An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for Joint Communication and Radar Sensing

Joint communication and radar sensing (JCR) represents an emerging research field aiming to integrate the above two functionalities into a single system, by sharing the majority of hardware, signal processing modules and, in a typical case, the transmitted signal. The close cooperation of the communication and sensing functions can enable significant improvement of spectrum efficiency, reduction of device size, cost and power consumption, and improvement of performance of both functions. Advanced signal processing techniques are critical for making the integration efficient, from transmission signal design to receiver processing. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art on JCR systems from the signal processing perspective. A balanced coverage on both transmitter and receiver is provided for three types of JCR systems, namely, communication-centric, radar-centric, and joint design and optimization

Trellis code-aided high-rate differential space-time block code and enhanced uncoded space-time labeling diversity.

Master of Science in Engineering. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2017.In this dissertation, a trellis code-aided bandwidth efficiency improvement technique for space-time block coded wireless communication systems is investigated. The application of the trellis code-aided bandwidth efficiency improvement technique to differential space-time block codes (DSTBC) results in a high-rate system called trellis code-aided DSTBC (TC-DSTBC). Such a system has not been investigated in open literature to date. Hence, in this dissertation, the mathematical models and design methodology for TC-DSTBC are presented. The two transmit antenna TC-DSTBC system transmits data by using a transmission matrix similar to the conventional DSTBC. The fundamental idea of TC-DSTBC is to use a dynamic mapping rule rather than a fixed one to map additional bits onto the expanded space-time block code (STBC) prior to differential encoding, hence, the additional bits-to-STBC mapping technique, which incorporates trellis coding is proposed for square M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) in order to enhance the bandwidth efficiency without sacrificing the error performance of the conventional DSTBC. The comparison of bandwidth efficiency between TC-DSTBC and the conventional DSTBC show that TC-DSTBC achieves a minimum of 12.5% and 8.3% increase in bandwidth efficiency for 16-QAM and 64-QAM, respectively. Furthermore, the Monte Carlo simulation results show that, at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), the four receive antenna TC- DSTBC retains the bit error rate (BER) performance of the conventional DSTBC with the same number of receive antennas under the same independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rayleigh frequency-flat fading channel and additive white noise (AWGN) conditions for various square M-QAM modulation orders and numbers of additional bits. Motivated by the bandwidth efficiency advantage of TC-DSTBC over the conventional DSTBC, the trellis code-aided bandwidth efficiency improvement technique is extended to the recently developed uncoded space-time labeling diversity (USTLD) system, where a new system referred to as enhanced uncoded space-time labeling diversity (E-USTLD) is proposed. In addition to this, a tight closed form lower-bound is derived to predict the average BER of the E-USTLD system over i.i.d. Rayleigh frequency-flat fading channels at high SNR. The Monte Carlo simulation results validate that the more bandwidth efficient four receive antenna E-USTLD system at the minimum retains the BER performance of the conventional four receive antenna USTLD system under the same fading channel and AWGN conditions for various square M-QAM modulation orders. The bandwidth efficiency improvement for TC-DSTBC and E-USTLD is achieved at the cost of a much higher computational complexity at the receiver due to use of the high-complexity Viterbi algorithm (VA)-based detector. Therefore, the low-complexity (LC) near-maximum-likelihood (near-ML) detection scheme proposed for the conventional USTLD is extended to the E-USTLD detector in order to reduce the magnitude of increase in the computational complexity. The Monte Carlo simulation results show that E-USTLD with a VA-based detector that implements LC near-ML detection attains near optimal BER performance

