High-rate codes that are linear in space and time

Multiple-antenna systems that operate at high rates require simple yet effective space-time transmission schemes to handle the large traffic volume in real time. At rates of tens of bits per second per hertz, Vertical Bell Labs Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST), where every antenna transmits its own independent substream of data, has been shown to have good performance and simple encoding and decoding. Yet V-BLAST suffers from its inability to work with fewer receive antennas than transmit antennas-this deficiency is especially important for modern cellular systems, where a base station typically has more antennas than the mobile handsets. Furthermore, because V-BLAST transmits independent data streams on its antennas there is no built-in spatial coding to guard against deep fades from any given transmit antenna. On the other hand, there are many previously proposed space-time codes that have good fading resistance and simple decoding, but these codes generally have poor performance at high data rates or with many antennas. We propose a high-rate coding scheme that can handle any configuration of transmit and receive antennas and that subsumes both V-BLAST and many proposed space-time block codes as special cases. The scheme transmits substreams of data in linear combinations over space and time. The codes are designed to optimize the mutual information between the transmitted and received signals. Because of their linear structure, the codes retain the decoding simplicity of V-BLAST, and because of their information-theoretic optimality, they possess many coding advantages. We give examples of the codes and show that their performance is generally superior to earlier proposed methods over a wide range of rates and signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs)

Unitary space-time modulation via Cayley transform

A prevoiusly proposed method for communicating with multiple antennas over block fading channels is unitary space-time modulation (USTM). In this method, the signals transmitted from the antennas, viewed as a matrix with spatial and temporal dimensions, form a unitary matrix, i.e., one with orthonormal columns. Since channel knowledge is not required at the receiver, USTM schemes are suitable for use on wireless links where channel tracking is undesirable or infeasible, either because of rapid changes in the channel characteristics or because of limited system resources. Previous results have shown that if suitably designed, USTM schemes can achieve full channel capacity at high SNR and, moreover, that all this can be done over a single coherence interval, provided the coherence interval and number of transmit antennas are sufficiently large, which is a phenomenon referred to as autocoding. While all this is well recognized, what is not clear is how to generate good performing constellations of (nonsquare) unitary matrices that lend themselves to efficient encoding/decoding. The schemes proposed so far either exhibit poor performance, especially at high rates, or have no efficient decoding algorithms. We propose to use the Cayley transform to design USTM constellations. This work can be viewed as a generalization, to the nonsquare case, of the Cayley codes that have been proposed for differential USTM. The codes are designed based on an information-theoretic criterion and lend themselves to polynomial-time (often cubic) near-maximum-likelihood decoding using a sphere decoding algorithm. Simulations suggest that the resulting codes allow for effective high-rate data transmission in multiantenna communication systems without knowing the channel. However, our preliminary results do not show a substantial advantage over training-based schemes

Performance evaluation of cross-layer energy-efficient transmit antenna selection for spatial multiplexing systems

Abstract Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and cognitive radio (CR) are key techniques for present and future high-speed wireless technologies. On the other hand, there are rising energy costs and greenhouse emissions associated with the provision of high-speed wireless communications. Consequently, the design of high-speed energy efficient systems is paramount for next-generation wireless systems. This thesis studies energy-efficient antenna selection for spatial multiplexing multiple-antenna systems from a cross-layer perspective, contrary to the norm, where physical-layer energy efficiency metrics are optimized. The enhanced system performance achieved by cross-layer designs in wireless networks motivates this research. The aim of the thesis is to propose and analyze novel cross-layer energy-efficient transmit antenna selection schemes that enhance energy efficiency and system performance - with regard to throughput, transmission latency, packet error rate and receiver buffer requirements. Firstly, this thesis derives the analytical expression for data link throughput for point-to-point spatial multiplexing multiple-antenna systems - which include MIMO and underlay CR MIMO systems - equipped with linear receivers with N-process stop-and-wait (N-SAW) as the automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol. The performance of cross-layer transmit antenna selection, which maximizes the derived throughput metric, is then analyzed. The impact of packet size, number of SAW processes and the stalling of packets inside the receiver reordering buffer is considered in the investigation. The results show that the cross-layer approach, which takes into account system characteristics at both the data link and physical layers, has superior performance in comparison with the conventional physical-layer approach, which optimizes capacity. Secondly, this thesis proposes a cross-layer energy efficiency metric, based on the derived system throughput. Energy-efficient transmit antenna selection for spatial multiplexing MIMO systems, which maximizes the proposed cross-layer energy efficiency metric, by jointly optimizing the transmit antenna subset and transmit power, subject to spectral efficiency and transmit power constraints, is then introduced and analyzed. Additionally, adaptive modulation is incorporated into the proposed cross-layer scheme to enhance system performance. Cross-layer energyefficient transmit antenna selection for underlay CR MIMO systems, where interference constraints now come into play, is then considered. Lastly, this thesis develops novel reduced complexity versions of the proposed cross-layer energyefficient transmit antenna selection schemes - along with detailed complexity analysis - which shows that the proposed cross-layer approach attains significant energy efficiency and performance gains at affordable computational complexity

Directional Modulation via Symbol-Level Precoding: A Way to Enhance Security

Wireless communication provides a wide coverage at the cost of exposing information to unintended users. As an information-theoretic paradigm, secrecy rate derives bounds for secure transmission when the channel to the eavesdropper is known. However, such bounds are shown to be restrictive in practice and may require exploitation of specialized coding schemes. In this paper, we employ the concept of directional modulation and follow a signal processing approach to enhance the security of multi-user MIMO communication systems when a multi-antenna eavesdropper is present. Enhancing the security is accomplished by increasing the symbol error rate at the eavesdropper. Unlike the information-theoretic secrecy rate paradigm, we assume that the legitimate transmitter is not aware of its channel to the eavesdropper, which is a more realistic assumption. We examine the applicability of MIMO receiving algorithms at the eavesdropper. Using the channel knowledge and the intended symbols for the users, we design security enhancing symbol-level precoders for different transmitter and eavesdropper antenna configurations. We transform each design problem to a linearly constrained quadratic program and propose two solutions, namely the iterative algorithm and one based on non-negative least squares, at each scenario for a computationally-efficient modulation. Simulation results verify the analysis and show that the designed precoders outperform the benchmark scheme in terms of both power efficiency and security enhancement.Comment: This manuscript is submitted to IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processin