Near-Capacity Turbo Coded Soft-decision Aided DAPSK/Star-QAM for Amplify-and-Forward based Cooperative Communications

Multilevel Differential Amplitude and Phase-Shift Keying (DAPSK) schemes do not require any channel estimation, which results in low complexity. In this treatise we derive the soft-output probability formulas required for a soft-decision based demodulation of high-order DAPSK, in order to facilitate iterative detection by exchanging extrinsic information with an outer Turbo Code (TC). Furthermore, when the TC block size is increased, the system operates closer to the channel capacity. Compared to the identical-throughput TC assisted 64-ary Differential Phase-Shift Keying (64-DPSK) scheme, the 4-ring based TC assisted 64-ary DAPSK arrangement has a power-efficiency improvement of 2.3 dB at a bit error rate (BER) of 10-5 . Furthermore, when the TC block size is increased, the system operates closer to the channel capacity. More specifically, when using a TC block length of 400 modulated symbols, the 64 DAPSK (4, 16) scheme is 7.56 dB away from its capacity curve, while it had a reduced gap as low as 2.25 dB, when using a longer TC block length of 40 000 modulated symbols. Finally, as a novel application example, the soft-decision M-DAPSK scheme was incorporated into an Amplify-and-Forward (AF) based cooperative communication system, which attains another 4.5 dB SNR improvement for a TC block length of 40 000 modulated symbols

Dispensing with Channel Estimation…

In this article, we investigate the feasibility of noncoherent detection schemes in wireless communication systems as a low-complexity alternative to the family of coherent schemes. The noncoherent schemes require no channel knowledge at the receiver for the detection of the received signal, while the coherent schemes require channel inherently complex estimation, which implies that pilot symbols have to be transmitted resulting in a wastage of the available bandwidth as well as the transmission power

Design guidelines for spatial modulation

A new class of low-complexity, yet energyefficient Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) transmission techniques, namely the family of Spatial Modulation (SM) aided MIMOs (SM-MIMO) has emerged. These systems are capable of exploiting the spatial dimensions (i.e. the antenna indices) as an additional dimension invoked for transmitting information, apart from the traditional Amplitude and Phase Modulation (APM). SM is capable of efficiently operating in diverse MIMO configurations in the context of future communication systems. It constitutes a promising transmission candidate for large-scale MIMO design and for the indoor optical wireless communication whilst relying on a single-Radio Frequency (RF) chain. Moreover, SM may also be viewed as an entirely new hybrid modulation scheme, which is still in its infancy. This paper aims for providing a general survey of the SM design framework as well as of its intrinsic limits. In particular, we focus our attention on the associated transceiver design, on spatial constellation optimization, on link adaptation techniques, on distributed/ cooperative protocol design issues, and on their meritorious variants

Dispensing with channel estimation: differentially modulated cooperative wireless communications

As a benefit of bypassing the potentially excessive complexity and yet inaccurate channel estimation, differentially encoded modulation in conjunction with low-complexity noncoherent detection constitutes a viable candidate for user-cooperative systems, where estimating all the links by the relays is unrealistic. In order to stimulate further research on differentially modulated cooperative systems, a number of fundamental challenges encountered in their practical implementations are addressed, including the time-variant-channel-induced performance erosion, flexible cooperative protocol designs, resource allocation as well as its high-spectral-efficiency transceiver design. Our investigations demonstrate the quantitative benefits of cooperative wireless networks both from a pure capacity perspective as well as from a practical system design perspective

Differential spatial modulation : low complexity detection and improved error performance.

Master of Science in Electronic Engineering. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 2016.Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems utilize multiple transmit and receive antennas in order to achieve a high spectral efficiency and improved reliability for wireless links. However, MIMO systems suffer from high system complexity and costs, due to inter-channel interference (ICI) at the receiver, the requirement of transmit-antenna synchronization (TAS), and the need for multiple radio frequency (RF) chains. Spatial modulation (SM) is a MIMO system which maintains a high spectral efficiency without suffering from ICI or TAS, while utilizing a single RF chain. However, the SM receiver requires full knowledge of the channel state information (CSI) to achieve optimal error performance, thereby increasing the receiver detection complexity. To overcome this, differential SM (DSM) has been developed which does not require CSI to perform detection. However, the maximum-likelihood (ML) detection for DSM results in excessive computational complexity when the number of transmit antennas is large, and suffers from a 3 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) penalty compared to coherent SM. This dissertation aims to reduce the computational complexity of DSM, and mitigate the 3 dB SNR penalty. A generalized differential scheme based on SM (GD-SM) is proposed, which employs optimal power allocation to reduce the 3 dB SNR penalty. GD-SM divides a frame into a reference part and normal part. The reference part is transmitted at a higher power than the normal part, and is used to encode and decode the information in the normal part. Optimal power allocation is applied to the system, and the results demonstrate that at a bit error rate (BER) of 10−5 and for a frame length of 400, GD-SM is only 0.5 dB behind coherent SM. The frame structure of GD-SM and optimal power allocation is extended to conventional DSM (C-DSM). At a BER of 10−5, a 2.5 dB gain is achieved over C-DSM for a frame length of 400. Furthermore, the frame structure allows for easy implementation of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), which yields an additional gain in error performance. The use of QAM constellations is not possible in C-DSM. A simple, near-ML, low-complexity detector (L-CD) is proposed for DSM. The L-CD exploits the features of the phase shift keying, and amplitude phase shift keying constellations to achieve near-ML error performance, and at least a 98% reduction in computational complexity. The proposed detector is independent of the constellation size, and demonstrates a significantly lower complexity than that of current L-CDs

