Abstract

16-QAM Hierarchical Modulation Optimization in Relay Cooperative Networks
Sara Sallam
Recently, the concept of cooperative networks has attracted special attention in the field of wireless communications. This is due to their ability in achieving diversity with no extra hardware cost. The main drawback that characterizes cooperative networks is that they require extra transmission time slots compared to the traditional non-cooperative networks. Several strategies have been proposed in order to mitigate this disadvantage. One of the most recently adopted techniques is the use of hierarchical modulation. Hierarchical modulation was originally used in Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) applications. Lately, it has been applied in cooperative networks for its ability to transmit relative high data rate with acceptable performance.
In this thesis, the application of a 4/16 QAM hierarchical modulation in cooperative networks is examined. This study focuses on a downlink cellular network scenario, composed of a Base Station, a Relay and two destinations. The Base Station intends to transmit two different streams of data to these two destinations by concatenating the two streams and broadcasting the resulting sequence using a non-uniform 4/16 QAM hierarchical modulation. Unlike previous work, the main contribution in this thesis is the optimization of the 16QAM constellation’s parameters according to each user’s channel condition. In other words, this method gives each user’s data the priority it needs in order to be detected as correctly as possible at the destination. Explicit closed form expressions of Hierarchical modulation Bit Error Rate
in relay cooperative networks are derived. These BER expressions are used in order to select the constellation’s parameters that will achieve total minimum BER in coded and un-coded schemes. Results prove that the proposed method achieve noticeable improvement in both users performance compared to the use of uniform 16QAM constellation.