Hardware oriented, quasi-optimal detectors for iterative and non-iterative MIMO receivers

n/

MIMO Systems: Principles, Iterative Techniques, and advanced Polarization

International audienceThis chapter considers the principles of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems as well as some recent accomplishments concerning their implementation. By employing multiple antennas at both transmitter and receiver, very high data rates can be achieved under the condition of deployment in a rich-scattering propagation medium. This interesting property of MIMO systems suggests their use in the future high-rate and high-quality wireless communication systems. Several concepts in MIMO systems are reviewed in this chapter. We first consider MIMO channel models and recall the basic principles of MIMO structures and channel modeling. We next study the MIMO channel capacity and present the early developments in these systems concerning the information theory aspect. Iterative signal detection is considered next; it considers iterative techniques for space-time decoding. As the capacity is inversely proportional to the spatial channel correlation, MIMO antennas should be sufficiently separated, usually by several wavelengths. In order to minimize antennas' deployment, we present advanced polarization diversity techniques for MIMO systems and explain how they can help to reduce the spatial correlation in order to achieve high transmission rates. We end the chapter by considering the application of MIMO systems in local area networks, as well as their potential in enhancing range, localization, and power efficiency of sensor networks

Space-Time Codes for MIMO systems : Quasi-Orthogonal design and concatenation

Der Nachfrage an Mobilfunksystemen mit hoher Datenrate und Übertragungsqualität für eine Vielfalt von Anwendungen ist in den letzten Jahren dramatisch gestiegen. Zur Deckung des hohen Bedarfs werden jedoch neue Konzepte und Technologien benötigt, die den Beeinträchtigungen des Mobilfunkkanals entgegenwirken oder sich diese zu Nutze machen und die knappen Ressourcen wie Bandbreite und Leistung optimal ausnutzen. Eine effiziente Maßnahme zur Erhöhung der Performanz stellen Mehrantennensysteme dar. Um das große Potenzial von solchen Mehrantennensystemen auszunutzen, wurden neue Sendestrategien, so genannte Raum-Zeit Codes entworfen und analysiert, die neben der zeitlichen und spektralen auch die räumliche Komponente ausnutzen sollen. In dieser Arbeit wird die Leistungsfähigkeit solcher Raum-Zeit Codes zunächst isoliert und später, im zweiten Teil der Arbeit, in Kombination mit herkömmlichen Kanalcodierungsverfahren untersucht. Im ersten Abschnitt, d.h. im Fall ohne herkömmliche Kanalcodierung liegt der Fokus auf diversitäts-orientierten Raum-Zeit Codes. Zunächst werden basierend auf den Raum-Zeit Codes mit orthogonaler Struktur (OSTBC) Raum-Zeit Codes mit quasi-orthogonaler Struktur für eine beliebige Anzahl von Sende-und Empfangsantennen entworfen. Aus der Konstruktion resultieren dann zwei Gruppen von Codes. Die wesentliche Charakteristik der ersten Gruppe ist es, dass sie Verbindungen mit hoher Qualität gewährleistet. Dies wird erreicht, indem räumliche und zeitliche Redundanz eingebracht wird und daraus die volle Diversität (entspricht dem maximalen Abfall der Bitfehlerratenkurve) resultiert. Volle Diversität wird auch von den OSTBC erreicht, die aufgrund ihrer Struktur den matrix-wertigen Kanal für Mehrantennensysteme, so genannte Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO)-Kanäle in parallele skalare Ersatzkanäle, so genannte Single-Input-Single-Output (SISO)-Kanäle, transformieren. Die Anzahl der parallelen Ersatzkanäle entspricht dabei der Anzahl der Sendeantennen. Diese Erkenntnis und die Einsicht in die Eigenschaften dieser Ersatzkanäle waren ein wichtiger Meilenstein und ermöglichten es, die Leistungsfähigkeit der OSTBC zu analysieren. Die Bestimmung der Ersatzkanalstuktur ist daher auch hier von zentraler Bedeutung. Im Falle von Raum-Zeit Codes mit quasi-orthogonaler Struktur wird in dieser Arbeit gezeigt, dass der MIMO-Kanal in einen block-diagonalen MIMO-Kanal zerlegt wird, dessen Eigenvektoren konstant und Blöcke identisch sind. Weiterhin konnte gezeigt werden, dass die Eigenwerte von jedem Block voneinander unabhängig sind und einer nichtzentralen Chi-Quadrat-Verteilung mit einer Anzahl von Freiheitsgraden, die dem Vierfachen der Anzahl der Empfangsantennen entspricht, folgen. Durch Lockerung der Anforderung von voller Diversität an die zu entwerfenden Codes gelangt