On rate capacity and signature sequence adaptation in downlink of MC-CDMA system

This dissertation addresses two topics in the MC-CDMA system: rate capacity and adaptation of users\u27 signature sequences. Both of them are studied for the downlink communication scenario with multi-code scheme. The purpose of studying rate capacity is to understand the potential of applying MC-CDMA technique for high speed wireless data communications. It is shown that, to maintain high speed data transmission with multi-code scheme, each mobile should cooperatively decode its desired user\u27s encoded data symbols which are spread with different signature sequences simultaneously. Higher data rate can be achieved by implementing dirty paper coding (DPC) to cooperatively encode all users\u27 data symbols at the base station. However, the complexity of realizing DPC is prohibitively high. Moreover, it is found that the resource allocation policy has profound impact on the rate capacity that can be maintained in the system. Nevertheless, the widely adopted proportional resource allocation policy is only suitable for the communication scenario in which the disparity of users\u27 channel qualities is small. When the difference between users\u27 channel qualities is large, one must resort to non-proportional assignment of power and signature sequences. Both centralized and distributed schemes are proposed to adapt users\u27 signature sequences in the downlink of MC-CDMA system. With the former, the base station collects complete channel state information and iteratively adapts all users\u27 signature sequences to optimize an overall system performance objective function, e.g. the weighted total mean square error (WTMSE). Since the proposed centralized scheme is designed such that each iteration of signature sequence adaptation decreases the WTMSE which is lower bounded, the convergence of the proposed centralized scheme is guaranteed. With the distributed signature sequence adaptation, each user\u27s signature sequences are independently adapted to optimize the associated user\u27s individual performance objective function with no regard to the performance of other users in the system. Two distributed adaptation schemes are developed. In one scheme, each user adapts its signature sequences under a pre-assigned power constraint which remains unchanged during the process of adaptation. In the other scheme, pricing methodology is applied so that the transmission power at the base station is properly distributed among users when users\u27 signature sequences are adapted. The stability issue of these distributed adaptation schemes is analyzed using game theory frame work. It is proven that there always exists a set of signature sequences at which no user can unilaterally adapt its signature sequences to further improve its individual performance, given the signature sequences chosen by other users in the system

Toward Massive MIMO 2.0: Understanding Spatial Correlation, Interference Suppression, and Pilot Contamination

Since the seminal paper by Marzetta from 2010, Massive MIMO has changed from being a theoretical concept with an infinite number of antennas to a practical technology. The key concepts are adopted into the 5G New Radio Standard and base stations (BSs) with M = 64 fully digital transceivers have been commercially deployed in sub-6GHz bands. The fast progress was enabled by many solid research contributions of which the vast majority assume spatially uncorrelated channels and signal processing schemes developed for single-cell operation. These assumptions make the performance analysis and optimization of Massive MIMO tractable but have three major caveats: 1) practical channels are spatially correlated; 2) large performance gains can be obtained by multicell processing, without BS cooperation; 3) the interference caused by pilot contamination creates a finite capacity limit, as M → ∞. There is a thin line of papers that avoided these caveats, but the results are easily missed. Hence, this tutorial article explains the importance of considering spatial channel correlation and using signal processing schemes designed for multicell networks. We present recent results on the fundamental limits of Massive MIMO, which are not determined by pilot contamination but the ability to acquire channel statistics. These results will guide the journey towards the next level of Massive MIMO, which we call "Massive MIMO 2.0"

Performance Analysis of Channel-Aware Media Access Control Schemes

This thesis proposes a new Channel-Aware MAC (CA-MAC) protocol that allows more than two simultaneous transmissions to take place within a single wireless collision domain. In this proposed work, Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) system is used to achieve higher spectral efficiency. The MIMO-based PHY layer has been adopted to help in controlling the transmission and to avoid any collisions by using weights gains technique on the antenna transmission, and by recovering any possible collisions using ZigZag decoding. In order to develop CA-MAC algorithm, to exploit the full potential of MIMO system, the library of 802.11x standard has been modified. NS-2 based simulations were conducted to study the performance of the proposed system. Detailed analysis and comparisons with current protocols schemes are presented

Characterization of MIMO Antennas and Terminals: Measurements in Reverberation Chambers

The reverberation chamber (RC) has drawn attention as a multipath emulator over the past decade for both passive and active over-the-air (OTA) tests. The overview of this thesis is given in Chapter 1. Although the main purpose of this thesis is characterization of MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) terminals based on RC measurements, it is of importance to know under which channel condition the device has been tested. Parameters that are used to characterize the channel in a multipath environment are coherence bandwidth, delay spread, coherence time, Doppler spread, coherence distance and angular spread. In a normal RC, angular of arrival distribution is almost uniform. The corresponding coherence distances for different antennas can be derived at ease based on the a priori knowledge of the uniform angular distribution. Therefore, the main tasks of RC channel characterization are to determine coherence bandwidth, RMS delay spread, coherence time and Doppler spread. These studies are given in Chapter 2. For multi-port antennas used in MIMO systems, relevant characterizations are correlation, embedded radiation efficiency, diversity gain, and MIMO capacity, all of which can be measured in a RC. In order to compare the RC measurements with that of an anechoic chamber (AC), two methods for evaluations of AC measurement-based maximum ratio combining (MRC) diversity gain and MIMO capacity are presented correspondingly. After examining these two methods, they are applied, respectively, to a wideband multi-port antenna that is measured in both AC and RC. Comparisons show good agreements. Furthermore, a throughput measurement of a LTE (long term evolution) dongle is tested in the RC. A corresponding throughput model is presented. Simple as it is, this model can be used to predict the measurement results well. All of these are studied in Chapter 3. For both passive and active OTA tests, the measurement accuracy is of great importance. Previous RC measurement uncertainty works believed that the RC accuracy depends only on the independent sample number. This thesis, however, shows that the RC accuracy depends not only on the independent sample number, but also on the Rician K-factor, i.e. the power ratio of unstirred electromagnetic (EM) fields to the stirred ones, and that the K-factor represents a residual error in RC measurements. It is also proven on practical chambers that accuracy can be improved either by reducing the K-factor, or by introducing stirring methods that reduce it, such as platform and polarization stirring. This work is presented in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 concludes this thesis

