Trellis code-aided high-rate differential space-time block code and enhanced uncoded space-time labeling diversity.

Master of Science in Engineering. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2017.In this dissertation, a trellis code-aided bandwidth efficiency improvement technique for space-time block coded wireless communication systems is investigated. The application of the trellis code-aided bandwidth efficiency improvement technique to differential space-time block codes (DSTBC) results in a high-rate system called trellis code-aided DSTBC (TC-DSTBC). Such a system has not been investigated in open literature to date. Hence, in this dissertation, the mathematical models and design methodology for TC-DSTBC are presented. The two transmit antenna TC-DSTBC system transmits data by using a transmission matrix similar to the conventional DSTBC. The fundamental idea of TC-DSTBC is to use a dynamic mapping rule rather than a fixed one to map additional bits onto the expanded space-time block code (STBC) prior to differential encoding, hence, the additional bits-to-STBC mapping technique, which incorporates trellis coding is proposed for square M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) in order to enhance the bandwidth efficiency without sacrificing the error performance of the conventional DSTBC. The comparison of bandwidth efficiency between TC-DSTBC and the conventional DSTBC show that TC-DSTBC achieves a minimum of 12.5% and 8.3% increase in bandwidth efficiency for 16-QAM and 64-QAM, respectively. Furthermore, the Monte Carlo simulation results show that, at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), the four receive antenna TC- DSTBC retains the bit error rate (BER) performance of the conventional DSTBC with the same number of receive antennas under the same independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rayleigh frequency-flat fading channel and additive white noise (AWGN) conditions for various square M-QAM modulation orders and numbers of additional bits. Motivated by the bandwidth efficiency advantage of TC-DSTBC over the conventional DSTBC, the trellis code-aided bandwidth efficiency improvement technique is extended to the recently developed uncoded space-time labeling diversity (USTLD) system, where a new system referred to as enhanced uncoded space-time labeling diversity (E-USTLD) is proposed. In addition to this, a tight closed form lower-bound is derived to predict the average BER of the E-USTLD system over i.i.d. Rayleigh frequency-flat fading channels at high SNR. The Monte Carlo simulation results validate that the more bandwidth efficient four receive antenna E-USTLD system at the minimum retains the BER performance of the conventional four receive antenna USTLD system under the same fading channel and AWGN conditions for various square M-QAM modulation orders. The bandwidth efficiency improvement for TC-DSTBC and E-USTLD is achieved at the cost of a much higher computational complexity at the receiver due to use of the high-complexity Viterbi algorithm (VA)-based detector. Therefore, the low-complexity (LC) near-maximum-likelihood (near-ML) detection scheme proposed for the conventional USTLD is extended to the E-USTLD detector in order to reduce the magnitude of increase in the computational complexity. The Monte Carlo simulation results show that E-USTLD with a VA-based detector that implements LC near-ML detection attains near optimal BER performance

Uncoded space-time labeling diversity with three transmit antennas: symbol mapping designs and error performance analysis.

Doctoral Degrees. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Abstract available in PDF.Publications on page iii

Design of a simulation platform to test next generation of terrestrial DVB

Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting (DTTB) is a member of our daily life routine, and nonetheless, according to new users’ necessities in the fields of communications and leisure, new challenges are coming up. Moreover, the current Standard is not able to satisfy all the potential requirements. For that reason, first of all, a review of the current Standard has been performed within this work. Then, it has been identified the needing of developing a new version of the standard, ready to support enhanced services, as for example broadcasting transmissions to moving terminals or High Definition Television (HDTV) transmissions, among others. The main objective of this project is the design and development of a physical layer simulator of the whole DVB-T standard, including both the complete transmission and reception procedures. The simulator has been developed in Matlab. A detailed description of the simulator both from a functional and an architectural point of view is included. The simulator is the base for testing any possible modifications that may be included into the DVB-T2 future standard. In fact, several proposed enhancements have already been carried out and their performance has been evaluated. Specifically, the use of higher order modulation schemes, and the corresponding modifications in all the system blocks, have been included and evaluated. Furthermore, the simulator will allow testing other enhancements as the use of more efficient encoders and interleavers, MIMO technologies, and so on. A complete set of numerical results showing the performance of the different parts of the system, are presented in order to validate the correctness of the implementation and to evaluate both the current standard performance and the proposed enhancements. This work has been performed within the context of a project called FURIA, which is a strategic research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce. A brief description of this project and its consortium has been also included herein, together with an introduction to the current situation of the DTTB in Spain (called TDT in Spanish)

