ALOHA With Collision Resolution(ALOHA-CR): Theory and Software Defined Radio Implementation

A cross-layer scheme, namely ALOHA With Collision Resolution (ALOHA-CR), is proposed for high throughput wireless communications in a cellular scenario. Transmissions occur in a time-slotted ALOHA-type fashion but with an important difference: simultaneous transmissions of two users can be successful. If more than two users transmit in the same slot the collision cannot be resolved and retransmission is required. If only one user transmits, the transmitted packet is recovered with some probability, depending on the state of the channel. If two users transmit the collision is resolved and the packets are recovered by first over-sampling the collision signal and then exploiting independent information about the two users that is contained in the signal polyphase components. The ALOHA-CR throughput is derived under the infinite backlog assumption and also under the assumption of finite backlog. The contention probability is determined under these two assumptions in order to maximize the network throughput and maintain stability. Queuing delay analysis for network users is also conducted. The performance of ALOHA-CR is demonstrated on the Wireless Open Access Research Platform (WARP) test-bed containing five software defined radio nodes. Analysis and test-bed results indicate that ALOHA-CR leads to significant increase in throughput and reduction of service delays

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

Review of Recent Trends

This work was partially supported by the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), through the Regional Operational Programme of Centre (CENTRO 2020) of the Portugal 2020 framework, through projects SOCA (CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-000010) and ORCIP (CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-022141). Fernando P. Guiomar acknowledges a fellowship from “la Caixa” Foundation (ID100010434), code LCF/BQ/PR20/11770015. Houda Harkat acknowledges the financial support of the Programmatic Financing of the CTS R&D Unit (UIDP/00066/2020).MIMO-OFDM is a key technology and a strong candidate for 5G telecommunication systems. In the literature, there is no convenient survey study that rounds up all the necessary points to be investigated concerning such systems. The current deeper review paper inspects and interprets the state of the art and addresses several research axes related to MIMO-OFDM systems. Two topics have received special attention: MIMO waveforms and MIMO-OFDM channel estimation. The existing MIMO hardware and software innovations, in addition to the MIMO-OFDM equalization techniques, are discussed concisely. In the literature, only a few authors have discussed the MIMO channel estimation and modeling problems for a variety of MIMO systems. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been until now no review paper specifically discussing the recent works concerning channel estimation and the equalization process for MIMO-OFDM systems. Hence, the current work focuses on analyzing the recently used algorithms in the field, which could be a rich reference for researchers. Moreover, some research perspectives are identified.publishersversionpublishe

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis dissertation deals with blind modulation identification of quadrature amplitude modulations (QAM) and phase-shift keying (PSK) signals in dual-polarized channels in digital communication systems. The problems addressed in this dissertation are as follows: First, blind modulation identification of QAM and PSK signals in single noisy channels and multipath channels are explored. Second, methods for blind separation of two information streams in a dual-polarized channel and identification of the modulation types of the two information streams are developed. A likelihood-based blind modulation identification for QAM and PSK signals in a single channel with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is developed first. This algorithm selects the modulation type that maximizes a log-likelihood function based on the known probability distribution associated with the phase or amplitude of the received signals for the candidate modulation types. The approach of this paper does not need prior knowledge of carrier frequency or baud rate. Comparisons of theory and simulation demonstrate good agreement in the probability of successful modulation identification under different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Simulation results show that for the signals in AWGN channels containing 10000 symbols and 20 samples per symbol, the system can identify BPSK, QPSK, 8PSK and QAMs of order 16, 32, 64, 128 and 256 with better than 99% accuracy at 4 dB SNR. Under the same condition, the simulation results indicate the two competing methods available in the literature can only reach at most 85% accuracy even at 20 dB SNR for all the modulation types. The simulation results also suggest that when the symbol length decreases, the system needs higher SNRs in order to get accurate identification results. Simulations using different noisy environments indicate that the algorithm is robust to variations of noise environments from the models assumed for derivation of the algorithm. In addition, the combination of a constant modulus amplitude (CMA) equalizer and the likelihood-based modulation identification algorithm is able to identify the QAM signals in multipath channels in a wide range of SNRs. When compared with the results for the signals in AWGN channels, the combination of the CMA equalizer and the likelihood-based modulation identification algorithm needs higher SNRs and longer signal lengths in order to obtain accurate identification results. The second contribution of this dissertation is a new method for blindly identifying PSK and QAM signals in dual-polarized channels. The system combines a likelihood-based adaptive blind source separation (BSS) method and the likelihood-based blind modulation identification method. The BSS algorithm is based on the likelihood functions of the amplitude of the transmitted signals. This system tracks the time-varying polarization coefficients and recovers the input signals to the two channels. The simulation results presented in this paper demonstrate that the likelihood-based adaptive BSS method is able to recover the source signals of different modulation types for a wide range of input SNRs. Comparisons with a natural gradient-based BSS algorithm indicate that the likelihood-based method results in smaller symbol error rates. When a modulation identification algorithm is applied to the separated signals, the overall system is able to identify different PSK and QAM signals with high accuracy at sufficiently high SNRs. For example, with 20,000 symbols, the system identified BPSK and 16-QAM signals with better than 99% accuracy when the input SNR was 8dB and the polarization coefficients rotated with a rate of 1.3 ms. Higher SNRs are needed to obtain similar levels of accuracy when the polarization changes faster or when the number of input symbols is shorter. When compared with the identification results for signals in AWGN channels, the system needs higher SNRs and longer signal length to obtain accurate results for signals in dual-polarized channels