Differential Coding for MIMO and Cooperative Communications

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems have been studied a lot in the last ten years. They have many promising features like array gain, diversity gain, spatial multiplexing gain, interference reduction, and improved capacity as compared to a single-input single-output (SISO) systems. However, the increasing demand of high data-rate in current wireless communications systems motivated us to investigate new rate-efficient channel coding techniques. In this dissertation, we study differential modulation for MIMO systems. Differential modulation is useful since it avoids the need of channel estimation by the receiver and saves valuable bandwidth with a slight symbol error-rate (SER) performance loss. The effect of channel correlation over differential MIMO system has not been studied in detail so far. It has been shown in the literature that a linear memoryless precoder can be used to improve the performance of coherent MIMO system over correlated channels. In this work, we implement precoded differential modulation for non-orthogonal and orthogonal space-time blocks codes (STBCs) over arbitrarily correlated channels. We design precoders based on pair-wise error probability (PEP) and approximate SER for differential MIMO system. The carrier offsets, which result because of the movement of the receiver or transmitter and/or scatterers, and mismatch between the transmit and receive oscillators, are a big challenge for the differential MIMO system. The carrier offsets make the flat fading channel behave as a time-varying channel. Hence, the channel does not remain constant over two consecutive STBC block transmission time-intervals, which is a basic assumption for differential systems and the differential systems break down. Double-differential coding is a key technique which could be used to avoid the need of both carrier offset and channel estimation. In this work, we propose a double-differential coding for full-rank and square orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBC) with M-PSK constellation. A suboptimal decoder for the double-differentially encoded OSTBC is obtained. We also derive a simple PEP upper bound for the double-differential OSTBC. A precoder is also designed based on the PEP upper bound for the double-differential OSTBC to make it more robust against arbitrary MIMO channel correlations. Cooperative communication has several promising features to become a main technology in future wireless communications systems. It has been shown in the literature that the cooperative communication can avoid the difficulties of implementing actual antenna array and convert the SISO system into a virtual MIMO system. In this way, cooperation between the users allows them to exploit the diversity gain and other advantages of MIMO system at a SISO wireless network. A cooperative communication system is difficult to implement in practice because it generally requires that all cooperating nodes must have the perfect knowledge of the channel gains of all the links in the network. This is infeasible in a large wireless network like cellular system. If the users are moving and there is mismatch between the transmit and receive oscillators, the resulting carrier offset may further degrade the performance of a cooperative system. In practice, it is very difficult to estimate the carrier offset perfectly over SISO links. A very small residual offset error in the data may degrade the system performance substantially. Hence, to exploit the diversity in a cooperative system in the presence of carrier offsets is a big challenge. In this dissertation, we propose double-differential modulation for cooperative communication systems to avoid the need of the knowledge of carrier offset and channel gain at the cooperating nodes (relays) and the destination. We derive few useful SER/bit error rate (BER) expressions for double-differential cooperative communication systems using decode-and-forward and amplify-and-forward protocols. Based on these SER/BER expressions, power allocations are also proposed to further improve the performance of these systems. List of papers included in the dissertation This dissertation is based on the following five papers, referred to in the text by letters (A-E)

EFFICIENT SYMBOL ERROR RATE ANALYSIS OF COOPERATIVE NON-REGENERATIVE RELAY SYSTEMS OVER GENERALIZED FADING CHANNELS

ABSTRAC

Self-concatenated code design and its application in power-efficient cooperative communications

In this tutorial, we have focused on the design of binary self-concatenated coding schemes with the help of EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts and Union bound analysis. The design methodology of future iteratively decoded self-concatenated aided cooperative communication schemes is presented. In doing so, we will identify the most important milestones in the area of channel coding, concatenated coding schemes and cooperative communication systems till date and suggest future research directions