Timing and Carrier Synchronization in Wireless Communication Systems: A Survey and Classification of Research in the Last 5 Years

Timing and carrier synchronization is a fundamental requirement for any wireless communication system to work properly. Timing synchronization is the process by which a receiver node determines the correct instants of time at which to sample the incoming signal. Carrier synchronization is the process by which a receiver adapts the frequency and phase of its local carrier oscillator with those of the received signal. In this paper, we survey the literature over the last 5 years (2010–2014) and present a comprehensive literature review and classification of the recent research progress in achieving timing and carrier synchronization in single-input single-output (SISO), multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), cooperative relaying, and multiuser/multicell interference networks. Considering both single-carrier and multi-carrier communication systems, we survey and categorize the timing and carrier synchronization techniques proposed for the different communication systems focusing on the system model assumptions for synchronization, the synchronization challenges, and the state-of-the-art synchronization solutions and their limitations. Finally, we envision some future research directions

Modeling and Digital Mitigation of Transmitter Imperfections in Radio Communication Systems

To satisfy the continuously growing demands for higher data rates, modern radio communication systems employ larger bandwidths and more complex waveforms. Furthermore, radio devices are expected to support a rich mixture of standards such as cellular networks, wireless local-area networks, wireless personal area networks, positioning and navigation systems, etc. In general, a "smart'' device should be flexible to support all these requirements while being portable, cheap, and energy efficient. These seemingly conflicting expectations impose stringent radio frequency (RF) design challenges which, in turn, call for their proper understanding as well as developing cost-effective solutions to address them. The direct-conversion transceiver architecture is an appealing analog front-end for flexible and multi-standard radio systems. However, it is sensitive to various circuit impairments, and modern communication systems based on multi-carrier waveforms such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) are particularly vulnerable to RF front-end non-idealities.This thesis addresses the modeling and digital mitigation of selected transmitter (TX) RF impairments in radio communication devices. The contributions can be divided into two areas. First, new modeling and digital mitigation techniques are proposed for two essential front-end impairments in direct-conversion architecture-based OFDM and OFDMA systems, namely inphase and quadrature phase (I/Q) imbalance and carrier frequency offset (CFO). Both joint and de-coupled estimation and compensation schemes for frequency-selective TX I/Q imbalance and channel distortions are proposed for OFDM systems, to be adopted on the receiver side. Then, in the context of uplink OFDMA and Single Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA), which are the air interface technologies of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced systems, joint estimation and equalization techniques of RF impairments and channel distortions are proposed. Here, the challenging multi-user uplink scenario with unequal received power levels is investigated where I/Q imbalance causes inter-user interference. A joint mirror subcarrier processing-based minimum mean-square error (MMSE) equalizer with an arbitrary number of receiver antennas is formulated to effectively handle the mirror sub-band users of different power levels. Furthermore, the joint channel and impairments filter responses are efficiently approximated with polynomial-based basis function models, and the parameters of basis functions are estimated with the reference signals conforming to the LTE uplink sub-frame structure. The resulting receiver concept adopting the proposed techniques enables improved link performance without modifying the design of RF transceivers.Second, digital baseband mitigation solutions are developed for the TX leakage signal-induced self-interference in frequency division duplex (FDD) transceivers. In FDD transceivers, a duplexer is used to connect the TX and receiver (RX) chains to a common antenna while also providing isolation to the receiver chain against the powerful transmit signal. In general, the continuous miniaturization of hardware and adoption of larger bandwidths through carrier aggregation type noncontiguous allocations complicates achieving sufficient TX-RX isolation. Here, two different effects of the transmitter leakage signal are investigated. The first is TX out-of-band (OOB) emissions and TX spurious emissions at own receiver band, due to the transmitter nonlinearity, and the second is nonlinearity of down-converter in the RX that generates second-order intermodulation distortion (IMD2) due to the TX in-band leakage signal. This work shows that the transmitter leakage signal-induced interference depends on an equivalent leakage channel that models the TX path non-idealities, duplexer filter responses, and the RX path non-idealities. The work proposes algorithms that operate in the digital baseband of the transceiver to estimate the TX-RX non-idealities and the duplexer filter responses, and subsequently regenerating and canceling the self-interference, thereby potentially relaxing the TX-RX isolation requirements as well as increasing the transceiver flexibility.Overall, this thesis provides useful signal models to understand the implications of different RF non-idealities and proposes compensation solutions to cope with certain RF impairments. This is complemented with extensive computer simulations and practical RF measurements to validate their application in real-world radio transceivers

Inter-carrier interference suppression in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems uplink

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Semi-blind CFO estimation and ICA based equalization for wireless communication systems

