Analysis of Non-Pilot Interference on Link Adaptation and Latency in Cellular Networks

Modern wireless systems such as the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and 5G New Radio (5G NR) use pilot-aided SINR estimates to adapt the transmission mode and the modulation and coding scheme (MCS) of data transmissions, maximizing the utility of the wireless channel capacity. However, when interference is localized exclusively on non-pilot resources, pilot-aided SINR estimates become inaccurate. We show that this leads to congestion due to retransmissions, and in the worst case, outage due to very high block error rate (BLER). We demonstrate this behavior through numerical as well as experimental results with the 4G LTE downlink, which show high BLER and significant throughput detriment in the presence of non-pilot interference (NPI). To provide useful insights on the impact of NPI on low-latency communications, we derive an approximate relation between the retransmission-induced latency and BLER. Our results show that NPI can severely compromise low-latency applications such as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications and 5G NR. We identify robust link adaptation schemes as the key to reliable communications.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication at the 89th IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (IEEE VTC Spring 2019

Probability of Pilot Interference in Pulsed Radar-Cellular Coexistence: Fundamental Insights on Demodulation and Limited CSI Feedback

This paper considers an underlay pulsed radar-cellular spectrum sharing scenario, where the cellular system uses pilot-aided demodulation, statistical channel state information (S-CSI) estimation and limited feedback schemes. Under a realistic system model, upper and lower bounds are derived on the probability that at least a specified number of pilot signals are interfered by a radar pulse train in a finite CSI estimation window. Exact probabilities are also derived for important special cases which reveal operational regimes where the lower bound is achieved. Using these results, this paper (a) provides insights on pilot interference-minimizing schemes for accurate coherent symbol demodulation, and (b) demonstrates that pilot-aided methods fail to accurately estimate S-CSI of the pulsed radar interference channel for a wide range of radar repetition intervals.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Semi-Blind Post-Equalizer SINR Estimation and Dual CSI Feedback for Radar-Cellular Coexistence

Current cellular systems use pilot-aided statistical-channel state information (S-CSI) estimation and limited feedback schemes to aid in link adaptation and scheduling decisions. However, in the presence of pulsed radar signals, pilot-aided S-CSI is inaccurate since interference statistics on pilot and non-pilot resources can be different. Moreover, the channel will be bimodal as a result of the periodic interference. In this paper, we propose a max-min heuristic to estimate the post-equalizer SINR in the case of non-pilot pulsed radar interference, and characterize its distribution as a function of noise variance and interference power. We observe that the proposed heuristic incurs low computational complexity, and is robust beyond a certain SINR threshold for different modulation schemes, especially for QPSK. This enables us to develop a comprehensive semi-blind framework to estimate the wideband SINR metric that is commonly used for S-CSI quantization in 3GPP Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and New Radio (NR) networks. Finally, we propose dual CSI feedback for practical radar-cellular spectrum sharing, to enable accurate CSI acquisition in the bimodal channel. We demonstrate significant improvements in throughput, block error rate and retransmission-induced latency for LTE-Advanced Pro when compared to conventional pilot-aided S-CSI estimation and limited feedback schemes.Comment: 33 pages, 26 figure