A Reduced Complexity Ungerboeck Receiver for Quantized Wideband Massive SC-MIMO

Employing low resolution analog-to-digital converters in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has many advantages in terms of total power consumption, cost and feasibility of such systems. However, such advantages come together with significant challenges in channel estimation and data detection due to the severe quantization noise present. In this study, we propose a novel iterative receiver for quantized uplink single carrier MIMO (SC-MIMO) utilizing an efficient message passing algorithm based on the Bussgang decomposition and Ungerboeck factorization, which avoids the use of a complex whitening filter. A reduced state sequence estimator with bidirectional decision feedback is also derived, achieving remarkable complexity reduction compared to the existing receivers for quantized SC-MIMO in the literature, without any requirement on the sparsity of the transmission channel. Moreover, the linear minimum mean-square-error (LMMSE) channel estimator for SC-MIMO under frequency-selective channel, which do not require any cyclic-prefix overhead, is also derived. We observe that the proposed receiver has significant performance gains with respect to the existing receivers in the literature under imperfect channel state information.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Design of terahertz transceiver schemes for ultrahigh-speed wireless communications

Future ultra-high-speed wireless communication systems face difficult challenges due to the fundamental limitations of current technologies operating at microwave frequencies. Supporting high transmission rates will require the use of more spectral resources that are only available at higher frequencies. Within this context, terahertz (THz) communications have been attracting more and more attention, being considered by the research community as one of the most promising research fields on the topic due to the availability of extensive unused bandwidth segments. However, its widespread use is not yet possible due to some obstacles, such as the high propagation losses that occur in this band and the difficulty in designing devices that can effectively perform both transmission and detection tasks. The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute for the solution of both of the aforementioned problems and to propose novel THz transceiver schemes for ultra-high-speed wireless communications. Three main research areas were addressed: device modelling for the THz; index modulation (IM) based schemes for Beyond 5G (B5G) networks and hybrid precoding designs for THz ultra massive (UM) – multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. The main contributions of this work include the creation of a new design for a reconfigurable THz filter; the proposal of a precoded generalized spatial modulation scheme for downlink MIMO transmissions in B5G networks; the creation of a low-complexity hybrid design algorithm with a near fully-digital performance for multiuser (MU) mmWave/THz ultra massive MIMO systems that can incorporate different analog architectures; and the system-level assessment of cloud radio access network (C-RAN) deployments based on low-complexity hybrid precoding designs for massive MIMO downlink transmissions in B5G networks. The first contribution is especially suited for the implementation of reconfigurable THz filters and optical modulators, since it is based on a simple design, which transits from situations in which it presents a full transparency to situations where it achieves full opacity. Moreover, this approach can also be used for the implementation of simultaneously transmitting and reflecting (STAR) reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) which are important for enabling flexible system designs in RIS-assisted networks. The second contribution showed that the implementation of precoding schemes based on generalised spatial modulations is a solution with a considerable potential for future B5G systems, since it can provide larger throughputs when compared to conventional MU-MIMO schemes with identical spectral efficiencies.The last two contributions showed that through the proposed hybrid design algorithm it becomes possible to replace a fully digital precoder/combiner by a fully-connected or even by a partially-connected architecture (array of subarrays and dynamic array of subarrays), while achieving good tradeoffs between spectral efficiency, power consumption and implementation complexity. These proposals are particularly relevant for the support of UM-MIMO in severely hardware constrained THz systems. Moreover, the capability of achieving significant improvements in terms of throughput performance and coverage over typical cellular networks, when considering hybrid precoding‐based C-RAN deployments in two indoor office scenarios at the THz band, was demonstrated.Os futuros sistemas de comunicação sem fios de velocidade ultra-elevada enfrentam desafios difíceis devido às limitações fundamentais das tecnologias atuais que funcionam a frequências de microondas. O suporte de taxas de transmissão altas exigirá a utilização de mais recursos espectrais que só estão disponíveis em frequências mais elevadas. A banda Terahertz (THz) é uma das soluções mais promissoras devido às suas enormes larguras de banda disponíveis no espectro eletromagnético. No entanto, a sua utilização generalizada ainda não é possível devido a alguns obstáculos, tais como as elevadas perdas de propagação que se verificam nesta banda e a dificuldade em conceber dispositivos que possam desempenhar eficazmente as tarefas de transmissão e deteção. O objetivo desta tese de doutoramento, é contribuir para ambos os problemas mencionados anteriormente e propor novos esquemas de transcetores THz para comunicações sem fios de velocidade ultra-elevada. Três grandes áreas de investigação foram endereçadas, contribuindo individualmente para um todo: a modelação do dispositivo para o THz; esquemas baseados em modulações de índice (IM) para redes pós-5G (B5G) e desenhos de pré-codificadores híbridos para sistemas THz MIMO ultra-massivos. As principais contribuições deste trabalho incluem a criação de um novo design para um filtro THz reconfigurável; a proposta de uma nova tipologia de modulação espacial generalizada pré-codificada para transmissões MIMO de ligação descendente para redes B5G; a criação de um algoritmo de design híbrido de baixa complexidade com desempenho quase totalmente digital para sistemas MIMO multi-utilizador (MU) mmWave/THz ultra massivos que podem incorporar diferentes arquiteturas analógicas e a avaliação das implementações da rede de acesso de rádio na nuvem (C-RAN) com base em designs de pré-codificação híbridos de baixa complexidade para transmissões MIMO de ligação descendente massivas em redes B5G. A primeira contribuição é especialmente adequada para a implementação de filtros THz reconfiguráveis e moduladores óticos, uma vez que se baseia numa concepção mais simples, que transita de situações em que apresenta uma transparência total para situações em que atinge uma opacidade total. Para além disso, esta abordagem também pode ser utilizada para a implementação de superfícies inteligentes reconfiguráveis (RIS) de transmissão e reflexão simultânea (STAR). A segunda contribuição mostrou que a implementação de esquemas de pré-codificação baseados em modulações espaciais generalizadas é uma solução com um potencial considerável para futuros sistemas B5G, uma vez que permite alcançar maiores ganhos em termos de débito binário quando comparado com esquemas convencionais MU-MIMO com eficiências espectrais idênticas. As duas últimas contribuições mostraram que através do algoritmo proposto torna-se possível substituir a utilização de uma arquitectura totalmente digital por uma arquitetura totalmente conectada ou mesmo por uma arquitetura parcialmente conectada (arrays de subarrays e arrays dinâmicos de subarrays), conseguindo-se bons tradeoffs entre eficiência espectral, consumo de energia e complexidade de implementação. Estas propostas são particularmente relevantes para dar suporte a sistemas THz UM-MIMO com restrições severas ao nível de hardware. Demonstrou-se também a capacidade de se alcançar melhorias significativas em termos de débito binário e cobertura em relação a redes celulares típicas, considerando dois cenários na banda THz