In this thesis, a number of semi-blind structures are proposed for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based wireless communication systems, with Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) estimation and Independent Component Analysis (ICA) based equalization. In the first contribution, a semi-blind non-redundant single-user Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) OFDM system is proposed, with a precoding aided CFO estimation approach and an ICA based equalization structure. A number of reference data sequences are carefully designed and selected from a pool of orthogonal sequences, killing two birds with one stone. On the one hand, the precoding based CFO estimation is performed by minimizing the sum cross-correlations between the CFO compensated signals and the rest of the orthogonal sequences in the pool. On the other hand, the same reference data sequences enable the elimination of permutation and quadrant ambiguities in the ICA equalized signals. Simulation results show that the proposed semi-blind MIMO OFDM system can achieve a Bit Error Rate (BER) performance close to the ideal case with perfect Channel State Information (CSI) and no CFO. In the second contribution, a low-complexity semi-blind structure, with a multi-CFO estimation method and an ICA based equalization scheme, is proposed for multiuser Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) OFDM systems. A short pilot is carefully designed offline for each user and has a two-fold advantage. On the one hand, using the pilot structure, a complex multi-dimensional search for multiple CFOs is divided into a number of low-complexity mono-dimensional searches. On the other hand, the cross-correlation between the transmitted and received pilots is explored to allow the simultaneous elimination of permutation and quadrant ambiguities in the ICA equalized signals. Simulation results show that the proposed semi-blind CoMP OFDM system can provide a BER performance close to the ideal case with perfect CSI and no CFO. In the third contribution, a semi-blind structure is proposed for Carrier Aggregation (CA) based CoMP Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) systems, with an ICA based joint Inter-Carrier Interference (ICI) mitigation and equalization scheme. The CFO-induced ICI is mitigated implicitly via ICA based equalization, without introducing feedback overhead for CFO correction. The permutation and quadrant ambiguities in the ICA equalized signals can be eliminated by a small number of pilots. Simulation results show that with a low training overhead, the proposed semi-blind equalization scheme can provide a BER performance close to the ideal case with perfect CSI and no CFO

Techniques d’Estimation de Canal et de Décalage de Fréquence Porteuse pour Systèmes Sans-fil Multiporteuses en Liaison Montante

Multicarrier modulation is the common feature of high-data rate mobile wireless systems. In that case, two phenomena disturb the symbol detection. Firstly, due to the relative transmitter-receiver motion and a difference between the local oscillator (LO) frequency at the transmitter and the receiver, a carrier frequency offset (CFO) affects the received signal. This leads to an intercarrier interference (ICI). Secondly, several versions of the transmitted signal are received due to the wireless propagation channel. These unwanted phenomena must be taken into account when designing a receiver. As estimating the multipath channel and the CFO is essential, this PhD deals with several CFO and channel estimation methods based on optimal filtering. Firstly, as the estimation issue is nonlinear, we suggest using the extended Kalman filter (EKF). It is based on a local linearization of the equations around the last state estimate. However, this approach requires a linearization based on calculations of Jacobians and Hessians matrices and may not be a sufficient description of the nonlinearity. For these reasons, we can consider the sigma-point Kalman filter (SPKF), namely the unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) and the central difference Kalman filter (CDKF). The UKF is based on the unscented transformation whereas the CDKF is based on the second order Sterling polynomial interpolation formula. Nevertheless, the above methods require an exact and accurate a priori system model as well as perfect knowledge of the additive measurementnoise statistics. Therefore, we propose to use the H∞ filtering, which is known to be more robust to uncertainties than Kalman filtering. As the state-space representation of the system is non-linear, we first evaluate the “extended H∞ filter”, which is based on a linearization of the state-space equations like the EKF. As an alternative, the “unscented H∞ filter”, which has been recently proposed in the literature, is implemented by embedding the unscented transformation into the “extended H∞ filter” and carrying out the filtering by using the statistical linear error propagation approach.Multicarrier modulation is the common feature of high-data rate mobile wireless systems. In that case, two phenomena disturb the symbol detection. Firstly, due to the relative transmitter-receiver motion and a difference between the local oscillator (LO) frequency at the transmitter and the receiver, a carrier frequency offset (CFO) affects the received signal. This leads to an intercarrier interference (ICI). Secondly, several versions of the transmitted signal are received due to the wireless propagation channel. These unwanted phenomena must be taken into account when designing a receiver. As estimating the multipath channel and the CFO is essential, this PhD deals with several CFO and channel estimation methods based on optimal filtering. Firstly, as the estimation issue is nonlinear, we suggest using the extended Kalman filter (EKF). It is based on a local linearization of the equations around the last state estimate. However, this approach requires a linearization based on calculations of Jacobians and Hessians matrices and may not be a sufficient description of the nonlinearity. For these reasons, we can consider the sigma-point Kalman filter (SPKF), namely the unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) and the central difference Kalman filter (CDKF). The UKF is based on the unscented transformation whereas the CDKF is based on the second order Sterling polynomial interpolation formula. Nevertheless, the above methods require an exact and accurate a priori system model as well as perfect knowledge of the additive measurementnoise statistics. Therefore, we propose to use the H∞ filtering, which is known to be more robust to uncertainties than Kalman filtering. As the state-space representation of the system is non-linear, we first evaluate the “extended H∞ filter”, which is based on a linearization of the state-space equations like the EKF. As an alternative, the “unscented H∞ filter”, which has been recently proposed in the literature, is implemented by embedding the unscented transformation into the “extended H∞ filter” and carrying out the filtering by using the statistical linear error propagation approach

Physical Layer Techniques for Wireless Communication Systems

The increasing diffusion of mobile devices requiring, everywhere and every time, reliable connections able to support the more common applications, induced in the last years the deployment of telecommunication networks based on technologies capable to respond effectively to the ever-increasing market demand, still a long way off from saturation level. Multicarrier transmission techniques employed in standards for local networks (Wi-Fi) and metropolitan networks (WiMAX) and for many years hot research topic, have been definitely adopted beginning from the fourth generation of cellular systems (LTE). The adoption of multicarrier signaling techniques if on one hand has brought significant advantages to counteract the detrimental effects in environments with particularly harsh propagation channel, on the other hand, has imposed very strict requirements on sensitivity to recovery errors of the carrier frequency offset (CFO) due to the resulting impact on correct signal detection. The main focus of the thesis falls in this area, investigating some aspects relating to synchronization procedures for system based on multicarrier signaling. Particular reference will be made to a network entry procedure for LTE networks and to CFO recovery for OFDM, fltered multitone modulation and direct conversion receivers. Other contributions pertaining to physical layer issues for communication systems, both radio and over acoustic carrier, conclude the thesis