5GNOW: Challenging the LTE Design Paradigms of Orthogonality and Synchronicity

LTE and LTE-Advanced have been optimized to deliver high bandwidth pipes to wireless users. The transport mechanisms have been tailored to maximize single cell performance by enforcing strict synchronism and orthogonality within a single cell and within a single contiguous frequency band. Various emerging trends reveal major shortcomings of those design criteria: 1) The fraction of machine-type-communications (MTC) is growing fast. Transmissions of this kind are suffering from the bulky procedures necessary to ensure strict synchronism. 2) Collaborative schemes have been introduced to boost capacity and coverage (CoMP), and wireless networks are becoming more and more heterogeneous following the non-uniform distribution of users. Tremendous efforts must be spent to collect the gains and to manage such systems under the premise of strict synchronism and orthogonality. 3) The advent of the Digital Agenda and the introduction of carrier aggregation are forcing the transmission systems to deal with fragmented spectrum. 5GNOW is an European research project supported by the European Commission within FP7 ICT Call 8. It will question the design targets of LTE and LTE-Advanced having these shortcomings in mind and the obedience to strict synchronism and orthogonality will be challenged. It will develop new PHY and MAC layer concepts being better suited to meet the upcoming needs with respect to service variety and heterogeneous transmission setups. Wireless transmission networks following the outcomes of 5GNOW will be better suited to meet the manifoldness of services, device classes and transmission setups present in envisioned future scenarios like smart cities. The integration of systems relying heavily on MTC into the communication network will be eased. The per-user experience will be more uniform and satisfying. To ensure this 5GNOW will contribute to upcoming 5G standardization.Comment: Submitted to Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Communication Systems for 2020 and beyond (at IEEE VTC 2013, Spring

A New Low Complexity Uniform Filter Bank Based on the Improved Coefficient Decimation Method

In this paper, we propose a new uniform filter bank (FB) based on the improved coefficient decimation method (ICDM). In the proposed FB’s design, the ICDM is used to obtain different multi-band frequency responses using a single lowpass prototype filter. The desired subbands are individually obtained from these multi-band frequency responses by using low order frequency response masking filters and their corresponding ICDM output frequency responses. We show that the proposed FB is a very low complexity alternative to the other FBs in literature, especially the widely used discrete Fourier transform based FB (DFTFB) and the CDM based FB (CDFB). The proposed FB can have a higher number of subbands with twice the center frequency resolution when compared with the CDFB and DFTFB. Design example and implementation results show that our FB achieves 86.59% and 58.84% reductions in resource utilizations and 76.95% and 47.09% reductions in power consumptions when compared with the DFTFB and CDFB respectively

Low complexity and efficient dynamic spectrum learning and tunable bandwidth access for heterogeneous decentralized cognitive radio networks

International audienceThis paper deals with the design of the low complexity and efficient dynamic spectrum learning and access (DSLA) scheme for next-generation heterogeneous decentralized Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) such as Long Term Evolution-Advanced and 5G. Existing DSLA schemes for decentralized CRNs are focused predominantly on the decision making policies which perform the task of orthogonalization of secondary users to optimum vacant subbands of fixed bandwidth. The focus of this paper is the design of DSLA scheme for decentralized CRNs to support the tunable vacant bandwidth requirements of the secondary users while minimizing the computationally intensive subband switchings. We first propose a new low complexity VDF which is designed by modifying second order frequency transformation and subsequently combining it with the interpolation technique. It is referred to as Interpolation and Modified Frequency Transformation based VDF (IMFT-VDF) and it provides tunable bandpass responses anywhere over Nyquist band with complete control over the bandwidth as well as the center frequency. Second, we propose a tunable decision making policy, ρt_randρt_rand, consisting of learning and access unit, and is designed to take full advantage of exclusive frequency response control offered by IMFT-VDF. The simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed DSLA scheme over the existing DSLA schemes while complexity comparisons indicate total gate count savings from 11% to as high as 87% over various existing schemes. Also, lower number of subband switchings make the proposed scheme power-efficient and suitable for battery-operated cognitive radio terminals

Channelization for Multi-Standard Software-Defined Radio Base Stations

As the number of radio standards increase and spectrum resources come under more pressure, it becomes ever less efficient to reserve bands of spectrum for exclusive use by a single radio standard. Therefore, this work focuses on channelization structures compatible with spectrum sharing among multiple wireless standards and dynamic spectrum allocation in particular. A channelizer extracts independent communication channels from a wideband signal, and is one of the most computationally expensive components in a communications receiver. This work specifically focuses on non-uniform channelizers suitable for multi-standard Software-Defined Radio (SDR) base stations in general and public mobile radio base stations in particular. A comprehensive evaluation of non-uniform channelizers (existing and developed during the course of this work) shows that parallel and recombined variants of the Generalised Discrete Fourier Transform Modulated Filter Bank (GDFT-FB) represent the best trade-off between computational load and flexibility for dynamic spectrum allocation. Nevertheless, for base station applications (with many channels) very high filter orders may be required, making the channelizers difficult to physically implement. To mitigate this problem, multi-stage filtering techniques are applied to the GDFT-FB. It is shown that these multi-stage designs can significantly reduce the filter orders and number of operations required by the GDFT-FB. An alternative approach, applying frequency response masking techniques to the GDFT-FB prototype filter design, leads to even bigger reductions in the number of coefficients, but computational load is only reduced for oversampled configurations and then not as much as for the multi-stage designs. Both techniques render the implementation of GDFT-FB based non-uniform channelizers more practical. Finally, channelization solutions for some real-world spectrum sharing use cases are developed before some final physical implementation issues are considered

Practical Non-Uniform Channelization for Multistandard Base Stations

A Multistandard software-defined radio base station must perform non-uniform channelization of multiplexed frequency bands. Non-uniform channelization accounts for a significant portion of the digital signal processing workload in the base station receiver and can be difficult to realize in a physical implementation. In non-uniform channelization methods based on generalized DFT filter banks, large prototype filter orders are a significant issue for implementation. In this paper, a multistage filter design is applied to two different non-uniform generalized DFT-based channelizers in order to reduce their filter orders. To evaluate the approach, a TETRA and TEDS base station is used. Experimental results show that the new multistage design reduces both the number of coefficients and operations and leads to a more feasible design and practical physical implementation