Performance of Asynchronous MC-CDMA Systems with Maximal Ratio Combining in Frequency-Selective Fading Channels

The bit error rate (BER) performance of the asynchronous uplink channel of multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) systems with maximal ratio combining (MRC) is analyzed. The study takes into account the effects of channel path correlations in generalized frequency-selective fading channels. Closed-form BER expressions are developed for correlated Nakagami fading channels with arbitrary fading parameters. For channels with correlated Rician fading paths, the BER formula developed is in one-dimensional integration form with finite integration limits, which is also easy to evaluate. The accuracy of the derived BER formulas are verified by computer simulations. The derived BER formulas are also useful in terms of computing other system performance measures such as error floor and user capacity

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

Multi-carrier CDMA using convolutional coding and interference cancellation

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN016251 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Dispensing with channel estimation: differentially modulated cooperative wireless communications

As a benefit of bypassing the potentially excessive complexity and yet inaccurate channel estimation, differentially encoded modulation in conjunction with low-complexity noncoherent detection constitutes a viable candidate for user-cooperative systems, where estimating all the links by the relays is unrealistic. In order to stimulate further research on differentially modulated cooperative systems, a number of fundamental challenges encountered in their practical implementations are addressed, including the time-variant-channel-induced performance erosion, flexible cooperative protocol designs, resource allocation as well as its high-spectral-efficiency transceiver design. Our investigations demonstrate the quantitative benefits of cooperative wireless networks both from a pure capacity perspective as well as from a practical system design perspective

Scaling up MIMO: Opportunities and Challenges with Very Large Arrays

This paper surveys recent advances in the area of very large MIMO systems. With very large MIMO, we think of systems that use antenna arrays with an order of magnitude more elements than in systems being built today, say a hundred antennas or more. Very large MIMO entails an unprecedented number of antennas simultaneously serving a much smaller number of terminals. The disparity in number emerges as a desirable operating condition and a practical one as well. The number of terminals that can be simultaneously served is limited, not by the number of antennas, but rather by our inability to acquire channel-state information for an unlimited number of terminals. Larger numbers of terminals can always be accommodated by combining very large MIMO technology with conventional time- and frequency-division multiplexing via OFDM. Very large MIMO arrays is a new research field both in communication theory, propagation, and electronics and represents a paradigm shift in the way of thinking both with regards to theory, systems and implementation. The ultimate vision of very large MIMO systems is that the antenna array would consist of small active antenna units, plugged into an (optical) fieldbus.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, October 201

Capacity, coding and interference cancellation in multiuser multicarrier wireless communications systems

Multicarrier modulation and multiuser systems have generated a great deal of research during the last decade. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a multicarrier modulation generated with the inverse Discrete Fourier Transform, which has been adopted for standards in wireless and wire-line communications. Multiuser wireless systems using multicarrier modulation suffer from the effects of dispersive fading channels, which create multi-access, inter-symbol, and inter-carrier interference (MAI, ISI, ICI). Nevertheless, channel dispersion also provides diversity, which can be exploited and has the potential to increase robustness against fading. Multiuser multi-carrier systems can be implemented using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), a flexible orthogonal multiplexing scheme that can implement time and frequency division multiplexing, and using multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA). Coding, interference cancellation, and resource sharing schemes to improve the performance of multiuser multicarrier systems on wireless channels were addressed in this dissertation. Performance of multiple access schemes applied to a downlink multiuser wireless system was studied from an information theory perspective and from a more practical perspective. For time, frequency, and code division, implemented using OFDMA and MC-CDMA, the system outage capacity region was calculated for a correlated fading channel. It was found that receiver complexity determines which scheme offers larger capacity regions, and that OFDMA results in a better compromise between complexity and performance than MC-CDMA. From the more practical perspective of bit error rate, the effects of channel coding and interleaving were investigated. Results in terms of coding bounds as well as simulation were obtained, showing that OFDMAbased orthogonal multiple access schemes are more sensitive to the effectiveness of the code to provide diversity than non-orthogonal, MC-CDMA-based schemes. While cellular multiuser schemes suffer mainly from MAI, OFDM-based broadcasting systems suffer from ICI, in particular when operating as a single frequency network (SFN). It was found that for SFN the performance of a conventional OFDM receiver rapidly degrades when transmitters have frequency synchronization errors. Several methods based on linear and decision-feedback ICI cancellation were proposed and evaluated, showing improved robustness against ICI. System function characterization of time-variant dispersive channels is important for understanding their effects on single carrier and multicarrier modulation. Using time-frequency duality it was shown that MC-CDMA and DS-CDMA are strictly dual on dispersive channels. This property was used to derive optimal matched filter structures, and to determine a criterion for the selection of spreading sequences for both DS and MC CDMA. The analysis of multiple antenna systems provided a unified framework for the study of DS-CDMA and MC-CDMA on time and frequency dispersive channels, which can also be used to compare their performance

