Multi-rate access schemes and successive interference cancellation for wireless multimedia MC-CDMA communications

To catch up with the fast changes of the information challenges, providing multimedia services has become a very important requirement for future wireless communications. A proper system, capable of supporting multi-rate transmissions as well as handling high quality of service (QoS) requirements in hostile wireless communication environments, should be sought. Multi-carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA), a combination of multi-carrier modulation (MCM) and direct-sequence CDMA (DS-CDMA), appears to be one of the most elegant solutions. In this dissertation, four multi-rate access schemes, termed uncoded fixed spreading length (UFSL), coded fixed spreading length (CFSL), multi-code fixed spreading length (MFSL) and variable spreading length (VSL), are constructed for MC-CDMA. Due to different sub-carrier assignment strategies, they present different properties in spectral utilization efficiency (SUE), rate matching capability, receiver structure and bit-error-rate (BER) performance in correlated Rayleigh fading channels. With these schemes, different information traffic such as voice, video and higher rate data can be transmitted seanilessly through one MC-CDMA infrastructure. The performance of the multi-rate MC-CDMA is mainly limited by multiple access interference (MAI). For example, in the MFSL MC-CDMA systems, the interference is not only presented among different users, but also among different symbols of the same user transmitted in parallel on different spreading codes. To mitigate this problem, a nonlinear zero-forcing successive interference cancellation (ZF-SIC) receiver and a minimum mean square error SIC (MMSE-SIC) receiver are applied in the MFSL MC-CDMA systems. It is well known that SIC is sensitive to the receive power distribution. By providing channel state information (CSI) at the receiver and reliable feedback of power distribution from the receiver to the transmitter, SIC can be integrated with power distribution control (PDC), which improves the system capacity significantly. In this dissertation, the PDC algorithms, under both a short-term power constraint (STPC) and a long-term power constraint (LTPC) are investigated for two different SIC receivers. For the ZF-SIC receiver, the PDC under the equal BER criterion, which ensures the same performance after SIC for all parallel transmit symbols, is first considered. It is found that for a multi-code system, such equal BER PDC is only suboptimal from the viewpoint of minimizing each user\u27s BER, hence, an optimal PDC algorithm is proposed, which significantly outperforms the equal BER PDC, particularly under the STPC and highly-loaded systems. For the MMSE-SIC, the PDC under the equal BER criterion is derived, which cancels interference very effectively, resulting in a performance of a fully-loaded system close to the single user bound (SUB). In comparison to the nonlinear matched-filter SIC (MF-SIC) with the equal BER PDC, studied extensively in the literature, the ZF-SIC and MMSE-SIC with the proposed PDC algorithms present remarkable performance advantage. Finally, the effect of channel estimation errors (CEE) on the performance of the MMSE-SIC with the equal BER PDC is analyzed. A method of second-order approximation is used to estimate the mean excess MSE (MEMSE) of the parallel transmit symbols, under a given decision order. The approximation accuracy is confirmed by simulation results. Furthermore, it is also interesting to find out that the MMSE-SIC with the equal BER PDC presents significant robustness to CEE

Non-atomic Games for Multi-User Systems

In this contribution, the performance of a multi-user system is analyzed in the context of frequency selective fading channels. Using game theoretic tools, a useful framework is provided in order to determine the optimal power allocation when users know only their own channel (while perfect channel state information is assumed at the base station). We consider the realistic case of frequency selective channels for uplink CDMA. This scenario illustrates the case of decentralized schemes, where limited information on the network is available at the terminal. Various receivers are considered, namely the Matched filter, the MMSE filter and the optimum filter. The goal of this paper is to derive simple expressions for the non-cooperative Nash equilibrium as the number of mobiles becomes large and the spreading length increases. To that end two asymptotic methodologies are combined. The first is asymptotic random matrix theory which allows us to obtain explicit expressions of the impact of all other mobiles on any given tagged mobile. The second is the theory of non-atomic games which computes good approximations of the Nash equilibrium as the number of mobiles grows.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, submitted to IEEE JSAC Special Issue on ``Game Theory in Communication Systems'

