue of melt electrode was observed optically as a white fusion spot, with radius depending on the energizing current.

An electromagnetic relay (EMR) is widely used in automatic control field, and its dynamic characteristics play a significant role in EMR researches. According to structural features of the EMR, a dynamic characteristics testing and analyzing system (DCTAS) based on CCD digital image processing technique is designed and implemented. By using the DCTAS, the dynamic characteristics (include displacement, velocity, acceleration and force characteristics) of EMR whose operating time is less than 12 ms and armature travel is less than 10 mm can be investigated. The comparison of testing data obtained by the DCTAS and that of by a high speed camera indicates the validity of the system to EMR dynamic characteristics testing.

The cooperative characteristics of electromagnetic relay's attraction torque and reaction torque are the key property to ensure its reliability, and it is important to attain better cooperative characteristics by analyzing and optimizing relay's electromagnetic system and mechanical system. From the standpoint of changing reaction torque of mechanical system, in this paper, adjusted parameters (armature's maximum angular displacement αarm_max, initial return spring's force Finiti_return_spring, normally closed (NC) contacts' force FNC_contacts, contacts' gap δgap, and normally opened (NO) contacts' over travel δNO_contacts) were adopted as design variables, and objective function was provided for with the purpose of increasing breaking velocities of both NC contacts and NO contacts. Finally, genetic algorithm (GA) was used to attain optimization of the objective function. Accuracy of calculation for the relay's dynamic characteristics was verified by experiment.

In this letter, we present the impact of carrier frequency offset (CFO) in dual-hop orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with a fixed relay for frequency-selective fading channels. Approximate expressions of the average signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) for both downlink and uplink are obtained and validated by simulations. It is shown that dual-hop systems have slightly worse average SNR degradation than single-hop systems. We also show that the average SNR degradation due to the CFO varies according to the gap between average received SNRs for the first and the second hop.

Electrical life is an important parameter to estimate the reliability of a relay, and it is greatly affected by load current. In order to shorten the time of life test, load current stress accelerated life tests were carried out by using a life test system designed for relay in this paper. During the life test, many parameters such as the contact resistance, the closing time and the over-travel time of relay were measured for each operation to identify the failure modes. After the life test, the failure mechanisms under each current stress, which cause the same failure mode, were analyzed by investigating the variations of parameters and observing the morphology of contact surface. In addition, for the purpose of further studying the consistency of failure mechanisms between different current stress, a Weibull statistical analysis was adopted to estimate the shape parameter of Weibull distribution because the same shape parameter means the same failure mechanism. Finally, a statistical model for estimating the lifetime under load current stress was built. The research methods and conclusions mentioned in this paper are meaningful to perform the accelerated life tests for other types of relays.

Using the transient current switch circuit in parallel with the energizing contacts, the slow decay of the contact current due to thermal fusion of metal was observed just after the contact voltage exceeded the melting contact voltage Um. At that time, the contact voltage was higher than the boiling contact voltage Ub. These results contradict Holm's θ theory. A new melting model of breaking mechanical contact is proposed. The area surrounding a cluster of contacting a-spots melts, the melt metal diffuses, and the contact spot thermally shrinks. Including the metal phase transition from solid to liquid, the increase of contact resistance is introduced to the electric circuit analysis. The numerical analysis agrees qualitatively with measured V-I characteristics.

This letter proposes a type of mutually cooperative relaying (MCR) scheme based on a spatially coordinate-interleaved orthogonal design (SCID), in which two cooperative users are spatially multiplexed without bandwidth expansion. It provides not only diversity gain (with order of two) as in the existing MCR scheme, but also additional coding gain. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SCID scheme is useful for improving the uplink performance as long as one user can find another active user as a close neighbor that is simultaneously communicating with the same destination, e.g., a base station in the cellular network.

A critical problem after a natural/manmade disaster is to provide immediate post-disaster communication links between the disaster victims and some overlay networks. This paper proposes a novel scheme that uses the surviving Mobile handSets (MS) as sensing nodes to form an auto-configured Hierarchical Cognitive Radio Network (H-CRN). The implementation of this H-CRN is explained through detailed problem scenario statement and step-by-step implementation of automatic identification of emergency situation by the MS nodes. An overview of the cross-layer framework used by the MS nodes is also presented. This novel scheme is tested through some hypothesis along with probability calculations for successful identification of emergency situation, formation of ad hoc group and Emergency Beacon Message (EBM) transmission.

In this letter we investigate the relaying strategies for multihop transmission in wireless networks over Rayleigh fading channels. Theoretical analysis reveals that equally allocating power among all transmitters and placing relays equidistantly on the line between source and destination are optimal in terms of outage capacity. Then equal time duration for the transmission of each hop is also proved to be optimal. Furthermore, the optimum number of hops is also derived and shown to be inversely proportional to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Numerical simulations agree well with the reported theoretical results.

In this paper, we investigate the system performance of decode and forward based bi-directional relaying based on symbol-wise XOR operation. This technique gives more freedom in selecting the modulation and coding scheme at relay stations, and significantly relaxes the transmission bottleneck. However, the performance degradation occurs when the modulation orders of both links differ from each other. To mitigate such an impact, we exploit a repetition coding scheme in conjunction with a redundant modulation code scheme by overlapping MCS levels. To this end, a system level simulation proves that the proposed scheme achieves about 43% capacity gain over bit-wise XOR based bi-directional relaying and gives additional 10% gain over symbol-wise XOR based bi-directional relaying.

