Peak-to-Average-Power-Ratio (PAPR) Reduction Techniques for Orthogonal-Frequency-Division- Multiplexing (OFDM) Transmission

Wireless communication has experienced an incredible growth in the last decade. Two decades ago,the number of mobile subscribers was less than 1% of the world\u27s population. As of 2011, the number of mobile subscribers has increased tremendously to 79.86% of the world\u27s population. Robust and high-rate data transmission in mobile environments faces severe problems due to the time-variant channel conditions, multipath fading and shadow fading. Fading is the main limitation on wireless communication channels. Frequency selective interference and fading, such as multipath fading, is a bandwidth bottleneck in the last mile which runs from the access point to the user. The last mile problem in wireless communication networks is caused by the environment of free space channels through which the signal propagates. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a promising modulation and multiplexing technique due to its robustness against multipath fading. Nevertheless, OFDM suffers from high Peak-to-Average- Power-Ratio (PAPR), which results in a complex OFDM signal. In this research, reduction of PAPR considering the out-of-band radiation and the regeneration of the time-domain signal peaks caused by filtering has been studied and is presented. Our PAPR reduction was 30% of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) with Interleaved Frequency Division Multiple Access (IFDMA) utilizing Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK) and varying the roll-off factor. We show that pulse shaping does not affect the PAPR of Localized Frequency Division Multiple Access (LFDMA) as much as it affects the PAPR of IFDMA. Therefore, IFDMA has an important trade-off relationship between excess bandwidth and PAPR performance, since excess bandwidth increases as the roll-off factor increases. In addition, we studied a low complexity clipping scheme, applicable to IFDMA uplink and OFDM downlink systems for PAPR reduction. We show that the performance of the PAPR of the Interleaved-FDMA scheme is better than traditional OFDMA for the uplink transmission system. Our reduction of PAPR is 53% when IFDMA is used instead of OFDMA in the uplink direction. Furthermore, we also examined an important trade-off relationship between clipping distortion and quantization noise when the clipping scheme is used for OFDM downlink systems. Our results show a significant reduction in the PAPR and the out-of-band radiation caused by clipping for OFDM downlink transmission system

LTE Advanced: Technology and Performance Analysis

Wireless data usage is increasing at a phenomenal rate and driving the need for continued innovations in wireless data technologies to provide more capacity and higher quality of service. In October 2009, 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) submitted LTE-Advanced to the ITU as a proposed candidate IMT-Advanced technology for which specifications could become available in 2011 through Release-10 . The aim of “LTE-Advanced” is to further enhance LTE radio access in terms of system performance and capabilities compared to current cellular systems, including the first release of LTE, with a specific goal to ensure that LTE fulfills and even surpass the requirements of “IMT-Advanced” as defined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-R) . This thesis offers an introduction to the mobile communication standard known as LTE Advanced, depicting the evolution of the standard from its roots and discussing several important technologies that help it evolve to accomplishing the IMT-Advanced requirements. A short history of the LTE standard is offered, along with a discussion of its standards and performance. LTE-Advanced details include analysis on the physical layer by investigating the performance of SC-FDMA and OFDMA of LTE physical layer. The investigation is done by considering different modulation schemes (QPSK, 16QAM and 64QAM) on the basis of PAPR, BER, power spectral density (PSD) and error probability by simulating the model of SC-FDMA & OFDMA. To evaluate the performance in presence of noise, an Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel was introduced. A set of conclusions is derived from our results describing the effect of higher order modulation schemes on BER and error probability for both OFDMA and SC-FDMA. The power spectral densities of both the multiple access techniques (OFDMA and SC-FDMA) are calculated and result shows that the OFDMA has higher power spectral density.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Integrated Filters and Couplers for Next Generation Wireless Tranceivers

The main focus of this thesis is to investigate the critical nonlinear distortion issues affecting RF/Microwave components such as power amplifiers (PA) and develop new and improved solutions that will improve efficiency and linearity of next generation RF/Microwave mobile wireless communication systems. This research involves evaluating the nonlinear distortions in PA for different analog and digital signals which have been a major concern. The second harmonic injection technique is explored and used to effectively suppress nonlinear distortions. This method consists of simultaneously feeding back the second harmonics at the output of the power amplifier (PA) into the input of the PA. Simulated and measured results show improved linearity results. However, for increasing frequency bandwidth, the suppression abilities reduced which is a limitation for 4G LTE and 5G networks that require larger bandwidth (above 5 MHz). This thesis explores creative ways to deal with this major drawback. The injection technique was modified with the aid of a well-designed band-stop filter. The compact narrowband notch filter designed was able to suppress nonlinear distortions very effectively when used before the PA. The notch filter is also integrated in the injection technique for LTE carrier aggregation (CA) with multiple carriers and significant improvement in nonlinear distortion performance was observed. This thesis also considers maximizing efficiency alongside with improved linearity performance. To improve on the efficiency performance of the PA, the balanced PA configuration was investigated. However, another major challenge was that the couplers used in this configuration are very large in size at the desired operating frequency. In this thesis, this problem was solved by designing a compact branch line coupler. The novel coupler was simulated, fabricated and measured with performance comparable to its conventional equivalent and the coupler achieved substantial size reduction over others. The coupler is implemented in the balanced PA configuration giving improved input and output matching abilities. The proposed balanced PA is also implemented in 4G LTE and 5G wireless transmitters. This thesis provides simulation and measured results for all balanced PA cases with substantial efficiency and linearity improvements observed even for higher bandwidths (above 5 MHz). Additionally, the coupler is successfully integrated with rectifiers for improved energy harvesting performance and gave improved RF-dc conversion efficienc

