System capacity enhancement for 5G network and beyond

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyThe demand for wireless digital data is dramatically increasing year over year. Wireless communication systems like Laptops, Smart phones, Tablets, Smart watch, Virtual Reality devices and so on are becoming an important part of people’s daily life. The number of mobile devices is increasing at a very fast speed as well as the requirements for mobile devices such as super high-resolution image/video, fast download speed, very short latency and high reliability, which raise challenges to the existing wireless communication networks. Unlike the previous four generation communication networks, the fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication network includes many technologies such as millimetre-wave communication, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), visual light communication (VLC), heterogeneous network (HetNet) and so forth. Although 5G has not been standardised yet, these above technologies have been studied in both academia and industry and the goal of the research is to enhance and improve the system capacity for 5G networks and beyond by studying some key problems and providing some effective solutions existing in the above technologies from system implementation and hardware impairments’ perspective. The key problems studied in this thesis include interference cancellation in HetNet, impairments calibration for massive MIMO, channel state estimation for VLC, and low latency parallel Turbo decoding technique. Firstly, inter-cell interference in HetNet is studied and a cell specific reference signal (CRS) interference cancellation method is proposed to mitigate the performance degrade in enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC). This method takes carrier frequency offset (CFO) and timing offset (TO) of the user’s received signal into account. By reconstructing the interfering signal and cancelling it afterwards, the capacity of HetNet is enhanced. Secondly, for massive MIMO systems, the radio frequency (RF) impairments of the hardware will degrade the beamforming performance. When operated in time duplex division (TDD) mode, a massive MIMO system relies on the reciprocity of the channel which can be broken by the transmitter and receiver RF impairments. Impairments calibration has been studied and a closed-loop reciprocity calibration method is proposed in this thesis. A test device (TD) is introduced in this calibration method that can estimate the transmitters’ impairments over-the-air and feed the results back to the base station via the Internet. The uplink pilots sent by the TD can assist the BS receivers’ impairment estimation. With both the uplink and downlink impairments estimates, the reciprocity calibration coefficients can be obtained. By computer simulation and lab experiment, the performance of the proposed method is evaluated. Channel coding is an essential part of a wireless communication system which helps fight with noise and get correct information delivery. Turbo codes is one of the most reliable codes that has been used in many standards such as WiMAX and LTE. However, the decoding process of turbo codes is time-consuming and the decoding latency should be improved to meet the requirement of the future network. A reverse interleave address generator is proposed that can reduce the decoding time and a low latency parallel turbo decoder has been implemented on a FPGA platform. The simulation and experiment results prove the effectiveness of the address generator and show that there is a trade-off between latency and throughput with a limited hardware resource. Apart from the above contributions, this thesis also investigated multi-user precoding for MIMO VLC systems. As a green and secure technology, VLC is achieving more and more attention and could become a part of 5G network especially for indoor communication. For indoor scenario, the MIMO VLC channel could be easily ill-conditioned. Hence, it is important to study the impact of the channel state to the precoding performance. A channel state estimation method is proposed based on the signal to interference noise ratio (SINR) of the users’ received signal. Simulation results show that it can enhance the capacity of the indoor MIMO VLC system

Hardware Architectures of Visible Light Communication Transmitter and Receiver for Beacon-based Indoor Positioning Systems

High-speed applications of Visible Light Communications have been presented recently in which response times of photodiode-based VLC receivers are critical points. Typical VLC receiver routines, such as soft-decoding of run-length limited (RLL) codes and FEC codes was purely processed on embedded firmware, and potentially cause bottleneck at the receiver. To speed up the performance of receivers, ASIC-based VLC receiver could be the solution. Unfortunately, recent works on soft-decoding of RLL and FEC have shown that they are bulky and time-consuming computations. This causes hardware implementation of VLC receivers becomes heavy and unrealistic. In this paper, we introduce a compact Polar-code-based VLC receivers. in which flicker mitigation of the system can be guaranteed even without RLL codes. In particular, we utilized the centralized bit-probability distribution of a pre-scrambler and a Polar encoder to create a non-RLL flicker mitigation solution. At the receiver, a 3-bit soft-decision filter was implemented to analyze signals received from the VLC channel to extract log-likelihood ratio (LLR) values and feed them to the Polar decoder. Therefore, the proposed receiver could exploit the soft-decoding of the Polar decoder to improve the error-correction performance of the system. Due to the non-RLL characteristic, the receiver has a preeminent code-rate and a reduced complexity compared with RLL-based receivers. We present the proposed VLC receiver along with a novel very-large-scale integration (VLSI) architecture, and a synthesis of our design using FPGA/ASIC synthesis tools

Mitigating PAPR in cooperative wireless networks with frequency selective channels and relay selection

The focus of this thesis is peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction in cooperative wireless networks which exploit orthogonal frequency division multiplexing in transmission. To reduce the PAPR clipping is employed at the source node. The first contribution focuses upon an amplify-and-forward (AF) type network with four relay nodes which exploits distributed closed loop extended orthogonal space frequency block coding to improve end-to-end performance. Oversampling and filtering are used at the source node to reduce out-of-band interference and the iterative amplitude reconstruction decoding technique is used at the destination node to mitigate in-band distortion which is introduced by the clipping process. In addition, by exploiting quantized group feedback and phase rotation at two of the relay nodes, the system achieves full cooperative diversity in addition to array gain. The second contribution area is outage probability analysis in the context of multi-relay selection in a cooperative AF network with frequency selective fading channels. The gains of time domain multi-path fading channels with L paths are modeled with an Erlang distribution. General closed form expressions for the lower and upper bounds of outage probability are derived for arbitrary channel length L as a function of end-to-end signal to noise ratio. This analysis is then extended for the case when single relay selection from an arbitrary number of relay nodes M is performed. The spatial and temporal cooperative diversity gain is then analysed. In addition, exact form of outage probability for multi-path channel length L = 2 and selecting the best single relay from an arbitrary number of relay nodes M is obtained. Moreover, selecting a pair of relays when L = 2 or 3 is additionally analysed. Finally, the third contribution context is outage probability analysis of a cooperative AF network with single and two relay pair selection from M available relay nodes together with clipping at the source node, which is explicitly modelled. MATLAB and Maple software based simulations are employed throughout the thesis to support the analytical results and assess the performance of algorithms and methods

Digital signal processing techniques for peak-to-average power ratio mitigation in MIMO–OFDM systems

The focus of this thesis is to mitigate the very large peak-to-average transmit power ratios (PAPRs) inherent to conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, particularly in the context of transmission over multi-input multi-output (MIMO) wireless broadband channels. This problem is important as a large PAPR generally needs an expensive radio frequency (RF) power amplifier at the transmitter due to the requirement for linear operation over a wide amplitude range and such a cost would be compounded when multiple transmit antennas are used. Advanced signal processing techniques which can reduce PAPR whilst retain the integrity of digital transmission therefore have considerable potential for application in emergent MIMO–OFDM wireless systems and form the technical contributions of this study. [Continues.