Near-Instantaneously Adaptive HSDPA-Style OFDM Versus MC-CDMA Transceivers for WIFI, WIMAX, and Next-Generation Cellular Systems

Burts-by-burst (BbB) adaptive high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) style multicarrier systems are reviewed, identifying their most critical design aspects. These systems exhibit numerous attractive features, rendering them eminently eligible for employment in next-generation wireless systems. It is argued that BbB-adaptive or symbol-by-symbol adaptive orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) modems counteract the near instantaneous channel quality variations and hence attain an increased throughput or robustness in comparison to their fixed-mode counterparts. Although they act quite differently, various diversity techniques, such as Rake receivers and space-time block coding (STBC) are also capable of mitigating the channel quality variations in their effort to reduce the bit error ratio (BER), provided that the individual antenna elements experience independent fading. By contrast, in the presence of correlated fading imposed by shadowing or time-variant multiuser interference, the benefits of space-time coding erode and it is unrealistic to expect that a fixed-mode space-time coded system remains capable of maintaining a near-constant BER

High Capacity CDMA and Collaborative Techniques

The thesis investigates new approaches to increase the user capacity and improve the error performance of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) by employing adaptive interference cancellation and collaborative spreading and space diversity techniques. Collaborative Coding Multiple Access (CCMA) is also investigated as a separate technique and combined with CDMA. The advantages and shortcomings of CDMA and CCMA are analysed and new techniques for both the uplink and downlink are proposed and evaluated. Multiple access interference (MAI) problem in the uplink of CDMA is investigated first. The practical issues of multiuser detection (MUD) techniques are reviewed and a novel blind adaptive approach to interference cancellation (IC) is proposed. It exploits the constant modulus (CM) property of digital signals to blindly suppress interference during the despreading process and obtain amplitude estimation with minimum mean squared error for use in cancellation stages. Two new blind adaptive receiver designs employing successive and parallel interference cancellation architectures using the CM algorithm (CMA) referred to as ‘CMA-SIC’ and ‘BA-PIC’, respectively, are presented. These techniques have shown to offer near single user performance for large number of users. It is shown to increase the user capacity by approximately two fold compared with conventional IC receivers. The spectral efficiency analysis of the techniques based on output signal-to interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) also shows significant gain in data rate. Furthermore, an effective and low complexity blind adaptive subcarrier combining (BASC) technique using a simple gradient descent based algorithm is proposed for Multicarrier-CDMA. It suppresses MAI without any knowledge of channel amplitudes and allows large number of users compared with equal gain and maximum ratio combining techniques normally used in practice. New user collaborative schemes are proposed and analysed theoretically and by simulations in different channel conditions to achieve spatial diversity for uplink of CCMA and CDMA. First, a simple transmitter diversity and its equivalent user collaborative diversity techniques for CCMA are designed and analysed. Next, a new user collaborative scheme with successive interference cancellation for uplink of CDMA referred to as collaborative SIC (C-SIC) is investigated to reduce MAI and achieve improved diversity. To further improve the performance of C-SIC under high system loading conditions, Collaborative Blind Adaptive SIC (C-BASIC) scheme is proposed. It is shown to minimize the residual MAI, leading to improved user capacity and a more robust system. It is known that collaborative diversity schemes incur loss in throughput due to the need of orthogonal time/frequency slots for relaying source’s data. To address this problem, finally a novel near-unity-rate scheme also referred to as bandwidth efficient collaborative diversity (BECD) is proposed and evaluated for CDMA. Under this scheme, pairs of users share a single spreading sequence to exchange and forward their data employing a simple superposition or space-time encoding methods. At the receiver collaborative joint detection is performed to separate each paired users’ data. It is shown that the scheme can achieve full diversity gain at no extra bandwidth as inter-user channel SNR becomes high. A novel approach of ‘User Collaboration’ is introduced to increase the user capacity of CDMA for both the downlink and uplink. First, collaborative group spreading technique for the downlink of overloaded CDMA system is introduced. It allows the sharing of the same single spreading sequence for more than one user belonging to the same group. This technique is referred to as Collaborative Spreading CDMA downlink (CS-CDMA-DL). In this technique T-user collaborative coding is used for each group to form a composite codeword signal of the users and then a single orthogonal sequence is used for the group. At each user’s receiver, decoding of composite codeword is carried out to extract the user’s own information while maintaining a high SINR performance. To improve the bit error performance of CS-CDMA-DL in Rayleigh fading conditions, Collaborative Space-time Spreading (C-STS) technique is proposed by combining the collaborative coding multiple access and space-time coding principles. A new scheme for uplink of CDMA using the ‘User Collaboration’ approach, referred to as CS-CDMA-UL is presented next. When users’ channels are independent (uncorrelated), significantly higher user capacity can be achieved by grouping multiple users to share the same spreading sequence and performing MUD on per group basis followed by a low complexity ML decoding at the receiver. This approach has shown to support much higher number of users than the available sequences while also maintaining the low receiver complexity. For improved performance under highly correlated channel conditions, T-user collaborative coding is also investigated within the CS-CDMA-UL system