Millimetre-Wave Fibre-Wireless Technologies for 5G Mobile Fronthaul

The unprecedented growth in mobile data traffic, driven primarily by bandwidth rich applications and high definition video is accelerating the development of fifth generation (5G) mobile network. As mobile access network evolves towards centralisation, mobile fronthaul (MFH) architecture becomes essential in providing high capacity, ubiquitous and yet affordable services to subscribers. In order to meet the demand for high data rates in the access, Millimetre-wave (mmWave) has been highlighted as an essential technology in the development of 5G-new radio (5G-NR). In the present MFH architecture which is typically based on common public radio interface (CPRI) protocol, baseband signals are digitised before fibre transmission, featuring high overhead data and stringent synchronisation requirements. A direct application of mmWave 5G-NR to CPRI digital MFH, where signal bandwidth is expected to be up to 1GHz will be challenging, due to the increased complexity of the digitising interface and huge overhead data that will be required for such bandwidth. Alternatively, radio over fibre (RoF) technique can be employed in the transportation of mmWave wireless signals via the MFH link, thereby avoiding the expensive digitisation interface and excessive overhead associated with its implementation. Additionally, mmWave carrier can be realised with the aid of photonic components employed in the RoF link, further reducing the system complexity. However, noise and nonlinearities inherent to analog transmission presents implementation challenges, limiting the system dynamic range. Therefore, it is important to investigate the effects of these impairments in RoF based MFH architecture. This thesis presents extensive research on the impact of noise and nonlinearities on 5G candidate waveforms, in mmWave 5G fibre wireless MFH. Besides orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), another radio access technology (RAT) that has received significant attention is filter bank multicarrier (FBMC), particularly due to its high spectral containment and excellent performance in asynchronous transmission. Hence, FBMC waveform is adopted in this work to study the impact of noise and nonlinearities on the mmWave fibre-wireless MFH architecture. Since OFDM is widely deployed and it has been adopted for 5G-NR, the performance of OFDM and FBMC based 5G mmWave RAT in fibre wireless MFH architecture is compared for several implementations and transmission scenarios. To this extent, an end to end transmission testbed is designed and implemented using industry standard VPI Transmission Maker® to investigate five mmWave upconversion techniques. Simulation results show that the impact of noise is higher in FBMC when the signal to-noise (SNR) is low, however, FBMC exhibits better performance compared to OFDM as the SNR improved. More importantly, an evaluation of the contribution of each noise component to the overall system SNR is carried out. It is observed in the investigation that noise contribution from the optical carriers employed in the heterodyne upconversion of intermediate frequency (IF) signals to mmWave frequency dominate the system noise. An adaptive modulation technique is employed to optimise the system throughput based on the received SNR. The throughput of FBMC based system reduced significantly compared to OFDM, due to laser phase noise and chromatic dispersion (CD). Additionally, it is shown that by employing frequency domain averaging technique to enhance the channel estimation (CE), the throughput of FBMC is significantly increased and consequently, a comparable performance is obtained for both waveforms. Furthermore, several coexistence scenarios for multi service transmission are studied, considering OFDM and FBMC based RATs to evaluate the impact inter band interference (IBI), due to power amplifier (PA) nonlinearity on the system performance. The low out of band (OOB) emission in FBMC plays an important role in minimising IBI to adjacent services. Therefore, FBMC requires less guardband in coexistence with multiple services in 5G fibre-wireless MFH. Conversely, OFDM introduced significant OOB to adjacent services requiring large guardband in multi-service coexistence transmission scenario. Finally, a novel transmission scheme is proposed and investigated to simultaneously generate multiple mmWave signals using laser heterodyning mmWave upconversion technique. With appropriate IF and optical frequency plan, several mmWave signals can be realised. Simulation results demonstrate successful simultaneous realisation of 28GHz, 38GHz, and 60GHz mmWave signals