Parallel Interference Cancellation Based Turbo Space-Time Equalization in the SDMA Uplink

A novel Parallel Interference Cancellation (PIC) based turbo Space Time Equalizer (STE) structure designed for multiple antenna assisted uplink receivers is introduced. The proposed receiver structure allows the employment of non-linear type of detectors such as the Bayesian Decision Feedback (DF) assisted turbo STE or the Maximum Aposteriori (MAP) STE, while operating at a moderate computational cost. Receivers based on the proposed structure outperform the linear turbo detector benchmarker based on the Minimum Mean-Squared Error (MMSE) criterion, even if the latter aims for jointly detecting all transmitters’ signals. Additionally the PIC based receiver is capable of equalizing non-linear binary pre-coded channels. The performance difference between the presented algorithms is discussed using Extrinsic Information Transferfunction (EXIT) charts. Index Terms—PIC, EXIT chart, precoding, Bayesian, STE

Novel multiuser detection and multi-rate schemes for multi-carrier CDMA

A large variety of services is [sic] expected for wireless systems, in particular, high data rate services, such as wireless Internet access. Users with different data rates and quality of service (QoS) requirements must be accommodated. A suitable multiple access scheme is key to enabling wireless systems to support both the high data rate and the integrated multiple data rate transmissions with satisfactory performance and flexibility. A multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) scheme is a promising candidate for emerging broadband wireless systems. MC-CDMA is a hybrid of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and code division multiple access (CDMA). The most salient feature of MC-CDMA is that the rate of transmission is not limited by the wireless channel\u27s frequency-selective fading effects caused by multipath propagation. In MC-CDMA, each chip of the desired user\u27s spreading code, multiplied by the current data bit, is modulated onto a separate subcarrier. Therefore, each subcarrier has a narrow bandwidth and undergoes frequency-flat fading. Two important issues for an MC-CDMA wireless system, multiuser detection and multi-rate access, are discussed in this dissertation. Several advanced receiver structures capable of suppressing multiuser interference in an uplink MC-CDMA system, operating in a frequency-selective fading channel, are studied in this dissertation. One receiver is based on a so-called multishot structure, in which the interference introduced by the asynchronous reception of different users is successfully suppressed by a receiver based on the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) criterion with a built-in de-biasing feature. Like many other multiuser schemes, this receiver is very sensitive to a delay estimation error. A blind adaptive two-stage decorrelating receiver based on the bootstrap algorithm is developed to combat severe performance degradation due to a delay estimation error. It is observed that in the presence of a delay estimation error the blind adaptive bootstrap receiver is more near-far resistant than the MMSE receiver. Furthermore, a differential bootstrap receiver is proposed to extend the limited operating range of the two-stage bootstrap receiver which suffers from a phase ambiguity problem. Another receiver is based on a partial sampling (PS) demodulation structure, which further reduces the sensitivity to unknown user delays in an uplink scenario. Using this partial sampling structure, it is no longer necessary to synchronize the receiver with the desired user. Following the partial sampling demodulator, a minimum mean-square error combining (MMSEC) detector is applied. The partial sampling MMSEC (PS-MMSEC) receiver is shown to have strong interference suppression and timing acquisition capabilities. The complexity of this receiver can be reduced significantly, with negligible performance loss, by choosing a suitable partial sampling rate and using a structure called reduced complexity PS-MMSEC (RPS-MMSEC). The adaptive implementation of these receivers yields a superior rate of convergence and symbol error rate performance in comparison to a conventional MMSEC receiver with known timing. All the above receiver structures are for a single-rate MC-CDMA. Three novel multi-rate access schemes for multi-rate MC-CDMA, fixed spreading length (FSL), coded FSL (CFSL) and variable spreading length (VSL), have been developed. These multi-rate access schemes enable users to transmit information at different data rates in one MC-CDMA system. Hence, voice, data, image and video can be transmitted seamlessly through a wireless infrastructure. The bit error rate performance of these schemes is investigated for both low-rate and high-rate users

