A General Framework for Analyzing, Characterizing, and Implementing Spectrally Modulated, Spectrally Encoded Signals

Fourth generation (4G) communications will support many capabilities while providing universal, high speed access. One potential enabler for these capabilities is software defined radio (SDR). When controlled by cognitive radio (CR) principles, the required waveform diversity is achieved via a synergistic union called CR-based SDR. Research is rapidly progressing in SDR hardware and software venues, but current CR-based SDR research lacks the theoretical foundation and analytic framework to permit efficient implementation. This limitation is addressed here by introducing a general framework for analyzing, characterizing, and implementing spectrally modulated, spectrally encoded (SMSE) signals within CR-based SDR architectures. Given orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a 4G candidate signal, OFDM-based signals are collectively classified as SMSE since modulation and encoding are spectrally applied. The proposed framework provides analytic commonality and unification of SMSE signals. Applicability is first shown for candidate 4G signals, and resultant analytic expressions agree with published results. Implementability is then demonstrated in multiple coexistence scenarios via modeling and simulation to reinforce practical utility

Energy efficient design of an adaptive switching algorithm for the iterative-MIMO receiver

An efficient design dedicated for iterative-multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) receiver systems is now imperative in our world since data demands are increasing tremendously in wireless networks. This puts a massive burden on the signal processing power especially in small receiver systems where power sources are often shared or limited. This thesis proposes an attractive solution to both the wireless signal processing and the architectural implementation design sides of the problem. A novel algorithm, dubbed the Adaptive Switching Algorithm, is proven to not only save more than a third of the energy consumption in the algorithmic design, but is also able to achieve an energy reduction of more than 50% in terms of processing power when the design is mapped onto state-of-the-art programmable hardware. Simulations are based in MatlabTM using the Monte Carlo approach, where multiple additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels for both fast and slow fading environments were investigated. The software selects the appropriate detection algorithm depending on the current channel conditions. The design for the hardware is based on the latest field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) hardware from Xilinx R , specifically the Virtex-5 and Virtex-7 chipsets. They were chosen during the experimental phase to verify the results in order to examine trends for energy consumption in the proposed algorithm design. Savings come from dynamic allocation of the hardware resources by implementing power minimization techniques depending on the processing requirements of the system. Having demonstrated the feasibility of the algorithm in controlled environments, realistic channel conditions were simulated using spatially correlated MIMO channels to test the algorithm’s readiness for real-world deployment. The proposed algorithm is placed in both the MIMO detector and the iterative-decoder blocks of the receiver. When the final full receiver design setup is implemented, it shows that the key to energy saving lies in the fact that both software and hardware components of the Adaptive Switching Algorithm adopt adaptivity in the respective designs. The detector saves energy by selecting suitable detection schemes while the decoder provides adaptivity by limiting the number of decoding iterations, both of which are updated in real-time. The overall receiver can achieve more than 70% energy savings in comparison to state-of-the-art iterative-MIMO receivers and thus it can be concluded that this level of ‘intelligence’ is an important direction towards a more efficient iterative-MIMO receiver designs in the future

Hybrid solutions to instantaneous MIMO blind separation and decoding: narrowband, QAM and square cases

Future wireless communication systems are desired to support high data rates and high quality transmission when considering the growing multimedia applications. Increasing the channel throughput leads to the multiple input and multiple output and blind equalization techniques in recent years. Thereby blind MIMO equalization has attracted a great interest.Both system performance and computational complexities play important roles in real time communications. Reducing the computational load and providing accurate performances are the main challenges in present systems. In this thesis, a hybrid method which can provide an affordable complexity with good performance for Blind Equalization in large constellation MIMO systems is proposed first. Saving computational cost happens both in the signal sep- aration part and in signal detection part. First, based on Quadrature amplitude modulation signal characteristics, an efficient and simple nonlinear function for the Independent Compo- nent Analysis is introduced. Second, using the idea of the sphere decoding, we choose the soft information of channels in a sphere, and overcome the so- called curse of dimensionality of the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm and enhance the final results simultaneously. Mathematically, we demonstrate in the digital communication cases, the EM algorithm shows Newton -like convergence.Despite the widespread use of forward -error coding (FEC), most multiple input multiple output (MIMO) blind channel estimation techniques ignore its presence, and instead make the sim- plifying assumption that the transmitted symbols are uncoded. However, FEC induces code structure in the transmitted sequence that can be exploited to improve blind MIMO channel estimates. In final part of this work, we exploit the iterative channel estimation and decoding performance for blind MIMO equalization. Experiments show the improvements achievable by exploiting the existence of coding structures and that it can access the performance of a BCJR equalizer with perfect channel information in a reasonable SNR range. All results are confirmed experimentally for the example of blind equalization in block fading MIMO systems

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

Adaptive Bit Allocation With Reduced Feedback for Wireless Multicarrier Transceivers

With the increasing demand in the wireless mobile applications came a growing need to transmit information quickly and accurately, while consuming more and more bandwidth. To address this need, communication engineers started employing multicarrier modulation in their designs, which is suitable for high data rate transmission. Multicarrier modulation reduces the system's susceptibility to the frequency-selective fading channel, by transforming it into a collection of approximately flat subchannels. As a result, this makes it easier to compensate for the distortion introduced by the channel. This thesis concentrates on techniques for saving bandwidth usage when employing adaptive multicarrier modulation, where subcarrier parameters (bit and energy allocations) are modulated based on the channel state information feedback obtained from previous burst. Although bit and energy allocations can substantially increase error robustness and throughput of the system, the feedback information required at both ends of the transceiver can be large. The objective of this work is to compare different feedback compression techniques that could reduce the amount of feedback information required to perform adaptive bit and energy allocation in multicarrier transceivers. This thesis employs an approach for reducing the number of feedback transmissions by exploiting the time-correlation properties of a wireless channel and placing a threshold check on bit error rate (BER) values. Using quantization and source coding techniques, such as Huffman coding, Run length encoding and LZWalgorithms, the amount of feedback information has been compressed. These calculations have been done for different quantization levels to understand the relationship between quantization levels and system performance. These techniques have been applied to both OFDM and MIMO-OFDM systems

Advanced Trends in Wireless Communications

Physical limitations on wireless communication channels impose huge challenges to reliable communication. Bandwidth limitations, propagation loss, noise and interference make the wireless channel a narrow pipe that does not readily accommodate rapid flow of data. Thus, researches aim to design systems that are suitable to operate in such channels, in order to have high performance quality of service. Also, the mobility of the communication systems requires further investigations to reduce the complexity and the power consumption of the receiver. This book aims to provide highlights of the current research in the field of wireless communications. The subjects discussed are very valuable to communication researchers rather than researchers in the wireless related areas. The book chapters cover a wide range of wireless communication topics