Exploiting diversity in wireless channels with bit-interleaved coded modulation and iterative decoding (BICM-ID)

This dissertation studies a state-of-the-art bandwidth-efficient coded modulation technique, known as bit interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID), together with various diversity techniques to dramatically improve the performance of digital communication systems over wireless channels. For BICM-ID over a single-antenna frequency non-selective fading channel, the problem of mapping over multiple symbols, i.e., multi-dimensional (multi-D) mapping, with 8-PSK constellation is investigated. An explicit algorithm to construct a good multi-D mapping of 8-PSK to improve the asymptotic performance of BICM-ID systems is introduced. By comparing the performance of the proposed mapping with an unachievable lower bound, it is conjectured that the proposed mapping is the global optimal mapping. The superiority of the proposed mapping over the best conventional (1-dimensional complex) mapping and the multi-D mapping found previously by computer search is thoroughly demonstrated. In addition to the mapping issue in single-antenna BICM-ID systems, the use of signal space diversity (SSD), also known as linear constellation precoding (LCP), is considered in BICM-ID over frequency non-selective fading channels. The performance analysis of BICM-ID and complex N-dimensional signal space diversity is carried out to study its performance limitation, the choice of the rotation matrix and the design of a low-complexity receiver. Based on the design criterion obtained from a tight error bound, the optimality of the rotation matrix is established. It is shown that using the class of optimal rotation matrices, the performance of BICM-ID systems over a frequency non-selective Rayleigh fading channel approaches that of the BICM-ID systems over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel when the dimension of the signal constellation increases. Furthermore, by exploiting the sigma mapping for any M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation, a very simple sub-optimal, yet effective iterative receiver structure suitable for signal constellations with large dimensions is proposed. Simulation results in various cases and conditions indicate that the proposed receiver can achieve the analytical performance bounds with low complexity. The application of BICM-ID with SSD is then extended to the case of cascaded Rayleigh fading, which is more suitable to model mobile-to-mobile communication channels. By deriving the error bound on the asymptotic performance, it is first illustrated that for a small modulation constellation, a cascaded Rayleigh fading causes a much more severe performance degradation than a conventional Rayleigh fading. However, BICM-ID employing SSD with a sufficiently large constellation can close the performance gap between the Rayleigh and cascaded Rayleigh fading channels, and their performance can closely approach that over an AWGN channel. In the next step, the use of SSD in BICM-ID over frequency selective Rayleigh fading channels employing a multi-carrier modulation technique known as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is studied. Under the assumption of correlated fading over subcarriers, a tight bound on the asymptotic error performance for the general case of applying SSD over all N subcarriers is derived and used to establish the best achievable asymptotic performance by SSD. It is then shown that precoding over subgroups of at least L subcarriers per group, where L is the number of channel taps, is sufficient to obtain this best asymptotic error performance, while significantly reducing the receiver complexity. The optimal joint subcarrier grouping and rotation matrix design is subsequently determined by solving the Vandermonde linear system. Illustrative examples show a good agreement between various analytical and simulation results. Further, by combining the ideas of multi-D mapping and subcarrier grouping, a novel power and bandwidth-efficient bit-interleaved coded modulation with OFDM and iterative decoding (BI-COFDM-ID) in which multi-D mapping is performed over a group of subcarriers for broadband transmission in a frequency selective fading environment is proposed. A tight bound on the asymptotic error performance is developed, which shows that subcarrier mapping and grouping have independent impacts on the overall error performance, and hence they can be independently optimized. Specifically, it is demonstrated that the optimal subcarrier mapping is similar to the optimal multi-D mapping for BICM-ID in frequency non-selective Rayleigh fading environment, whereas the optimal subcarrier grouping is the same with that of OFDM with SSD. Furthermore, analytical and simulation results show that the proposed system with the combined optimal subcarrier mapping and grouping can achieve the full channel diversity without using SSD and provide significant coding gains as compared to the previously studied BI-COFDM-ID with the same power, bandwidth and receiver complexity. Finally, the investigation is extended to the application of BICM-ID over a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system equipped with multiple antennas at both the transmitter and the receiver to exploit both time and spatial diversities, where neither the transmitter nor the receiver knows the channel fading coefficients. The concentration is on the class of unitary constellation, due to its advantages in terms of both information-theoretic capacity and error probability. The tight error bound with respect to the asymptotic performance is also derived for any given unitary constellation and mapping rule. Design criteria regarding the choice of unitary constellation and mapping are then established. Furthermore, by using the unitary constellation obtained from orthogonal design with quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK or 4-PSK) and 8-PSK, two different mapping rules are proposed. The first mapping rule gives the most suitable mapping for systems that do not implement iterative processing, which is similar to a Gray mapping in coherent channels. The second mapping rule yields the best mapping for systems with iterative decoding. Analytical and simulation results show that with the proposed mappings of the unitary constellations obtained from orthogonal designs, the asymptotic error performance of the iterative systems can closely approach a lower bound which is applicable to any unitary constellation and mapping