High Capacity CDMA and Collaborative Techniques

The thesis investigates new approaches to increase the user capacity and improve the error performance of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) by employing adaptive interference cancellation and collaborative spreading and space diversity techniques. Collaborative Coding Multiple Access (CCMA) is also investigated as a separate technique and combined with CDMA. The advantages and shortcomings of CDMA and CCMA are analysed and new techniques for both the uplink and downlink are proposed and evaluated. Multiple access interference (MAI) problem in the uplink of CDMA is investigated first. The practical issues of multiuser detection (MUD) techniques are reviewed and a novel blind adaptive approach to interference cancellation (IC) is proposed. It exploits the constant modulus (CM) property of digital signals to blindly suppress interference during the despreading process and obtain amplitude estimation with minimum mean squared error for use in cancellation stages. Two new blind adaptive receiver designs employing successive and parallel interference cancellation architectures using the CM algorithm (CMA) referred to as ‘CMA-SIC’ and ‘BA-PIC’, respectively, are presented. These techniques have shown to offer near single user performance for large number of users. It is shown to increase the user capacity by approximately two fold compared with conventional IC receivers. The spectral efficiency analysis of the techniques based on output signal-to interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) also shows significant gain in data rate. Furthermore, an effective and low complexity blind adaptive subcarrier combining (BASC) technique using a simple gradient descent based algorithm is proposed for Multicarrier-CDMA. It suppresses MAI without any knowledge of channel amplitudes and allows large number of users compared with equal gain and maximum ratio combining techniques normally used in practice. New user collaborative schemes are proposed and analysed theoretically and by simulations in different channel conditions to achieve spatial diversity for uplink of CCMA and CDMA. First, a simple transmitter diversity and its equivalent user collaborative diversity techniques for CCMA are designed and analysed. Next, a new user collaborative scheme with successive interference cancellation for uplink of CDMA referred to as collaborative SIC (C-SIC) is investigated to reduce MAI and achieve improved diversity. To further improve the performance of C-SIC under high system loading conditions, Collaborative Blind Adaptive SIC (C-BASIC) scheme is proposed. It is shown to minimize the residual MAI, leading to improved user capacity and a more robust system. It is known that collaborative diversity schemes incur loss in throughput due to the need of orthogonal time/frequency slots for relaying source’s data. To address this problem, finally a novel near-unity-rate scheme also referred to as bandwidth efficient collaborative diversity (BECD) is proposed and evaluated for CDMA. Under this scheme, pairs of users share a single spreading sequence to exchange and forward their data employing a simple superposition or space-time encoding methods. At the receiver collaborative joint detection is performed to separate each paired users’ data. It is shown that the scheme can achieve full diversity gain at no extra bandwidth as inter-user channel SNR becomes high. A novel approach of ‘User Collaboration’ is introduced to increase the user capacity of CDMA for both the downlink and uplink. First, collaborative group spreading technique for the downlink of overloaded CDMA system is introduced. It allows the sharing of the same single spreading sequence for more than one user belonging to the same group. This technique is referred to as Collaborative Spreading CDMA downlink (CS-CDMA-DL). In this technique T-user collaborative coding is used for each group to form a composite codeword signal of the users and then a single orthogonal sequence is used for the group. At each user’s receiver, decoding of composite codeword is carried out to extract the user’s own information while maintaining a high SINR performance. To improve the bit error performance of CS-CDMA-DL in Rayleigh fading conditions, Collaborative Space-time Spreading (C-STS) technique is proposed by combining the collaborative coding multiple access and space-time coding principles. A new scheme for uplink of CDMA using the ‘User Collaboration’ approach, referred to as CS-CDMA-UL is presented next. When users’ channels are independent (uncorrelated), significantly higher user capacity can be achieved by grouping multiple users to share the same spreading sequence and performing MUD on per group basis followed by a low complexity ML decoding at the receiver. This approach has shown to support much higher number of users than the available sequences while also maintaining the low receiver complexity. For improved performance under highly correlated channel conditions, T-user collaborative coding is also investigated within the CS-CDMA-UL system

Capacity, coding and interference cancellation in multiuser multicarrier wireless communications systems