man zu der zweiten Gruppe der Raum-Zeit Codes mit quasi-orthogonaler Stuktur, welche eine Verallgemeinerung der OSTBC darstellen. Insbesondere wird in dieser Arbeit gezeigt, dass nicht nur das Alamouti-Schema, ein OSTBC für zwei Sendeantennen, sondern auch eine verallgemeinerte Version dieses Alamouti-Schemas, die Kapazität im Falle einer Empfangsantenne erreicht. Die in dieser Arbeit entworfenen Raum-Zeit Codes werden schließlich hinsichtlich ihrer Fehlerraten-Performanz und ihrer spektralen Effizienz mit optimalen als auch mit suboptimalen Empfängerstrukturen analysiert. Im zweiten Teil dieser Arbeit werden verschiedene Raum-Zeit Codes mit herkömmlichen Kanalcodierungsverfahren kombiniert. Dabei werden neue Empfängerstrukturen vorgestellt und die Leistungsfähigkeit der Raum-Zeit Codes mit iterativen Algorithmen zur so genannten Soft-Input-Soft-Output-Decodierung mit Hilfe von neuen Analysetechniken, den so genannten EXIT-Charts, untersucht und optimiert. Im Falle von OSTBC werden zusätzlich Kriterien für die optimale Abbildung von Bitsequenzen auf Sendesymbole hergeleitet.The demand for mobile communication systems with high data rates and improved link quality for a variety of applications has dramatically increased in recent years. New concepts and methods are necessary in order to cover this huge demand, which counteract or take advantage of the impairments of the mobile communication channel and optimally exploit the limited resources such as bandwidth and power. Multiple antenna systems are an efficient means for increasing the performance. In order to utilize the huge potential of multiple antenna concepts, it is necessary to resort to new transmit strategies, referred to as Space-Time Codes, which, in addition to the time and spectral domain, also use the spatial domain. The performance of such Space-Time Codes is analyzed in this thesis with and without conventional channel coding strategies. In case without conventional channel codes, the focus is on diversity-oriented Space-Time Codes. Based on Space-Time Block Codes from orthogonal designs (OSTBC), the Space-Time Block Codes from quasi-orthogonal designs are developed for any number of transmit and receive antennas. The outcome of this construction are two groups of codes. The main property of the first group is the support of links with high quality. This is achieved by incorporating spatial and temporal redundancy, which results in full diversity or in other words, in the maximum decay of the bit error rate curves. Full diversity is also achieved by OSTBC, which due to their structure transform the matrix-valued channel for multi-antenna systems, so called multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO)-channels, into several parallel, scalar single-input-single-output (SISO)-channels. This insight and the understanding of the properties of the equivalent SISO-channels were the key results in order to analyze the performance of the OSTBC. The determination of the structure of the equivalent channel is also a matter of vital importance in this work. To this end, we show that the MIMO-channel in the case of Space-Time Codes from quasi-orthogonal designs is transformed into an equivalent block-diagonal MIMO-channel with identical blocks having constant eigenvectors, independent of the channel realization. Furthermore, we show that the eigenvalues of each block are pairwise independent and follow a non-central chi-square distribution, where the number of degrees of freedom equals four times the number of receive antennas. By relaxing the requirement of full diversity one arrives at the second group of Space-Time Codes from quasi-orthogonal designs. These codes represent a generalization of Space-Time Codes from orthogonal designs. Particularly, we show in this work, that not only the Alamouti-scheme, a OSTBC for two transmit antennas, but also its generalized version achieves capacity in the case of one receive antenna. The drafted codes are then analyzed with respect to the error rate performance and the spectral efficiency with optimal as well as suboptimal receiver structures. In the second part of this work the combination of Space-Time Codes with conventional channel coding techniques is considered. New receiver structures are presented and the performance of Space-Time Codes with iterative algorithms for soft-input-soft-output-decoding is analyzed and optimized with the help of new analytical tools, the so called EXIT-charts. Furthermore, some criteria for the optimal mapping strategy are derived in the case of OSTBC

