Turbo-Coded Adaptive Modulation Versus Space-Time Trellis Codes for Transmission over Dispersive Channels

Decision feedback equalizer (DFE)-aided turbocoded wideband adaptive quadrature amplitude modulation (AQAM) is proposed, which is capable of combating the temporal channel quality variation of fading channels. A procedure is suggested for determining the AQAM switching thresholds and the specific turbo-coding rates capable of maintaining the target bit-error rate while aiming for achieving a highly effective bits per symbol throughput. As a design alternative, we also employ multiple-input/multiple-output DFE-aided space–time trellis codes, which benefit from transmit diversity and hence reduce the temporal channel quality fluctuations. The performance of both systems is characterized and compared when communicating over the COST 207 typical urban wideband fading channel. It was found that the turbo-coded AQAM scheme outperforms the two-transmitter space–time trellis coded system employing two receivers; although, its performance is inferior to the space–time trellis coded arrangement employing three receivers. Index Terms—Coded adaptive modulation, dispersive channels, space–time trellis codes

Efficient DSP and Circuit Architectures for Massive MIMO: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

Massive MIMO is a compelling wireless access concept that relies on the use of an excess number of base-station antennas, relative to the number of active terminals. This technology is a main component of 5G New Radio (NR) and addresses all important requirements of future wireless standards: a great capacity increase, the support of many simultaneous users, and improvement in energy efficiency. Massive MIMO requires the simultaneous processing of signals from many antenna chains, and computational operations on large matrices. The complexity of the digital processing has been viewed as a fundamental obstacle to the feasibility of Massive MIMO in the past. Recent advances on system-algorithm-hardware co-design have led to extremely energy-efficient implementations. These exploit opportunities in deeply-scaled silicon technologies and perform partly distributed processing to cope with the bottlenecks encountered in the interconnection of many signals. For example, prototype ASIC implementations have demonstrated zero-forcing precoding in real time at a 55 mW power consumption (20 MHz bandwidth, 128 antennas, multiplexing of 8 terminals). Coarse and even error-prone digital processing in the antenna paths permits a reduction of consumption with a factor of 2 to 5. This article summarizes the fundamental technical contributions to efficient digital signal processing for Massive MIMO. The opportunities and constraints on operating on low-complexity RF and analog hardware chains are clarified. It illustrates how terminals can benefit from improved energy efficiency. The status of technology and real-life prototypes discussed. Open challenges and directions for future research are suggested.Comment: submitted to IEEE transactions on signal processin

Cramer-Rao bounds in the estimation of time of arrival in fading channels

This paper computes the Cramer-Rao bounds for the time of arrival estimation in a multipath Rice and Rayleigh fading scenario, conditioned to the previous estimation of a set of propagation channels, since these channel estimates (correlation between received signal and the pilot sequence) are sufficient statistics in the estimation of delays. Furthermore, channel estimation is a constitutive block in receivers, so we can take advantage of this information to improve timing estimation by using time and space diversity. The received signal is modeled as coming from a scattering environment that disperses the signal both in space and time. Spatial scattering is modeled with a Gaussian distribution and temporal dispersion as an exponential random variable. The impact of the sampling rate, the roll-off factor, the spatial and temporal correlation among channel estimates, the number of channel estimates, and the use of multiple sensors in the antenna at the receiver is studied and related to the mobile subscriber positioning issue. To our knowledge, this model is the only one of its kind as a result of the relationship between the space-time diversity and the accuracy of the timing estimation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version