Benefits of improper signaling for underlay cognitive radio

In this letter we study the potential benefits of improper signaling for a secondary user (SU) in underlay cognitive radio networks. We consider a basic yet illustrative scenario in which the primary user (PU) always transmit proper Gaussian signals and has a minimum rate constraint. After parameterizing the SU transmit signal in terms of its power and circularity coefficient (which measures the degree of impropriety), we prove that the SU improves its rate by transmitting improper signals only when the ratio of the squared modulus between the SU-PU interference link and the SU direct link exceeds a given threshold. As a by-product of this analysis, we obtain the optimal circularity coefficient that must be used by the SU depending on its power budget. Some simulation results show that the SU benefits from the transmission of improper signals especially when the PU is not highly loaded.C. Lameiro and I. Santamaría have received funding from the Spanish Government (MICINN) under projects CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 CSD2008-00010 (COMONSENS), TEC2013-47141-C4-3-R (RACHEL) and FPU Grant AP2010-2189; and also from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) under its programm ”Research grants for doctoral candidates and young academics and scientists”. P. Schreier receives financial support from the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach foundation, under its program ”Return of German scientists from abroad”

Spectrum Sharing Opportunities of Full-Duplex Systems using Improper Gaussian Signaling

Sharing the licensed spectrum of full-duplex (FD) primary users (PU) brings strict limitations on the underlay cognitive radio operation. Particularly, the self interference may overwhelm the PU receiver and limit the opportunity of secondary users (SU) to access the spectrum. Improper Gaussian signaling (IGS) has demonstrated its superiority in improving the performance of interference channel systems. Throughout this paper, we assume a FD PU pair that uses proper Gaussian signaling (PGS), and a half-duplex SU pair that uses IGS. The objective is to maximize the SU instantaneous achievable rate while meeting the PU quality-of-service. To this end, we propose a simplified algorithm that optimizes the SU signal parameters, i.e, the transmit power and the circularity coefficient, which is a measure of the degree of impropriety of the SU signal, to achieve the design objective. Numerical results show the merits of adopting IGS compared with PGS for the SU especially with the existence of week PU direct channels and/or strong SU interference channels

Improper signaling for SISO two-user interference channels with additive asymmetric hardware distortion

Hardware non-idealities are among the main performance restrictions for upcoming wireless communication systems. Asymmetric hardware distortions (HWD) happen when the impairments of the I/Q branches are correlated or imbalanced, which in turn generate improper additive interference at the receiver side. When the interference is improper, as well as in other interference-limited scenarios, improper Gaussian signaling (IGS) has been shown to provide rate and/or power efficiency benefits. In this paper, we investigate the rate benefits of IGS in a two-user interference channel (IC) with additive asymmetric HWD when interference is treated as noise. We propose two iterative algorithms to optimize the parameters of the improper transmit signals. We first rewrite the rate region as an pseudo-signal-to-interference-plus-noiseratio (PSINR) region and employ majorization minimization and fractional programming to find a suboptimal solution for the achievable user rates. Then, we propose a simplified algorithm based on a separate optimization of the powers and complementary variances of the users, which exhibits lower computational complexity. We show that IGS can improve the performance of the two-user IC with additive HWD. Our proposed algorithms outperform proper Gaussian signaling and competing IGS algorithms in the literature that do not consider asymmetric HWD.The work of M. Soleymani, C. Lameiro and P. J. Schreier was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grants LA 4107/1-1, SCHR 1384/7-1 and SCHR 1384/8-1. The work of I. Santamaria was supported by MINECO of Spain and AEI/FEDER funds of the E.U., under grant TEC2016-75067-C4-4-R (CARMEN)

Improper Gaussian signaling for the K-user MIMO interference channels with hardware impairments

This paper investigates the performance of improper Gaussian signaling (IGS) for the K-user multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) interference channel (IC) with hardware impairments (HWI). HWI may arise due to imperfections in the devices like I/Q imbalance, phase noise, etc. With I/Q imbalance, the received signal is a widely linear transformation of the transmitted signal and noise. Thus, the effective noise at the receivers becomes improper, which means that its real and imaginary parts are correlated and/or have unequal powers. IGS can improve system performance with improper noise and/or improper interference. In this paper, we study the benefits of IGS for this scenario in terms of two performance metrics: achievable rate and energy efficiency (EE). We consider the rate region, the sum-rate, the EE region and the global EE optimization problems to fully evaluate the IGS performance. To solve these non-convex problems, we employ an optimization framework based on majorization-minimization algorithms, which allow us to obtain a stationary point of any optimization problem in which either the objective function and/or constraints are linear functions of rates. Our numerical results show that IGS can significantly improve the performance of the K-user MIMO IC with HWI and I/Q imbalance, where its benefits increase with the number of users, K, and the imbalance level, and decrease with the number of antennas.The work of Mohammad Soleymani and Peter J. Schreier was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under Grant SCHR 1384/8-1. The work of Ignacio Santamaria was supported in part by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion of Spain, and in part by AEI/FEDER funds of the E.U. under Grants TEC2016-75067-C4-4-R (CARMEN) and PID2019-104958RB-C43 (ADELE)

Robust improper signaling for two-user SISO interference channels

It has been shown that improper Gaussian signaling (IGS) can improve the performance of wireless interference-limited systems when perfect channel-state information (CSI) is available. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of IGS against imperfect CSI on the transmitter side in a two-user single-input single-output (SISO) interference channel (IC) as well as in a SISO Z-IC, when interference is treated as noise. We assume that the true channel coefficients belong to a known region around the channel estimates, which we call the uncertainty region. Following a worst-case robustness approach, we study the rate-region boundary of the IC for the worst channel in the uncertainty region. For the two-user IC, we derive a robust design in closed form, which is independent of the phase of the channels by allowing only one of the users to transmit IGS. For the Z-IC, we provide a closed-form design for the transmission parameters by considering an enlarged uncertainty region and allowing both users to employ IGS. In both cases, the IGS-based designs are ensured to perform no worse than proper Gaussian signaling. Furthermore, we show, through numerical examples, that the proposed robust designs significantly outperform non-robust solutions.The work of M. Soleymani, C. Lameiro and P. J. Schreier was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grants LA 4107/1-1 and SCHR 1384/8-1. The work of I. Santamaria was supported by MINECO of Spain and AEI/FEDER funds of the E.U., under grant TEC2016-75067-C4-4-R (CARMEN)