Index Modulation Techniques for Energy-efficient Transmission in Large-scale MIMO Systems

This thesis exploits index modulation techniques to design energy- and spectrum-efficient system models to operate in future wireless networks. In this respect, index modulation techniques are studied considering two different media: mapping the information onto the frequency indices of multicarrier systems, and onto the antenna array indices of a platform that comprises multiple antennas. The index modulation techniques in wideband communication scenarios considering orthogonal and generalized frequency division multiplexing systems are studied first. Single cell multiuser networks are considered while developing the system models that exploit the index modulation on the subcarriers of the multicarrier systems. Instead of actively modulating all the subcarriers, a subset is selected according to the index modulation bits. As a result, there are subcarriers that remain idle during the data transmission phase and the activation pattern of the subcarriers convey additional information. The transceivers for the orthogonal and generalized frequency division multiplexing systems with index modulation are both designed considering the uplink and downlink transmission phases with a linear combiner and precoder in order to reduce the system complexity. In the developed system models, channel state information is required only at the base station. The linear combiner is designed adopting minimum mean square error method to mitigate the inter-user-interference. The proposed system models offer a flexible design as the parameters are independent of each other. The parameters can be adjusted to design the system in favor of the energy efficiency, spectrum efficiency, peak-to-average power ratio, or error performance. Then, the index modulation techniques are studied for large-scale multiple-input multiple-output systems that operate in millimeter wave bands. In order to overcome the drawbacks of transmission in millimeter wave frequencies, channel properties should be taken in to account while envisaging the wireless communication network. The large-scale multiple-input multiple-output systems increase the degrees of freedom in the spatial domain. This feature can be exploited to focus the transmit power directly onto the intended receiver terminal to cope with the severe path-loss. However, scaling up the number of hardware elements results in excessive power consumption. Hybrid architectures provide a remedy by shifting a part of the signal processing to the analog domain. In this way, the number of bulky and high power consuming hardware elements can be reduced. However, there will be a performance degradation as a consequence of renouncing the fully digital signal processing. Index modulation techniques can be combined with the hybrid system architecture to compensate the loss in spectrum efficiency to further increase the data rates. A user terminal architecture is designed that employs analog beamforming together with spatial modulation where a part of the information bits is mapped onto the indices of the antenna arrays. The system is comprised a switching stage that allocates the user terminal antennas on the phase shifter groups to minimize the spatial correlation, and a phase shifting stage that maximizes the beamforming gain to combat the path-loss. A computationally efficient optimization algorithm is developed to configure the system. The flexibility of the architecture enables optimization of the hybrid transceiver at any signal-to-noise ratio values. A base station is designed in which hybrid beamforming together with spatial modulation is employed. The analog beamformer is designed to point the transmit beam only in the direction of the intended user terminal to mitigate leakage of the transmit power to other directions. The analog beamformer to transmit the signal is chosen based on the spatial modulation bits. The digital precoder is designed to eliminate the inter-user-interference by exploiting the zero-forcing method. The base station computes the hybrid beamformers and the digital combiners, and only feeds back the digital combiners of each antenna array-user pair to the related user terminals. Thus, a low complexity user architecture is sufficient to achieve a higher performance. The developed optimization framework for the energy efficiency jointly optimizes the number of served users and the total transmit power by utilizing the derived upper bound of the achievable rate. The proposed transceiver architectures provide a more energy-efficient system model compared to the hybrid systems in which the spatial modulation technique is not exploited. This thesis develops low-complexity system models that operate in narrowband and wideband channel environments to meet the energy and spectrum efficiency demands of future wireless networks. It is corroborated in the thesis that adopting index modulation techniques both in the systems improves the system performance in various aspects.:1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Overview and Contribution 2 1.3 Outline 9 2 Preliminaries and Fundamentals 13 2.1 Multicarrier Systems 13 2.2 Large-scale Multiple Input Multiple Output Systems 17 2.3 Index Modulation Techniques 19 2.4 Single Cell Multiuser Networks 22 3 Multicarrier Systems with Index Modulation 27 3.1 Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing 28 3.2 Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing 40 3.3 Summary 52 4 Hybrid Beamforming with Spatial Modulation 55 4.1 Uplink Transmission 56 4.2 Downlink Transmission 74 4.3 Summary 106 5 Conclusion and Outlook 109 5.1 Conclusion 109 5.2 Outlook 111 A Quantization Error Derivations 113 B On the Achievable Rate of Gaussian Mixtures 115 B.1 The Conditional Density Function 115 B.2 Tight Bounds on the Differential Entropy 116 B.3 A Bound on the Achievable Rate 118 C Multiuser MIMO Downlink without Spatial Modulation 121 Bibliograph