Channel estimation techniques for filter bank multicarrier based transceivers for next generation of wireless networks

A dissertation submitted to Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering (Electrical and Information Engineering), August 2017The fourth generation (4G) of wireless communication system is designed based on the principles of cyclic prefix orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) where the cyclic prefix (CP) is used to combat inter-symbol interference (ISI) and inter-carrier interference (ICI) in order to achieve higher data rates in comparison to the previous generations of wireless networks. Various filter bank multicarrier systems have been considered as potential waveforms for the fast emerging next generation (xG) of wireless networks (especially the fifth generation (5G) networks). Some examples of the considered waveforms are orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with offset quadrature amplitude modulation based filter bank, universal filtered multicarrier (UFMC), bi-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (BFDM) and generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM). In perfect reconstruction (PR) or near perfect reconstruction (NPR) filter bank designs, these aforementioned FBMC waveforms adopt the use of well-designed prototype filters (which are used for designing the synthesis and analysis filter banks) so as to either replace or minimize the CP usage of the 4G networks in order to provide higher spectral efficiencies for the overall increment in data rates. The accurate designing of the FIR low-pass prototype filter in NPR filter banks results in minimal signal distortions thus, making the analysis filter bank a time-reversed version of the corresponding synthesis filter bank. However, in non-perfect reconstruction (Non-PR) the analysis filter bank is not directly a time-reversed version of the corresponding synthesis filter bank as the prototype filter impulse response for this system is formulated (in this dissertation) by the introduction of randomly generated errors. Hence, aliasing and amplitude distortions are more prominent for Non-PR. Channel estimation (CE) is used to predict the behaviour of the frequency selective channel and is usually adopted to ensure excellent reconstruction of the transmitted symbols. These techniques can be broadly classified as pilot based, semi-blind and blind channel estimation schemes. In this dissertation, two linear pilot based CE techniques namely the least square (LS) and linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE), and three adaptive channel estimation schemes namely least mean square (LMS), normalized least mean square (NLMS) and recursive least square (RLS) are presented, analyzed and documented. These are implemented while exploiting the near orthogonality properties of offset quadrature amplitude modulation (OQAM) to mitigate the effects of interference for two filter bank waveforms (i.e. OFDM/OQAM and GFDM/OQAM) for the next generation of wireless networks assuming conditions of both NPR and Non-PR in slow and fast frequency selective Rayleigh fading channel. Results obtained from the computer simulations carried out showed that the channel estimation schemes performed better in an NPR filter bank system as compared with Non-PR filter banks. The low performance of Non-PR system is due to the amplitude distortion and aliasing introduced from the random errors generated in the system that is used to design its prototype filters. It can be concluded that RLS, NLMS, LMS, LMMSE and LS channel estimation schemes offered the best normalized mean square error (NMSE) and bit error rate (BER) performances (in decreasing order) for both waveforms assuming both NPR and Non-PR filter banks. Keywords: Channel estimation, Filter bank, OFDM/OQAM, GFDM/OQAM, NPR, Non-PR, 5G, Frequency selective channel.CK201