Millimeter wave picocellular networks: capacity analysis and system design

The explosive growth in demand for wireless mobile data, driven by the proliferationof ever more sophisticated handhelds creating and consuming rich multimedia, calls fororders of magnitude increase in the capacity of cellular data networks. Millimeter wavecommunication from picocellular base stations to mobile devices is a particularly promisingapproach for meeting this challenge because of two reasons. First, there is a largeamount of available spectrum, enabling channel bandwidths of the order of Gigahertz(GHz) which are 1-2 orders of magnitude higher than those in existing WiFi and cellularsystems at lower carrier frequencies. Second, the small carrier wavelength enables therealization of highly directive steerable arrays with a large number of antenna elements,in compact form factors, thus significantly enhancing spatial reuse. Hence, we propose toemploy the 60 GHz unlicensed band for basestation to mobile communication in outdoorpicocells.We first investigate the basic feasibility of such networks, showing that 60GHz linksare indeed viable for outdoor applications. For this purpose, we provided link budgetcalculations along with preliminary simulations which show that despite the commonconcerns about higher oxygen absorption and sensitivity to movement and blockage,picocloud architecture provides availability rate of more than 99%.Next, we explore the idea of increasing spatial reuse by shrinking picocells hopingthat interference is no longer the bottleneck given the highly directive antenna arrays atthis band. Our goal is to estimate the achievable capacity for small picocells along an urban canyon. We consider basestations with multiple faces or sectors, each with one or more antenna arrays. Each such array, termed subarray can employ Radio Frequency(RF) beamforming to communicate with one mobile user at a time. We first focus oncharacterization and modeling the inter-cell interference for one subarray on each face.Our analysis provides a strong indication of very large capacity (in the order of Tbps/km)with a few GHz of bandwidth.Following this, we explore the impact of adding multiple subarrays per face. This leadsto intra-cell interference as well as additional inter-cell interference. While the effect ofadditional inter-cell interference can be quantified within our previous framework, intracellinterference has inherently different features that call for new approaches for analysisand design. We propose a cross-layer approach to suppress the intra-cell interference intwo stages: (a) Physical layer (PHY-layer) method which mitigates interference by jointprecoding and power adaptation and (b) Medium Access Control layer (MAC-layer)method which manages the residual interference by optimizing resource allocation. Wethen estimate the capacity gain over conventional LTE cellular networks and establishthat 1000-fold capacity increase is indeed feasible via mm-wave picocellular networks.Lastly, we examine fundamental signal processing challenges associated with channelestimation and tracking for large arrays, placed within the context of system designfor a mm-wave picocellular network. Maintainance of highly directive links in the faceof blockage and mobility requires accurate estimation of the spatial channels betweenbasestation and mobile users. Here we develop the analytical framework for compressivechannel estimation and tracking. We also address the system level design discussinglink budget, overhead, and inter-cell beacon interference. Simulation results demonstratethat our compressive scheme is able to resolve mm-wave spatial channels with a relativelysmall number of compressive measurements

Analysis and design of physical-layer network coding for relay networks

Physical-layer network coding (PNC) is a technique to make use of interference in wireless transmissions to boost the system throughput. In a PNC employed relay network, the relay node directly recovers and transmits a linear combination of its received messages in the physical layer. It has been shown that PNC can achieve near information-capacity rates. PNC is a new information exchange scheme introduced in wireless transmission. In practice, transmitters and receivers need to be designed and optimized, to achieve fast and reliable information exchange. Thus, we would like to ask: How to design the PNC schemes to achieve fast and reliable information exchange? In this thesis, we address this question from the following works: Firstly, we studied channel-uncoded PNC in two-way relay fading channels with QPSK modulation. The computation error probability for computing network coded messages at the relay is derived. We then optimized the network coding functions at the relay to improve the error rate performance. We then worked on channel coded PNC. The codes we studied include classical binary code, modern codes, and lattice codes. We analyzed the distance spectra of channel-coded PNC schemes with classical binary codes, to derive upper bounds for error rates of computing network coded messages at the relay. We designed and optimized irregular repeat-accumulate coded PNC. We modified the conventional extrinsic information transfer chart in the optimization process to suit the superimposed signal received at the relay. We analyzed and designed Eisenstein integer based lattice coded PNC in multi-way relay fading channels, to derive error rate performance bounds of computing network coded messages. Finally we extended our work to multi-way relay channels. We proposed a opportunistic transmission scheme for a pair-wise transmission PNC in a single-input single-output multi-way relay channel, to improve the sum-rate at the relay. The error performance of computing network coded messages at the relay is also improved. We optimized the uplink/downlink channel usage for multi-input multi-output multi-way relay channels with PNC to maximize the degrees of freedom capacity. We also showed that the system sum-rate can be further improved by a proposed iterative optimization algorithm