Channel estimation techniques for filter bank multicarrier based transceivers for next generation of wireless networks

A dissertation submitted to Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering (Electrical and Information Engineering), August 2017The fourth generation (4G) of wireless communication system is designed based on the principles of cyclic prefix orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) where the cyclic prefix (CP) is used to combat inter-symbol interference (ISI) and inter-carrier interference (ICI) in order to achieve higher data rates in comparison to the previous generations of wireless networks. Various filter bank multicarrier systems have been considered as potential waveforms for the fast emerging next generation (xG) of wireless networks (especially the fifth generation (5G) networks). Some examples of the considered waveforms are orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with offset quadrature amplitude modulation based filter bank, universal filtered multicarrier (UFMC), bi-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (BFDM) and generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM). In perfect reconstruction (PR) or near perfect reconstruction (NPR) filter bank designs, these aforementioned FBMC waveforms adopt the use of well-designed prototype filters (which are used for designing the synthesis and analysis filter banks) so as to either replace or minimize the CP usage of the 4G networks in order to provide higher spectral efficiencies for the overall increment in data rates. The accurate designing of the FIR low-pass prototype filter in NPR filter banks results in minimal signal distortions thus, making the analysis filter bank a time-reversed version of the corresponding synthesis filter bank. However, in non-perfect reconstruction (Non-PR) the analysis filter bank is not directly a time-reversed version of the corresponding synthesis filter bank as the prototype filter impulse response for this system is formulated (in this dissertation) by the introduction of randomly generated errors. Hence, aliasing and amplitude distortions are more prominent for Non-PR. Channel estimation (CE) is used to predict the behaviour of the frequency selective channel and is usually adopted to ensure excellent reconstruction of the transmitted symbols. These techniques can be broadly classified as pilot based, semi-blind and blind channel estimation schemes. In this dissertation, two linear pilot based CE techniques namely the least square (LS) and linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE), and three adaptive channel estimation schemes namely least mean square (LMS), normalized least mean square (NLMS) and recursive least square (RLS) are presented, analyzed and documented. These are implemented while exploiting the near orthogonality properties of offset quadrature amplitude modulation (OQAM) to mitigate the effects of interference for two filter bank waveforms (i.e. OFDM/OQAM and GFDM/OQAM) for the next generation of wireless networks assuming conditions of both NPR and Non-PR in slow and fast frequency selective Rayleigh fading channel. Results obtained from the computer simulations carried out showed that the channel estimation schemes performed better in an NPR filter bank system as compared with Non-PR filter banks. The low performance of Non-PR system is due to the amplitude distortion and aliasing introduced from the random errors generated in the system that is used to design its prototype filters. It can be concluded that RLS, NLMS, LMS, LMMSE and LS channel estimation schemes offered the best normalized mean square error (NMSE) and bit error rate (BER) performances (in decreasing order) for both waveforms assuming both NPR and Non-PR filter banks. Keywords: Channel estimation, Filter bank, OFDM/OQAM, GFDM/OQAM, NPR, Non-PR, 5G, Frequency selective channel.CK201

