User Effects in Beam-Space MIMO

The performance and design of the novel single-RF-chain beam-space MIMO antenna concept is evaluated for the first time in the presence of the user. First, the variations of different performance parameters are evaluated when placing a beam-space MIMO antenna in close proximity to the user body in several typical operating scenarios. In addition to the typical degradation of conventional antennas in terms of radiation efficiency and impedance matching, it is observed that the user body corrupts the power balance and the orthogonality of the beam-space MIMO basis. However, capacity analyses show that throughput reduction mainly stems from the absorption in user body tissues rather than from the power imbalance and the correlation of the basis. These results confirm that the beam-space MIMO concept, so far only demonstrated in the absence of external perturbation, still performs very well in typical human body interaction scenarios.Comment: 4 pages, 7 figures, 2 table

Multidimensional Index Modulation in Wireless Communications

In index modulation schemes, information bits are conveyed through indexing of transmission entities such as antennas, subcarriers, times slots, precoders, subarrays, and radio frequency (RF) mirrors. Index modulation schemes are attractive for their advantages such as good performance, high rates, and hardware simplicity. This paper focuses on index modulation schemes in which multiple transmission entities, namely, {\em antennas}, {\em time slots}, and {\em RF mirrors}, are indexed {\em simultaneously}. Recognizing that such multidimensional index modulation schemes encourage sparsity in their transmit signal vectors, we propose efficient signal detection schemes that use compressive sensing based reconstruction algorithms. Results show that, for a given rate, improved performance is achieved when the number of indexed transmission entities is increased. We also explore indexing opportunities in {\em load modulation}, which is a modulation scheme that offers power efficiency and reduced RF hardware complexity advantages in multiantenna systems. Results show that indexing space and time in load modulated multiantenna systems can achieve improved performance

Media-Based MIMO: A New Frontier in Wireless Communications

The idea of Media-based Modulation (MBM), is based on embedding information in the variations of the transmission media (channel state). This is in contrast to legacy wireless systems where data is embedded in a Radio Frequency (RF) source prior to the transmit antenna. MBM offers several advantages vs. legacy systems, including "additivity of information over multiple receive antennas", and "inherent diversity over a static fading channel". MBM is particularly suitable for transmitting high data rates using a single transmit and multiple receive antennas (Single Input-Multiple Output Media-Based Modulation, or SIMO-MBM). However, complexity issues limit the amount of data that can be embedded in the channel state using a single transmit unit. To address this shortcoming, the current article introduces the idea of Layered Multiple Input-Multiple Output Media-Based Modulation (LMIMO-MBM). Relying on a layered structure, LMIMO-MBM can significantly reduce both hardware and algorithmic complexities, as well as the training overhead, vs. SIMO-MBM. Simulation results show excellent performance in terms of Symbol Error Rate (SER) vs. Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). For example, a $4\times 16$ LMIMO-MBM is capable of transmitting $32$ bits of information per (complex) channel-use, with SER $\simeq 10^{-5}$ at $E_b/N_0\simeq -3.5$dB (or SER $\simeq 10^{-4}$ at $E_b/N_0=-4.5$dB). This performance is achieved using a single transmission and without adding any redundancy for Forward-Error-Correction (FEC). This means, in addition to its excellent SER vs. energy/rate performance, MBM relaxes the need for complex FEC structures, and thereby minimizes the transmission delay. Overall, LMIMO-MBM provides a promising alternative to MIMO and Massive MIMO for the realization of 5G wireless networks.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figures, additional examples are given to further explain the idea of Media-Based Modulation. Capacity figure adde

Efficient MIMO Transmission of PSK Signals With a Single-Radio Reconfigurable Antenna

Crucial developments to the recently introduced signal-space approach for multiplexing multiple data symbols using a single-radio switched antenna are presented. First, we introduce a general framework for expressing the spatial multiplexing relation of the transmit signals only from the antenna scattering parameters and the modulating reactive loading. This not only avoids tedious far-field calculations, but more importantly provides an efficient and practical strategy for spatially multiplexing PSK signals of any modulation order. The proposed approach allows ensuring a constant impedance matching at the input of the driving antenna for all symbol combinations, and as importantly uses only passive reconfigurable loads. This obviates the use of reconfigurable matching networks and active loads, respectively, thereby overcoming stringent limitations of previous single-feed MIMO techniques in terms of complexity, efficiency, and power consumption. The proposed approach is illustrated by the design of a realistic very compact antenna system optimized for multiplexing QPSK signals. The results show that the proposed approach can bring the MIMO benefits to the low-end user terminals at a reduced RF complexity.Comment: 30 pages, 6 figures. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 201