Digital signal processing waveform aggregation and its experimental demonstration for next generation mobile fronthaul

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Universal-Filtered Multi-Carrier: A Waveform Candidate for 5G

The emerging Internet of Things will make the next generation 5G systems to support a broad range of diverse needs with greater efficiency requirements. The new class of services will need a higher data rates, to handle these demands, the lowest layer of the 5G systems must be flexible. Therefore, the waveform will have an important role in offering these new requirements. These waveforms should enable efficient multiple access to handle the requirements of the future wireless communication system. This means that the corresponding required waveforms should be able to handle as much different type of traffic as possible in the same band. In this paper we compare three candidate multicarrier waveforms for the air interface of 5G: the original cyclic prefix OFDM applied in the 4G systems today, the Filter Bank Multicarrier (FBMC) heavily discussed in previous papers, and Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier (UFMC) a new contender making its appearance recently. These new waveforms will be more robust against the time frequency synchronization problem, it has the potential for mixing different traffic specifications, and supports the scenarios of spectrum fragmentation, due to the improvement in the localization of spectrum. In the same time, they support all multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) scenarios and applications. The simulation results shown that there is a good difference in the time frequency efficiency for transmitting very small bursts where the response time is required (like car-to-car communications). Due to the cyclic prefix the FBMC and CP-OFDM suffer when transmitting short bursts, the UFMC outperforms CP-OFDM by 10% for any case and FBMC for the very short packets and it is similar to FBMC for long sequences. Other simulation results are shown, which demonstrate the potential of this waveform

THROUGHPUT OPTIMIZATION AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY OF THE DOWNLINK IN THE LTE SYSTEM

Nowadays, the usage of smart phones is very popular. More and more people access the Internet with their smart phones. This demands higher data rates from the mobile network operators. Every year the number of users and the amount of information is increasing dramatically. The wireless technology should ensure high data rates to be able to compete with the wire-based technology. The main advantage of the wireless system is the ability for user to be mobile. The 4G LTE system made it possible to gain very high peak data rates. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the improvement of the system performance for the downlink based on different antenna configurations and different scheduling algorithms. Moreover, the fairness between the users using different schedulers has been analyzed and evaluated. Furthermore, the energy efficiency of the scheduling algorithms in the downlink of LTE systems has been considered. Some important parts of the LTE system are described in the theoretical part of this thesis.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Performance Investigation of Peak Shrinking and Interpolating the PAPR Reduction Technique for LTE-Advance and 5G Signals

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has become an indispensable part of waveform generation in wideband digital communication since its first appearance in digital audio broadcasting (DAB) in Europe in 1980s, and it is indeed in use. As has been seen, the OFDM based waveforms work well with time division duplex operation in new radio (NR) systems in 5G systems, supporting delay-sensitive applications, high spectral efficiency, massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) compatibility, and ever-larger bandwidth signals, which has demonstrated successful commercial implementation for 5G downlinks and uplinks up to 256-QAM modulation schemes. However, the OFDM waveforms suffer from high peak to average power ratio (PAPR), which is not desired by system designers as they want RF power amplifiers (PAs) to operate with high efficiency. Although NR offers some options for maintaining the efficiency and spectral demand, such as cyclic prefix based (CP-OFDM), and discrete Fourier transform spread based (DFT-S-OFDM) schemes, which have limiting effects on PAPR, the PAPR is still as high as 13 dB. This value increases when the bandwidth is increased. Moreover, in LTE-Advance and 5G systems, in order to increase the bandwidth, and data-rate, carrier aggregation technology is used which increases the PAPR the same way that bandwidth increment does; therefore, it is essential to employ PAPR reduction in signal processing stage before passing the signal to PA. In this paper, we investigate the performance of an innovative peak shrinking and interpolation (PSI) technique for reducing peak to average power ratio (PAPR) in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based signals at waveform generation stage. The main idea behind the PSI technique is to extract high peaks, scale them down, and interpolate them back into the signal. It is shown that PSI technique is a possible candidate for reducing PAPR without compromising on computational complexity, compatible for existing and future telecommunication systems such as 4G, 5G, and beyond. In this paper, the PSI technique is tested with variety of signals in terms of inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) length, type of the signal modulation, and applications. Additional work has been carried out to compare the proposed technique with other promising PAPR reduction techniques. This paper further validates the PSI technique through experimental measurement with a power amplifier (PA) test bench and achieves an adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) of less than –55 dBc. Results showed improvement in output power of PA versus given input power, and furthermore, the error vector magnitude (EVM) of less than 1% was achieved when comparing of the signal after and before modification by the PSI techniqu