Review of Recent Trends

This work was partially supported by the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), through the Regional Operational Programme of Centre (CENTRO 2020) of the Portugal 2020 framework, through projects SOCA (CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-000010) and ORCIP (CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-022141). Fernando P. Guiomar acknowledges a fellowship from “la Caixa” Foundation (ID100010434), code LCF/BQ/PR20/11770015. Houda Harkat acknowledges the financial support of the Programmatic Financing of the CTS R&D Unit (UIDP/00066/2020).MIMO-OFDM is a key technology and a strong candidate for 5G telecommunication systems. In the literature, there is no convenient survey study that rounds up all the necessary points to be investigated concerning such systems. The current deeper review paper inspects and interprets the state of the art and addresses several research axes related to MIMO-OFDM systems. Two topics have received special attention: MIMO waveforms and MIMO-OFDM channel estimation. The existing MIMO hardware and software innovations, in addition to the MIMO-OFDM equalization techniques, are discussed concisely. In the literature, only a few authors have discussed the MIMO channel estimation and modeling problems for a variety of MIMO systems. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been until now no review paper specifically discussing the recent works concerning channel estimation and the equalization process for MIMO-OFDM systems. Hence, the current work focuses on analyzing the recently used algorithms in the field, which could be a rich reference for researchers. Moreover, some research perspectives are identified.publishersversionpublishe

Joint precoding and antenna selection in massive mimo systems

This thesis presents an overview of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems and proposes new algorithms to jointly precode and select the antennas. Massive MIMO is a new technology, which is candidate for comprising the fifth-generation (5G) of mobile cellular systems. This technology employs a huge amount of antennas at the base station and can reach high data rates under favorable, or asymptotically favorable, propagation conditions, while using simple linear processing. However, massive MIMO systems have some drawbacks, such as the high cost related to the base stations. A way to deal with this issue is to employ antenna selection algorithms at the base stations. These algorithms reduce the number of active antennas, decreasing the deployment and maintenance costs related to the base stations. Moreover, this thesis also describes a class of nonlinear precoders that are rarely addressed in the literature; these techniques are able to generate precoded sparse signals in order to achieve joint precoding and antenna selection. This thesis proposes two precoders belonging to this class, where the number of selected antennas is controlled by a design parameter. Simulation results show that the proposed precoders reach a lower bit-error rate than the classical antenna selection algorithms. Furthermore, simulation results show that the proposed precoders present a linear relation between the aforementioned design parameter that controls the signals’ sparsity and the number of selected antennas. Such relation is invariant to the number of base station’s antennas and the number of terminals served by this base station.Esta dissertação apresenta uma visão geral sobre MIMO (do termo em inglês, multiple-input multiple-output) massivo e propõe novos algoritmos que permitem a pré-codificacão de sinais e a seleção de antenas de forma simultânea. MIMO massivo é uma nova tecnologia candidata para compor a quinta geração (5G) dos sistemas celulares. Essa tecnologia utiliza uma quantidade muito grande de antenas na estação-base e, sob condições de propagação favorável ou assintoticamente favorável, pode alcançar taxas de transmissão elevadas, ainda que utilizando um simples processamento linear. Entretanto, os sistemas MIMO massivo apresentam algumas desvantagens, como por exemplo, o alto custo de implementação das estações-bases. Uma maneira de lidar com esse problema é utilizar algoritmos de seleção de antenas na estação-base. Com esses algoritmos é possível reduzir o número de antenas ativas e consequentemente reduzir o custo nas estações-bases. Essa dissertação também apresenta uma classe pouco estudada de pré-codificadores não-lineares que buscam sinais pré-codificados esparsos para realizar a seleção de antenas conjuntamente com a pré-codificação. Além disso, este trabalho propõem dois novos pré-codificadores pertencentes a essa classe, para os quais o número de antenas selecionadas é controlado por um parâmetro de projeto. Resultados de simulações mostram que os pré-codificadores propostos conseguem uma BER (do termo em inglês, bit-error rate) menor que os algoritmos clássicos usados para selecionar antenas. Além disso, resultados de simulações mostram que os pré-codificadores propostos apresentam uma relação linear com o parâmetro de projeto que controla a quantidade de antenas selecionadas; tal relação independe do número de antenas na estação-base e do número de terminais servidos por essa estação