Multicarrier modulation and multiuser systems have generated a great deal of research during the last decade. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a multicarrier modulation generated with the inverse Discrete Fourier Transform, which has been adopted for standards in wireless and wire-line communications. Multiuser wireless systems using multicarrier modulation suffer from the effects of dispersive fading channels, which create multi-access, inter-symbol, and inter-carrier interference (MAI, ISI, ICI). Nevertheless, channel dispersion also provides diversity, which can be exploited and has the potential to increase robustness against fading. Multiuser multi-carrier systems can be implemented using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), a flexible orthogonal multiplexing scheme that can implement time and frequency division multiplexing, and using multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA). Coding, interference cancellation, and resource sharing schemes to improve the performance of multiuser multicarrier systems on wireless channels were addressed in this dissertation. Performance of multiple access schemes applied to a downlink multiuser wireless system was studied from an information theory perspective and from a more practical perspective. For time, frequency, and code division, implemented using OFDMA and MC-CDMA, the system outage capacity region was calculated for a correlated fading channel. It was found that receiver complexity determines which scheme offers larger capacity regions, and that OFDMA results in a better compromise between complexity and performance than MC-CDMA. From the more practical perspective of bit error rate, the effects of channel coding and interleaving were investigated. Results in terms of coding bounds as well as simulation were obtained, showing that OFDMAbased orthogonal multiple access schemes are more sensitive to the effectiveness of the code to provide diversity than non-orthogonal, MC-CDMA-based schemes. While cellular multiuser schemes suffer mainly from MAI, OFDM-based broadcasting systems suffer from ICI, in particular when operating as a single frequency network (SFN). It was found that for SFN the performance of a conventional OFDM receiver rapidly degrades when transmitters have frequency synchronization errors. Several methods based on linear and decision-feedback ICI cancellation were proposed and evaluated, showing improved robustness against ICI. System function characterization of time-variant dispersive channels is important for understanding their effects on single carrier and multicarrier modulation. Using time-frequency duality it was shown that MC-CDMA and DS-CDMA are strictly dual on dispersive channels. This property was used to derive optimal matched filter structures, and to determine a criterion for the selection of spreading sequences for both DS and MC CDMA. The analysis of multiple antenna systems provided a unified framework for the study of DS-CDMA and MC-CDMA on time and frequency dispersive channels, which can also be used to compare their performance

On receiver design for low density signature OFDM (LDS-OFDM)

Low density signature orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (LDS-OFDM) is an uplink multi-carrier multiple access scheme that uses low density signatures (LDS) for spreading the symbols in the frequency domain. In this paper, we introduce an effective receiver for the LDS-OFDM scheme. We propose a framework to analyze and design this iterative receiver using extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts. Furthermore, a turbo multi-user detector/decoder (MUDD) is proposed for the LDS-OFDM receiver. We show how the turbo MUDD is tuned using EXIT charts analysis. By tuning the turbo-style processing, the turbo MUDD can approach the performance of optimum MUDD with a smaller number of inner iterations. Using the suggested design guidelines in this paper, we show that the proposed structure brings about 2.3 dB performance improvement at a bit error rate (BER) equal to 10-5 over conventional LDS-OFDM while keeping the complexity affordable. Simulations for different scenarios also show that the LDS-OFDM outperforms similar well-known multiple access techniques such as multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) and group-orthogonal MC-CDMA

Sparsity Enhanced Decision Feedback Equalization

For single-carrier systems with frequency domain equalization, decision feedback equalization (DFE) performs better than linear equalization and has much lower computational complexity than sequence maximum likelihood detection. The main challenge in DFE is the feedback symbol selection rule. In this paper, we give a theoretical framework for a simple, sparsity based thresholding algorithm. We feed back multiple symbols in each iteration, so the algorithm converges fast and has a low computational cost. We show how the initial solution can be obtained via convex relaxation instead of linear equalization, and illustrate the impact that the choice of the initial solution has on the bit error rate performance of our algorithm. The algorithm is applicable in several existing wireless communication systems (SC-FDMA, MC-CDMA, MIMO-OFDM). Numerical results illustrate significant performance improvement in terms of bit error rate compared to the MMSE solution