Space time coding in MIMO systems

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna technology is promising for high-speed wireless communications without increasing the transmission band- width. Space time coding (STC) is a scheme that employs multiple antennas to increase transmission rate or to improve transmission quality. STC is used widely in mobile cellular networks, wireless local area networks (WLAN) and wireless metropolitan area networks (WMAN). However, there are still many unsolved or partially solved issues in STC. In this thesis, I propose a new STC design from cyclic design. I then propose a systematic method to design quasi-orthogonal space time block codes (QOSTBC) for an arbitrary number of transmit antennas, and derive the optimal constellation rotation angles to achieve full diversity. I also propose an analytical method to derive the exact error probabilities of orthogonal space time block codes (OSTBC). In order to improve the error performance, I introduce an adaptive power allocation scheme for OSTBC. Combining STC with continuous phase modulation (CPM) is an attractive solution for mobile commu- nications for which power is limited. Thus, I apply OSTBC to binary CPM with modulation index h = 0.5, and develop a simplified receiver for such scheme. Finally, I present a decoding method to reduce the complexity of QOSTBC without degrading its error performance

Design of a simulation platform to test next generation of terrestrial DVB

Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting (DTTB) is a member of our daily life routine, and nonetheless, according to new users’ necessities in the fields of communications and leisure, new challenges are coming up. Moreover, the current Standard is not able to satisfy all the potential requirements. For that reason, first of all, a review of the current Standard has been performed within this work. Then, it has been identified the needing of developing a new version of the standard, ready to support enhanced services, as for example broadcasting transmissions to moving terminals or High Definition Television (HDTV) transmissions, among others. The main objective of this project is the design and development of a physical layer simulator of the whole DVB-T standard, including both the complete transmission and reception procedures. The simulator has been developed in Matlab. A detailed description of the simulator both from a functional and an architectural point of view is included. The simulator is the base for testing any possible modifications that may be included into the DVB-T2 future standard. In fact, several proposed enhancements have already been carried out and their performance has been evaluated. Specifically, the use of higher order modulation schemes, and the corresponding modifications in all the system blocks, have been included and evaluated. Furthermore, the simulator will allow testing other enhancements as the use of more efficient encoders and interleavers, MIMO technologies, and so on. A complete set of numerical results showing the performance of the different parts of the system, are presented in order to validate the correctness of the implementation and to evaluate both the current standard performance and the proposed enhancements. This work has been performed within the context of a project called FURIA, which is a strategic research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce. A brief description of this project and its consortium has been also included herein, together with an introduction to the current situation of the DTTB in Spain (called TDT in Spanish)

Uncoded space-time labelling diversity : data rate & reliability enhancements and application to real-world satellite broadcasting.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Abstract available in PDF

Low complexity MIMO detection algorithms and implementations

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. December 2014. Major: Electrical Engineering. Advisor: Gerald E. Sobelman. 1 computer file (PDF); ix, 111 pages.MIMO techniques use multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver sides to achieve diversity gain, multiplexing gain, or both. One of the key challenges in exploiting the potential of MIMO systems is to design high-throughput, low-complexity detection algorithms while achieving near-optimal performance. In this thesis, we design and optimize algorithms for MIMO detection and investigate the associated performance and FPGA implementation aspects.First, we study and optimize a detection algorithm developed by Shabany and Gulak for a K-Best based high throughput and low energy hard output MIMO detection and expand it to the complex domain. The new method uses simple lookup tables, and it is fully scalable for a wide range of K-values and constellation sizes. This technique reduces the computational complexity, without sacrificing performance and the complexity scales only sub-linearly with the constellation size. Second, we apply the bidirectional technique to trellis search and propose a high performance soft output bidirectional path preserving trellis search (PPTS) detector for MIMO systems. The comparative error analysis between single direction and bidirectional PPTS detectors is given. We demonstrate that the bidirectional PPTS detector can minimize the detection error. Next, we design a novel bidirectional processing algorithm for soft-output MIMO systems. It combines features from several types of fixed complexity tree search procedures. The proposed approach achieves a higher performance than previously proposed algorithms and has a comparable computational cost. Moreover, its parallel nature and fixed throughput characteristics make it attractive for very large scale integration (VLSI) implementation.Following that, we present a novel low-complexity hard output MIMO detection algorithm for LTE and WiFi applications. We provide a well-defined tradeoff between computational complexity and performance. The proposed algorithm uses a much smaller number of Euclidean distance (ED) calculations while attaining only a 0.5dB loss compared to maximum likelihood detection (MLD). A 3x3 MIMO system with a 16QAM detector architecture is designed, and the latency and hardware costs are estimated.Finally, we present a stochastic computing implementation of trigonometric and hyperbolic functions which can be used for QR decomposition and other wireless communications and signal processing applications