Design and Performance Analysis of the Dynamic Reduction of Intrinsic Interference Suppression and BER using QAM-based FBMC for MU-MIMO Communications

The present research work is focused on the study of co-channel interface with its minimization techniques without influencing its performance, in turn, which is desired to achieve the minimized complexity of Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM)-based Filter Bank Multi-Carrier (FBMC) to minimize the interference and increase the spectral features with consideration of intrinsic features extractions for the ML (Maximum Likelihood) synthesis systems. The valid measures are given various concerns under consideration, to start with the consideration of the evaluation of the Cyclic Prefix Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (CP-OFD performance metrics along with the FBMC/QAM in signal transmission in a dedicated fading channel for the evaluation of the modulation order and BER as a required trade-off for quality assessments. From the results, it can be noted that the proposed FBMC QAM has performed better when compared with conventional FBMC systems. The present research also includes considering and calculating the efficiency of nonlinear channels with the Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) and FBMC/QAM techniques. In continuation, the obtained results are dominating significantly to access the possible solution to meet the efficiency of the proposed system. In the next part of the research, it is considered with implementation of the sub-detector during the downlink of the system with the technique of threshold-driven strategy for better accuracy and minimization of the complexity in terms of ML detection in terms of order of its modulation. The calculations of the proposed technique with better BER are done on the recent MATLAB platform with its simulation demonstration for its detailed observation

Spectrally and Energy Efficient Wireless Communications: Signal and System Design, Mathematical Modelling and Optimisation

This thesis explores engineering studies and designs aiming to meeting the requirements of enhancing capacity and energy efficiency for next generation communication networks. Challenges of spectrum scarcity and energy constraints are addressed and new technologies are proposed, analytically investigated and examined. The thesis commences by reviewing studies on spectrally and energy-efficient techniques, with a special focus on non-orthogonal multicarrier modulation, particularly spectrally efficient frequency division multiplexing (SEFDM). Rigorous theoretical and mathematical modelling studies of SEFDM are presented. Moreover, to address the potential application of SEFDM under the 5th generation new radio (5G NR) heterogeneous numerologies, simulation-based studies of SEFDM coexisting with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are conducted. New signal formats and corresponding transceiver structure are designed, using a Hilbert transform filter pair for shaping pulses. Detailed modelling and numerical investigations show that the proposed signal doubles spectral efficiency without performance degradation, with studies of two signal formats; uncoded narrow-band internet of things (NB-IoT) signals and unframed turbo coded multi-carrier signals. The thesis also considers using constellation shaping techniques and SEFDM for capacity enhancement in 5G system. Probabilistic shaping for SEFDM is proposed and modelled to show both transmission energy reduction and bandwidth saving with advantageous flexibility for data rate adaptation. Expanding on constellation shaping to improve performance further, a comparative study of multidimensional modulation techniques is carried out. A four-dimensional signal, with better noise immunity is investigated, for which metaheuristic optimisation algorithms are studied, developed, and conducted to optimise bit-to-symbol mapping. Finally, a specially designed machine learning technique for signal and system design in physical layer communications is proposed, utilising the application of autoencoder-based end-to-end learning. Multidimensional signal modulation with multidimensional constellation shaping is proposed and optimised by using machine learning techniques, demonstrating significant improvement in spectral and energy efficiencies