Limited Feedback Techniques in Multiple Antenna Wireless Communication Systems

Multiple antenna systems provide spatial multiplexing and diversity benefits.These systems also offer beamforming and interference mitigation capabilities in single-user (SU) and multi-user (MU) scenarios, respectively. Although diversity can be achieved without channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter using space-time codes, the knowledge of instantaneous CSI at the transmitter is essential to the above mentioned gains. In frequency division duplexing (FDD) systems, limited feedback techniques are employed to obtain CSI at the transmitter from the receiver using a low-rate link. As a consequence, CSI acquired by the transmitter in such manner have errors due to channel estimation and codebook quantization at the receiver, resulting in performance degradation of multi-antenna systems. In this thesis, we examine CSI inaccuracies due to codebook quantization errors and investigate several other aspects of limited feedback in SU, MU and multicell wireless communication systems with various channel models. For SU multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, we examine the capacity loss using standard codebooks. In particular, we consider single-stream and two-stream MIMO transmissions and derive capacity loss expressions in terms of minimum squared chordal distance for various MIMO receivers. Through simulations, we investigate the impact of codebook quantization errors on the capacity performance in uncorrelated Rayleigh, spatially correlated Rayleigh and standardized MIMO channels. This work motivates the need of effective codebook design to reduce the codebook quantization errors in correlated channels. Subsequently, we explore the improvements in the design of codebooks in temporally and spatially correlated channels for MU multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems, by employing scaling and rotation techniques. These codebooks quantize instantaneous channel direction information (CDI) and are referred as differential codebooks in the thesis. We also propose various adaptive scaling techniques for differential codebooks where packing density of codewords in the differential codebook are altered according to the channel condition, in order to reduce the quantization errors. The proposed differential codebooks improve the spectral efficiency of the system by minimizing the codebook quantization errors in spatially and temporally correlated channels. Later, we broaden the scope to massive MISO systems and propose trellis coded quantization (TCQ) schemes to quantize CDI. Unlike conventional codebook approach, the TCQ scheme does not require exhaustive search to select an appropriate codeword, thus reducing computational complexity and memory requirement at the receiver. The proposed TCQ schemes yield significant performance improvements compared to the existing TCQ based limited feedback schemes in both temporally and spatially correlated channels. Finally, we investigate interference coordination for multicell MU MISO systems using regularized zero-forcing (RZF) precoding. We consider random vector quantization (RVQ) codebooks and uncorrelated Rayleigh channels. We derive expected SINR approximations for perfect CDI and RVQ codebook-based CDI. We also propose an adaptive bit allocation scheme which aims to minimize the network interference and moreover, improves the spectral efficiency compared to equal bit allocation and coordinated zero-forcing (ZF) based adaptive bit allocation schemes

Interference Alignment and Cancellation in Wireless Communication Systems

The Shannon capacity of wireless networks has a fundamental importance for network information theory. This area has recently seen remarkable progress on a variety of problems including the capacity of interference networks, X networks, cellular networks, cooperative communication networks and cognitive radio networks. While each communication scenario has its own characteristics, a common reason of these recent developments is the new idea of interference alignment. The idea of interference alignment is to consolidate the interference into smaller dimensions of signal space at each receiver and use the remaining dimensions to transmit the desired signals without any interference. However, perfect alignment of interference requires certain assumptions, such as perfect channel state information at transmitter and receiver, perfect synchronization and feedback. Today’s wireless communication systems, on the other and, do not encounter such ideal conditions. In this thesis, we cover a breadth of topics of interference alignment and cancellation schemes in wireless communication systems such as multihop relay networks, multicell networks as well as cooperation and optimisation in such systems. Our main contributions in this thesis can be summarised as follows: • We derive analytical expressions for an interference alignment scheme in a multihop relay network with imperfect channel state information, and investigate the impact of interference on such systems where interference could accumulate due to the misalignment at each hop. • We also address the dimensionality problem in larger wireless communication systems such as multi-cellular systems. We propose precoding schemes based on maximising signal power over interference and noise. We show that these precoding vectors would dramatically improve the rates for multi-user cellular networks in both uplink and downlink, without requiring an excessive number of dimensions. Furthermore, we investigate how to improve the receivers which can mitigate interference more efficiently. • We also propose partial cooperation in an interference alignment and cancellation scheme. This enables us to assess the merits of varying mixture of cooperative and non-cooperative users and the gains achievable while reducing the overhead of channel estimation. In addition to this, we analytically derive expressions for the additional interference caused by imperfect channel estimation in such cooperative systems. We also show the impact of imperfect channel estimation on cooperation gains. • Furthermore, we propose jointly optimisation of interference alignment and cancellation for multi-user multi-cellular networks in both uplink and downlink. We find the optimum set of transceivers which minimise the mean square error at each base station. We demonstrate that optimised transceivers can outperform existing interference alignment and cancellation schemes. • Finally, we consider power adaptation and user selection schemes. The simulation results indicate that user selection and power adaptation techniques based on estimated rates can improve the overall system performance significantly