Modulation Schemes for Cognitive Radio in White Spaces

In this paper we give an overview and a comparison of the possible waveforms for white space applications. Four physical layer schemes for cognitive radio are selected for study: Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), DFT-Spread OFDM (DFTS-OFDM), Constant Envelope OFDM (CE-OFDM) and Filter Bank Multicarrier (FBMC). The comparison is mainly based on the side effects of various non-ideal analog components (power amplifier, local oscillator) and residual synchronization errors such as frequency offset. As we will show, each technique has different sensitivity to the various impairments. The comparisons will be performed via spectral density functions and bit error rates (BER)

Waveforms for the Massive MIMO Downlink: Amplifier Efficiency, Distortion and Performance

In massive MIMO, most precoders result in downlink signals that suffer from high PAR, independently of modulation order and whether single-carrier or OFDM transmission is used. The high PAR lowers the power efficiency of the base station amplifiers. To increase power efficiency, low-PAR precoders have been proposed. In this article, we compare different transmission schemes for massive MIMO in terms of the power consumed by the amplifiers. It is found that (i) OFDM and single-carrier transmission have the same performance over a hardened massive MIMO channel and (ii) when the higher amplifier power efficiency of low-PAR precoding is taken into account, conventional and low-PAR precoders lead to approximately the same power consumption. Since downlink signals with low PAR allow for simpler and cheaper hardware, than signals with high PAR, therefore, the results suggest that low-PAR precoding with either single-carrier or OFDM transmission should be used in a massive MIMO base station

Nonlinear Precoding for Phase-Quantized Constant-Envelope Massive MU-MIMO-OFDM

We propose a nonlinear phase-quantized constant-envelope precoding algorithm for the massive multi-user (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink. Specifically, we adapt the squared-infinity norm Douglas-Rachford splitting (SQUID) precoder to systems that use oversampling digital-to-analog converters (DACs) at the base station (BS) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) to communicate over frequency-selective channels. We demonstrate that the proposed SQUID-OFDM precoder is able to generate transmit signals that are constrained to constant envelope, which enables the use of power-efficient analog radio-frequency circuitry at the BS. By quantizing the phase of the resulting constant-envelope signal, we obtain a finite-cardinality transmit signal that can be synthesized by low-resolution (e.g., 1-bit) DACs. We use error-rate simulations to demonstrate the superiority of SQUID-OFDM over linear-quantized precoders for massive MU-MIMO-OFDM systems

On the Detection of CE-OFDM Signals

In this letter, we study the optimum performance of constant envelope orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CE-OFDM) signals in both ideal additive white Gaussian noise channels and frequency-selective channels, and we compare it to the performance of conventional CE-OFDM receivers based on a phase detector. It is shown that the phase detector can achieve optimum performance, but only in scenarios where the power efficiency is very low. For this reason, the use of CE-OFDM schemes in power-constrained scenarios may demand other type of receivers, such as optimum-based receiver

On the peak-to-average power of OFDM signals based on oversampling

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) introduces large amplitude variations in time, which can result in significant signal distortion in the presence of nonlinear amplifiers. We introduce a new bound for the peak of the continuous envelope of an OFDM signal, based on the maximum of its corresponding oversampled sequence; it is shown to be very tight as the oversampling rate increases. The bound is then used to derive a closed-form probability upper bound for the complementary cumulative distribution function of the peak-to-mean envelope power ratio of uncoded OFDM signals for sufficiently large numbers of subcarriers. As another application of the bound for oversampled sequences, we propose tight relative error bounds for computation of the peak power using two main methods: the oversampled inverse fast Fourier transform and the method introduced for coded systems based on minimum distance decoding of the code

PAR-Aware Large-Scale Multi-User MIMO-OFDM Downlink

We investigate an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based downlink transmission scheme for large-scale multi-user (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems. The use of OFDM causes a high peak-to-average (power) ratio (PAR), which necessitates expensive and power-inefficient radio-frequency (RF) components at the base station. In this paper, we present a novel downlink transmission scheme, which exploits the massive degrees-of-freedom available in large-scale MU-MIMO-OFDM systems to achieve low PAR. Specifically, we propose to jointly perform MU precoding, OFDM modulation, and PAR reduction by solving a convex optimization problem. We develop a corresponding fast iterative truncation algorithm (FITRA) and show numerical results to demonstrate tremendous PAR-reduction capabilities. The significantly reduced linearity requirements eventually enable the use of low-cost RF components for the large-scale MU-MIMO-OFDM downlink.Comment: To appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication

On the Peak-to-Mean Envelope Power Ratio of Phase-Shifted Binary Codes

The peak-to-mean envelope power ratio (PMEPR) of a code employed in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems can be reduced by permuting its coordinates and by rotating each coordinate by a fixed phase shift. Motivated by some previous designs of phase shifts using suboptimal methods, the following question is considered in this paper. For a given binary code, how much PMEPR reduction can be achieved when the phase shifts are taken from a 2^h-ary phase-shift keying (2^h-PSK) constellation? A lower bound on the achievable PMEPR is established, which is related to the covering radius of the binary code. Generally speaking, the achievable region of the PMEPR shrinks as the covering radius of the binary code decreases. The bound is then applied to some well understood codes, including nonredundant BPSK signaling, BCH codes and their duals, Reed-Muller codes, and convolutional codes. It is demonstrated that most (presumably not optimal) phase-shift designs from the literature attain or approach our bound.Comment: minor revisions, accepted for IEEE Trans. Commun