Design and Implementation of Belief Propagation Symbol Detectors for Wireless Intersymbol Interference Channels

In modern wireless communication systems, intersymbol interference (ISI) introduced by frequency selective fading is one of the major impairments to reliable data communication. In ISI channels, the receiver observes the superposition of multiple delayed reflections of the transmitted signal, which will result errors in the decision device. As the data rate increases, the effect of ISI becomes severe. To combat ISI, equalization is usually required for symbol detectors. The optimal maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) based on the Viterbi algorithm (VA) may be used to estimate the transmitted sequence in the presence of the ISI. However, the computational complexity of the MLSE increases exponentially with the length of the channel impulse response (CIR). Even in channels which do not exhibit significant time dispersion, the length of the CIR will effectively increase as the sampling rate goes higher. Thus the optimal MLSE is impractical to implement in the majority of practical wireless applications. This dissertation is devoted to exploring practically implementable symbol detectors with near-optimal performance in wireless ISI channels. Particularly, we focus on the design and implementation of an iterative detector based on the belief propagation (BP) algorithm. The advantage of the BP detector is that its complexity is solely dependent on the number of nonzero coefficients in the CIR, instead of the length of the CIR. We also extend the work of BP detector design for various wireless applications. Firstly, we present a partial response BP (PRBP) symbol detector with near-optimal performance for channels which have long spanning durations but sparse multipath structure. We implement the architecture by cascading an adaptive linear equalizer (LE) with a BP detector. The channel is first partially equalized by the LE to a target impulse response (TIR) with only a few nonzero coefficients remaining. The residual ISI is then canceled by a more sophisticated BP detector. With the cascaded LE-BP structure, the symbol detector is capable to achieve a near-optimal error rate performance with acceptable implementation complexity. Moreover, we present a pipeline high-throughput implementation of the detector for channel length 30 with quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) modulation. The detector can achieve a maximum throughput of 206 Mb/s with an estimated core area of 3.162 mm^{2} using 90-nm technology node. At a target frequency of 515 MHz, the dynamic power is about 1.096 W. Secondly, we investigate the performance of aforementioned PRBP detector under a more generic 3G channel rather than the sparse channel. Another suboptimal partial response maximum-likelihood (PRML) detector is considered for comparison. Similar to the PRBP detector, the PRML detector also employs a hybrid two-stage scheme, in order to allow a tradeoff between performance and complexity. In simulations, we consider a slow fading environment and use the ITU-R 3G channel models. From the numerical results, it is shown that in frequency-selective fading wireless channels, the PRBP detector provides superior performance over both the traditional minimum mean squared error linear equalizer (MMSE-LE) and the PRML detector. Due to the effect of colored noise, the PRML detector in fading wireless channels is not as effective as it is in magnetic recording applications. Thirdly, we extend our work to accommodate the application of Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) digital television (DTV) systems. In order to reduce error propagation caused by the traditional decision feedback equalizer (DFE) in DTV receiver, we present an adaptive decision feedback sparsening filter BP (DFSF-BP) detector, which is another form of PRBP detector. Different from the aforementioned LE-BP structure, in the DFSF-BP scheme, the BP detector is followed by a nonlinear filter called DFSF as the partial response equalizer. In the first stage, the DFSF employs a modified feedback filter which leaves the strongest post-cursor ISI taps uncorrected. As a result, a long ISI channel is equalized to a sparse channel having only a small number of nonzero taps. In the second stage, the BP detector is applied to mitigate the residual ISI. Since the channel is typically time-varying and suffers from Doppler fading, the DFSF is adapted using the least mean square (LMS) algorithm, such that the amplitude and the locations of the nonzero taps of the equalized sparse channel appear to be fixed. As such, the channel appears to be static during the second stage of equalization which consists of the BP detector. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the traditional DFE in symbol error rate, under both static channels and dynamic ATSC channels. Finally, we study the symbol detector design for cooperative communications, which have attracted a lot of attention recently for its ability to exploit increased spatial diversity available at distributed antennas on other nodes. A system framework employing non-orthogonal amplify-and-forward half-duplex relays through ISI channels is developed. Based on the system model, we first design and implement an optimal maximum-likelihood detector based on the Viterbi algorithm. As the relay period increases, the effective CIR between the source and the destination becomes long and sparse, which makes the optimal detector impractical to implement. In order to achieve a balance between the computational complexity and performance, several sub-optimal detectors are proposed. We first present a multitrellis Viterbi algorithm (MVA) based detector which decomposes the original trellis into multiple parallel irregular sub-trellises by investigating the dependencies between the received symbols. Although MVA provides near-optimal performance, it is not straightforward to decompose the trellis for arbitrary ISI channels. Next, the decision feedback sequence estimation (DFSE) based detector and BP-based detector are proposed for cooperative ISI channels. Traditionally these two detectors are used with fixed, static channels. In our model, however, the effective channel is periodically time-varying, even when the component channels themselves are static. Consequently, we modify these two detector to account for cooperative ISI channels. Through simulations in frequency selective fading channels, we demonstrate the uncoded performance of the DFSE detector and the BP detector when compared to the optimal MLSE detector. In addition to quantifying the performance of these detectors, we also include an analysis of the implementation complexity as well as a discussion on complexity/performance tradeoffs

