Exploring the hot-carrier effect on the wireless transceivers

Phase noise can be regarded as the most severe cause of performance degradation in the wireless communication systems. The hot-carriers (HCs), found in the CMOS synchronization circuits, are the high-energy charge carriers that degrade the MOSFET devices’ performance by increasing the threshold voltage required to operate the MOSFETs. The HC effect manifests itself as the phase noise whose level increases with the continued MOSFET operation and such increases result in the performance degradation of the voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) built on the MOSFETs. The HC effect is particularly evident in the short-channel MOSFET devices. In this dissertation, we analyze the wireless transceiver performances in the presence of the synchronization errors induced by the HC effect, for both single-carrier and multi-carrier communication systems. We derive the relationship between the corresponding system performances and the HC effect in terms of a crucial parameter, the MOSFET threshold voltage. We employ a new phase noise model for the wireless systems influenced by the HC effect, which is based on a new precise phase noise mask function. In addition, we analyze the impact of the phase noise arising from the HC effect on the single-carrier wireless systems in terms of the BER and the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). We derive the exact BER expression and show the SINR degradation for the QPSK systems that suffer from the phase noise. We apply Monte Carlo simulations to verify our analysis. To study the HC effect thoroughly, we simplify the BER expression as a new asymptotical analysis as the signal-to-noise ratio approaches to infinity and obtain the lower bound of the achievable BER for the single-carrier wireless systems. For multi-carrier systems, we focus our discussions on the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. According to our simulations, we show that the bit-error-rate (BER) evaluation for OFDM using our new phase noise model in the presence of the HCs can be very different up to three orders-of-magnitude from the existing models disregarding the HCs. We have also found that the ICI self-cancellation coding is very effective for combating the phase noise in the OFDM systems

AirSync: Enabling Distributed Multiuser MIMO with Full Spatial Multiplexing

The enormous success of advanced wireless devices is pushing the demand for higher wireless data rates. Denser spectrum reuse through the deployment of more access points per square mile has the potential to successfully meet the increasing demand for more bandwidth. In theory, the best approach to density increase is via distributed multiuser MIMO, where several access points are connected to a central server and operate as a large distributed multi-antenna access point, ensuring that all transmitted signal power serves the purpose of data transmission, rather than creating "interference." In practice, while enterprise networks offer a natural setup in which distributed MIMO might be possible, there are serious implementation difficulties, the primary one being the need to eliminate phase and timing offsets between the jointly coordinated access points. In this paper we propose AirSync, a novel scheme which provides not only time but also phase synchronization, thus enabling distributed MIMO with full spatial multiplexing gains. AirSync locks the phase of all access points using a common reference broadcasted over the air in conjunction with a Kalman filter which closely tracks the phase drift. We have implemented AirSync as a digital circuit in the FPGA of the WARP radio platform. Our experimental testbed, comprised of two access points and two clients, shows that AirSync is able to achieve phase synchronization within a few degrees, and allows the system to nearly achieve the theoretical optimal multiplexing gain. We also discuss MAC and higher layer aspects of a practical deployment. To the best of our knowledge, AirSync offers the first ever realization of the full multiuser MIMO gain, namely the ability to increase the number of wireless clients linearly with the number of jointly coordinated access points, without reducing the per client rate.Comment: Submitted to Transactions on Networkin