Channel Estimation in Coded Modulation Systems

With the outstanding performance of coded modulation techniques in fading channels, much research efforts have been carried out on the design of communication systems able to operate at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). From this perspective, the so-called iterative decoding principle has been applied to many signal processing tasks at the receiver: demodulation, detection, decoding, synchronization and channel estimation. Nevertheless, at low SNRs, conventional channel estimators do not perform satisfactorily. This thesis is mainly concerned with channel estimation issues in coded modulation systems where different diversity techniques are exploited to combat fading in single or multiple antenna systems. First, for single antenna systems in fast time-varying fading channels, the thesis focuses on designing a training sequence by exploiting signal space diversity (SSD). Motivated by the power/bandwidth efficiency of the SSD technique, the proposed training sequence inserts pilot bits into the coded bits prior to constellation mapping and signal rotation. This scheme spreads the training sequence during a transmitted codeword and helps the estimator to track fast variation of the channel gains. A comprehensive comparison between the proposed training scheme and the conventional training scheme is then carried out, which reveals several interesting conclusions with respect to both error performance of the system and mean square error of the channel estimator. For multiple antenna systems, different schemes are examined in this thesis for the estimation of block-fading channels. For typical coded modulation systems with multiple antennas, the first scheme makes a distinction between the iteration in the channel estimation and the iteration in the decoding. Then, the estimator begins iteration when the soft output of the decoder at the decoding iteration meets some specified reliability conditions. This scheme guarantees the convergence of the iterative receiver with iterative channel estimator. To accelerate the convergence process and decrease the complexity of successive iterations, in the second scheme, the channel estimator estimates channel state information (CSI) at each iteration with a combination of the training sequence and soft information. For coded modulation systems with precoding technique, in which a precoder is used after the modulator, the training sequence and data symbols are combined using a linear precoder to decrease the required training overhead. The power allocation and the placement of the training sequence to be precoded are obtained based on a lower bound on the mean square error of the channel estimation. It is demonstrated that considerable performance improvement is possible when the training symbols are embedded within data symbols with an equi-spaced pattern. In the last scheme, a joint precoder and training sequence is developed to maximize the achievable coding gain and diversity order under imperfect CSI. In particular, both the asymptotic performance behavior of the system with the precoded training scheme under imperfect CSI and the mean square error of the channel estimation are derived to obtain achievable diversity order and coding gain. Simulation results demonstrate that the joint optimized scheme outperforms the existing training schemes for systems with given precoders in terms of error rate and the amount of training overhead

Turbo space-time coding for mimo systems : designs and analyses

Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems can provide high diversity, high data rate or a mix of both, for wireless communications. This dissertation combines both modes and suggests analyses and techniques that advance the state of the art of MIMO systems. Specifically, this dissertation studies turbo space-time coding schemes for MIMO systems. Before the designs of turbo space-time codes are presented, a fundamental tool to analyze and design turbo coding schemes, the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart method, is extended from the binary/nonbinary code case to coded modulation case. This extension prepares the convergence analysis for turbo space-time code. Turbo space-time codes with symbols precoded by randomly chosen unitary time variant linear transformations (TVLT) are investigated in this dissertation. It is shown that turbo codes with TVLT achieve full diversity gain and good coding gain with high probability. The probability that these design goals are not met is shown to vanish exponentially with the Hamming distance between codewords (number of different columns). Hence, exhaustive tests of the rank and the determinant criterion are not required. As an additional benefit of the application of TVLT, with the removal of the constant modulation condition, it is proved that throughput rates achieved by these codes are significantly higher than the rates achievable by conventional space-time codes. Finally, an EXIT chart analysis for turbo space-time codes with TVLT is developed, with application to predicting frame error rate (FER) performance without running full simulation. To increase the data rate of turbo-STC without exponentially increasing the decoding complexity, a multilevel turbo space-time coding scheme with TVLT is proposed. An iterative joint demapping and decoding receiver algorithm is also proposed. For MIMO systems with a large number of transmit antennas, two types of layered turbo space-time (LTST) coding schemes are studied. For systems with low order modulation, a type of LTST with a vertical encoding structure and a low complexity parallel interference cancellation (PlC) receiver is shown to achieve close to capacity performance. For high order modulation, another type of LTST with a horizontal encoding structure, TVLT, and an ordered successive interference cancellation (OSIC) receiver is shown to achieve better performance than conventional layered space-time coding schemes, where ordering is not available in the SIC detection