MIMO Systems

In recent years, it was realized that the MIMO communication systems seems to be inevitable in accelerated evolution of high data rates applications due to their potential to dramatically increase the spectral efficiency and simultaneously sending individual information to the corresponding users in wireless systems. This book, intends to provide highlights of the current research topics in the field of MIMO system, to offer a snapshot of the recent advances and major issues faced today by the researchers in the MIMO related areas. The book is written by specialists working in universities and research centers all over the world to cover the fundamental principles and main advanced topics on high data rates wireless communications systems over MIMO channels. Moreover, the book has the advantage of providing a collection of applications that are completely independent and self-contained; thus, the interested reader can choose any chapter and skip to another without losing continuity

D13.2 Techniques and performance analysis on energy- and bandwidth-efficient communications and networking

Deliverable D13.2 del projecte europeu NEWCOM#The report presents the status of the research work of the various Joint Research Activities (JRA) in WP1.3 and the results that were developed up to the second year of the project. For each activity there is a description, an illustration of the adherence to and relevance with the identified fundamental open issues, a short presentation of the main results, and a roadmap for the future joint research. In the Annex, for each JRA, the main technical details on specific scientific activities are described in detail.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

From Linear Equalization to Lattice-Reduction-Aided Sphere-Detector as an Answer to the MIMO Detection Problematic in Spatial Multiplexing Systems

ISBN 978-953-307-223-4International audienc

Advanced receivers for distributed cooperation in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are rapidly deployable wireless communications systems, operating with minimal coordination in order to avoid spectral efficiency losses caused by overhead. Cooperative transmission schemes are attractive for MANETs, but the distributed nature of such protocols comes with an increased level of interference, whose impact is further amplified by the need to push the limits of energy and spectral efficiency. Hence, the impact of interference has to be mitigated through with the use PHY layer signal processing algorithms with reasonable computational complexity. Recent advances in iterative digital receiver design techniques exploit approximate Bayesian inference and derivative message passing techniques to improve the capabilities of well-established turbo detectors. In particular, expectation propagation (EP) is a flexible technique which offers attractive complexity-performance trade-offs in situations where conventional belief propagation is limited by computational complexity. Moreover, thanks to emerging techniques in deep learning, such iterative structures are cast into deep detection networks, where learning the algorithmic hyper-parameters further improves receiver performance. In this thesis, EP-based finite-impulse response decision feedback equalizers are designed, and they achieve significant improvements, especially in high spectral efficiency applications, over more conventional turbo-equalization techniques, while having the advantage of being asymptotically predictable. A framework for designing frequency-domain EP-based receivers is proposed, in order to obtain detection architectures with low computational complexity. This framework is theoretically and numerically analysed with a focus on channel equalization, and then it is also extended to handle detection for time-varying channels and multiple-antenna systems. The design of multiple-user detectors and the impact of channel estimation are also explored to understand the capabilities and limits of this framework. Finally, a finite-length performance prediction method is presented for carrying out link abstraction for the EP-based frequency domain equalizer. The impact of accurate physical layer modelling is evaluated in the context of cooperative broadcasting in tactical MANETs, thanks to a flexible MAC-level simulato