Phase noise effects on OFDM : analysis and mitigation

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a promising technique which has high spectrum efficiency and the robustness against channel frequency selectivity. One drawback of OFDM is its sensitivity to phase noise. It has been shown that even small phase noise leads to significant performance loss of OFDM. Therefore, phase noise effects on OFDM systems need to be analyzed and methods be provided to its mitigation. Motivated by what have been proposed in the literature, the exact signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) is derived in this dissertation for arbitrary phase noise levels. In a multiple access environment with multiple phase noise, the closed form of bit error rate (BER) performance is derived as a function of phase noise parameters. Due to the detrimental effects of phase noise on OFDM, phase noise mitigation is quite necessary. Several schemes are proposed to mitigate both single and multiple phase noise. It is shown that, while outperforming conventional methods, these schemes have the performance close to no-phase-noise case. Two general approaches are presented which extend the conventional schemes proposed in the literature, making them special cases of these general approaches. Moreover, different implementation techniques are also presented. Analytical and numerical results are provided to compare the performance of these migitation approaches and implementation techniques. Similar to OFDM, an OFDM system with multiple antennas, i.e., Multiple Input. Multiple Output (MIMO)-OFDM, also suffer severe performance degradation due to phase noise, and what have been proposed in the literature may not be applicable to MIMO-OFDM. Therefore, a new scheme is proposed to mitigate phase noise for MIMO-OFDM, which provides significant performance gains over systems without phase noise mitigation. This scheme provides a very simple structure and achieves adequate performance with high spectrum efficiency, which makes it very attractive for practical implementations

On the performance and capacity of space-time block coded multicarrier CDMA communication systems

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Multi-rate access schemes and successive interference cancellation for wireless multimedia MC-CDMA communications

To catch up with the fast changes of the information challenges, providing multimedia services has become a very important requirement for future wireless communications. A proper system, capable of supporting multi-rate transmissions as well as handling high quality of service (QoS) requirements in hostile wireless communication environments, should be sought. Multi-carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA), a combination of multi-carrier modulation (MCM) and direct-sequence CDMA (DS-CDMA), appears to be one of the most elegant solutions. In this dissertation, four multi-rate access schemes, termed uncoded fixed spreading length (UFSL), coded fixed spreading length (CFSL), multi-code fixed spreading length (MFSL) and variable spreading length (VSL), are constructed for MC-CDMA. Due to different sub-carrier assignment strategies, they present different properties in spectral utilization efficiency (SUE), rate matching capability, receiver structure and bit-error-rate (BER) performance in correlated Rayleigh fading channels. With these schemes, different information traffic such as voice, video and higher rate data can be transmitted seanilessly through one MC-CDMA infrastructure. The performance of the multi-rate MC-CDMA is mainly limited by multiple access interference (MAI). For example, in the MFSL MC-CDMA systems, the interference is not only presented among different users, but also among different symbols of the same user transmitted in parallel on different spreading codes. To mitigate this problem, a nonlinear zero-forcing successive interference cancellation (ZF-SIC) receiver and a minimum mean square error SIC (MMSE-SIC) receiver are applied in the MFSL MC-CDMA systems. It is well known that SIC is sensitive to the receive power distribution. By providing channel state information (CSI) at the receiver and reliable feedback of power distribution from the receiver to the transmitter, SIC can be integrated with power distribution control (PDC), which improves the system capacity significantly. In this dissertation, the PDC algorithms, under both a short-term power constraint (STPC) and a long-term power constraint (LTPC) are investigated for two different SIC receivers. For the ZF-SIC receiver, the PDC under the equal BER criterion, which ensures the same performance after SIC for all parallel transmit symbols, is first considered. It is found that for a multi-code system, such equal BER PDC is only suboptimal from the viewpoint of minimizing each user\u27s BER, hence, an optimal PDC algorithm is proposed, which significantly outperforms the equal BER PDC, particularly under the STPC and highly-loaded systems. For the MMSE-SIC, the PDC under the equal BER criterion is derived, which cancels interference very effectively, resulting in a performance of a fully-loaded system close to the single user bound (SUB). In comparison to the nonlinear matched-filter SIC (MF-SIC) with the equal BER PDC, studied extensively in the literature, the ZF-SIC and MMSE-SIC with the proposed PDC algorithms present remarkable performance advantage. Finally, the effect of channel estimation errors (CEE) on the performance of the MMSE-SIC with the equal BER PDC is analyzed. A method of second-order approximation is used to estimate the mean excess MSE (MEMSE) of the parallel transmit symbols, under a given decision order. The approximation accuracy is confirmed by simulation results. Furthermore, it is also interesting to find out that the MMSE-SIC with the equal BER PDC presents significant robustness to CEE