MIMO Transmission for Single-fed ESPAR with Quantized Loads

Compact parasitic arrays in the form of electronically steerable parasitic antenna radiators (ESPARs) have emerged as a new antenna structure that achieves multipleinput- multiple-output (MIMO) transmission with a single RF chain. In this paper, we study the application of precoding on practical ESPARs, where the antennas are equipped with load impedances of quantized values. We analytically study the impact of the quantization on the system performance, where it is shown that while ideal ESPARs with ideal loads can achieve a similar performance to conventional MIMO, the performance of ESPARs will be degraded when only loads with quantized values are available. We further extend the performance analysis to imperfect channel state information (CSI). In order to alleviate the performance loss, we propose to approximate the ideal current vector by optimization, where a closed-form solution is further obtained. This enables the use of ESPARs in practice with quantized loads. Simulation results validate our analysis and show that a significant performance gain can be achieved with the proposed scheme over ESPARs with quantized loads. Finally, the tradeoff between performance and power consumption is shown to be favorable for the proposed ESPAR approaches compared to conventional MIMO, as evidenced by our energy efficiency results

Reconfigurable Antennas for Beam-Space MIMO Transmission with a Single Radio

MIMO techniques allow remarkable improvements in the reliability and/or transmission rate of wireless communication systems. However, there are several major challenges towards the implementation of conventional MIMO concept in terminals with size, cost, and power constraints. Firstly, insufficient space impedes the design of efficient and decorrelated MIMO antennas. Second, MIMO traditionally demands each antenna to be fed by its own RF chain, which in turn results in greater hardware complexity, larger power consumption, and higher implementation cost. Among all reduced-complexity and antenna-decoupling schemes proposed so far, the so-called beam-space MIMO has attracted a great deal of interest as a potential solution for addressing both problems concurrently. The key idea therein is to engineer the radiation pattern of a single-feed antenna structure for each symbol period, such that multiple independent symbols directly modulate a predefined set of orthogonal virtual patterns in the far-field, therefore allowing true MIMO transmission using a single RF chain and a compact antenna structure. More important in practice, the transmitted information can be retrieved using a conventional MIMO receiver. However, the transformation of this idea into reality entails dealing with various practical aspects that are commonly overlooked in theoretical and conceptual developments. This dissertation explores the beam-space MIMO concept from the perspective of the antenna engineering, and aims at addressing several key issues associated with the actual design and implementation of beam-space MIMO systems. The early developments of beam-space MIMO concerned switched parasitic arrays. However, the requirement of utilizing several physically-separate radiators is inconvenient for practicable implementation in compact portable devices. To solve this problem, a single-radiator load-modulated antenna solution is proposed in this dissertation. Another primary challenge consists in emulating high-order modulation schemes such as PSK with realistic hardware. Here, an efficient beam-space MIMO strategy is developed, which allows transmitting PSK data streams of any modulation order using only purely reactive reconfigurable loads, and without the need for a symbol-rate dynamic matching network. The approach is illustrated by the design and fabrication of a realistic antenna for QPSK signaling. The performance of a beam-space MIMO system which utilizes the fabricated antenna is then investigated through over-the-air experiments, and compared with conventional MIMO in realistic environments. Embedding information in the radiation patterns, beam-space MIMO systems are expected to be inherently prone to multiplexing performance degradation in the presence of external field perturbation. This makes the study of near-field interaction influence on beam-space MIMO distinct from those carried out for the case of conventional systems. This issue is considered for the first time in this dissertation. Moreover, like any reconfigurable system, a beam-space MIMO system may suffer from bandwidth expansion of the transmitted signals. The final part of the work is directed towards this important issue. To reduce out-of-band radiation effect, a solution based on shaping the time-domain response of the reconfigurable components is presented. The studies presented in this thesis constitute a crucial step towards MIMO with simpler and cheaper hardware for real-life terminals