In this paper, we propose a novel scheme of cooperative relaying network based on data exchange between relays before forwarding their received data to destination. This inter-relay data exchange step is done during an additional middle-slot in order to enhance the transmit signals from relays to the destination under low transmit power condition. To reduce the propagation errors between relays as well as the required transmit power during this data exchange, only the relay possessing the highest SNR is engaged into exchanging data by forwarding its received signal to the other relays. As for the remaining non-selected relays, i.e. with low SNR, the transmitted signal is estimated by using both signals received separately at different time slots (i.e., 1st and 2nd slot) from source and the 'best' selected relay, respectively, emulating virtual antenna array where appropriate weights for the antenna array are developed. In addition, we investigate distributed transmit beamforming and maximum ratio combining at the relays and the destination, respectively, to combine coherently the received signals. At the relay optimal location and for low SNR condition, the proposed method has significant better outage behavior and average throughput than conventional methods using one or two time slots for transmission.

In this paper, we consider an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay network where a source node transmits information to a destination node through the cooperation of multiple relay nodes. It is shown in prior works that the outage behavior and average throughput of the selection AF (S-AF) scheme where only the best relay node is chosen to assist can outperform the conventional all-participate AF (AP-AF) scheme. Assuming multiple antennas at the destination node and single antennas at other nodes in this paper, we propose a relay selection scheme according to the criterion of maximizing receive signal to noise ratio (SNR), where a group of relays is chosen to assist in the transmission simultaneously in a manner similar to cyclic delay diversity (CDD). Compared with S-AF, the proposed scheme achieves better outage behavior and average throughput. It can be seen from simulation results that the performance improvement of symbol error rate (SER) is significant compared with S-AF.

In prior work, contact welding phenomena were observed in automotive relays during break of motor inrush current. The switching performance of the type of relay investigated could be correlated with the parameters: over-travel, coil suppression, and the break current. In the present work the author further explores the impact of both the contact material (silver tin oxide versus fine grain silver) and the contact surface topography (brand new and pre-aged contacts). He further assesses the robustness of the system "relay" with those parameters using the Taguchi methods for robust design. Furthermore, the robustness of two alternative automotive relay types will be discussed.

We introduce a novel power allocation scheme for decode-and-forward relaying system with partial channel state (CSI) information, i.e., the source knows full CSI of source-relay link but only statistical CSI of source-destination and relay-destination links. Our objective is to minimize the outage probability by jointly allocating the transmit power between the source and relays. To avoid exhaustive search, the MAOP scheme and the MMS scheme are proposed to approach the optimal allocation in the high and low signal-to-noise ratio regimes, respectively.

The integration of multihop relays with orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) cellular infrastructures can meet the growing demands for better coverage and higher throughput. Resource allocation in the OFDMA two-hop relay system is more complex than that in the conventional single-hop OFDMA system. With time division between transmissions from the base station (BS) and those from relay stations (RSs), fixed partitioning of the BS subframe and RS subframes can not adapt to various traffic demands. Moreover, single-hop scheduling algorithms can not be used directly in the two-hop system. Therefore, we propose a semi-distributed algorithm called ASP to adjust the length of every subframe adaptively, and suggest two ways to extend single-hop scheduling algorithms into multihop scenarios: link-based and end-to-end approaches. Simulation results indicate that the ASP algorithm increases system utilization and fairness. The max carrier-to-interference ratio (Max C/I) and proportional fairness (PF) scheduling algorithms extended using the end-to-end approach obtain higher throughput than those using the link-based approach, but at the expense of more overhead for information exchange between the BS and RSs. The resource allocation scheme using ASP and end-to-end PF scheduling achieves a tradeoff between system throughput maximization and fairness.

Recently, there has been growing interest in the design of wireless cooperative protocol to achieve higher diversity-multiplexing tradeoff among single antenna devices. We propose an automatic request for cooperation (ARC) scheme for wireless networks which can achieve higher order diversity by selecting the best relay. In this scheme, a source transmits a data packet towards a destination and a group of relays. The destination tries to decode the information from the source and if the detection is correct the process will stop. Otherwise, the destination transmits an ARC towards the relays. We utilize this ARC signal for selecting the best relay from the set of relays that have successfully decoded the source packet. The selected relay generates and transmits redundant information for the source packet. The destination combines the two packets received from the source and the best relay to improve the reliability of the packet. We analyze the packet error rate, spectral efficiency and diversity-multiplexing tradeoff of our proposal and compare them with some existing protocols. Analysis shows that our proposal can achieve higher diversity multiplexing tradeoff than conventional cooperative protocols.

In this paper, the multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) relay channel is investigated, where the source node provides multi-beams to multi-users via a multi-antenna relay node. In this scenario, linear processing matrix at the relay node is designed around block diagonal (BD) scheme to improve the system sum-rate. Compared with the traditional linear processing matrix with zero-forcing (ZF) scheme at the relay node, the proposed matrix based on BD scheme can not only eliminate the multi-user interference to the same extent as the ZF scheme, but also realize optimal power allocation at the relay node. Numerical simulations demonstrate the BD scheme outperforms the ZF scheme and can significantly improve the sum-rate performance.