The electronically steerable parasitic array radiator antenna for wireless communications : signal processing and emerging techniques

Smart antenna technology is expected to play an important role in future wireless communication networks in order to use the spectrum efficiently, improve the quality of service, reduce the costs of establishing new wireless paradigms and reduce the energy consumption in wireless networks. Generally, smart antennas exploit multiple widely spaced active elements, which are connected to separate radio frequency (RF) chains. Therefore, they are only applicable to base stations (BSs) and access points, by contrast with modern compact wireless terminals with constraints on size, power and complexity. This dissertation considers an alternative smart antenna system the electronically steerable parasitic array radiator (ESPAR) which uses only a single RF chain, coupled with multiple parasitic elements. The ESPAR antenna is of significant interest because of its flexibility in beamforming by tuning a number of easy-to-implement reactance loads connected to parasitic elements; however, parasitic elements require no expensive RF circuits. This work concentrates on the study of the ESPAR antenna for compact transceivers in order to achieve some emerging techniques in wireless communications. The work begins by presenting the work principle and modeling of the ESPAR antenna and describes the reactance-domain signal processing that is suited to the single active antenna array, which are fundamental factors throughout this thesis. The major contribution in this chapter is the adaptive beamforming method based on the ESPAR antenna. In order to achieve fast convergent beamforming for the ESPAR antenna, a modified minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamfomer is proposed. With reactance-domain signal processing, the ESPAR array obtains a correlation matrix of receive signals as the input to the MVDR optimization problem. To design a set of feasible reactance loads for a desired beampattern, the MVDR optimization problem is reformulated as a convex optimization problem constraining an optimized weight vector close to a feasible solution. Finally, the necessary reactance loads are optimized by iterating the convex problem and a simple projector. In addition, the generic algorithm-based beamforming method has also studied for the ESPAR antenna. Blind interference alignment (BIA) is a promising technique for providing an optimal degree of freedom in a multi-user, multiple-inputsingle-output broadcast channel, without the requirements of channel state information at the transmitters. Its key is antenna mode switching at the receive antenna. The ESPAR antenna is able to provide a practical solution to beampattern switching (one kind of antenna mode switching) for the implementation of BIA. In this chapter, three beamforming methods are proposed for providing the required number of beampatterns that are exploited across one super symbol for creating the channel fluctuation patterns seen by receivers. These manually created channel fluctuation patterns are jointly combined with the designed spacetime precoding in order to align the inter-user interference. Furthermore, the directional beampatterns designed in the ESPAR antenna are demonstrated to improve the performance of BIA by alleviating the noise amplification. The ESPAR antenna is studied as the solution to interference mitigation in small cell networks. Specifically, ESPARs analog beamforming presented in the previous chapter is exploited to suppress inter-cell interference for the system scenario, scheduling only one user to be served by each small BS at a single time. In addition, the ESPAR-based BIA is employed to mitigate both inter-cell and intracell interference for the system scenario, scheduling a small number of users to be simultaneously served by each small BS for a single time. In the cognitive radio (CR) paradigm, the ESPAR antenna is employed for spatial spectrum sensing in order to utilize the new angle dimension in the spectrum space besides the conventional frequency, time and space dimensions. The twostage spatial spectrum sensing method is proposed based on the ESPAR antenna being targeted at identifying white spectrum space, including the new angle dimension. At the first stage, the occupancy of a specific frequency band is detected by conventional spectrum-sensing methods, including energy detector and eigenvalue-based methods implemented with the switched-beam ESPAR antenna. With the presence of primary users, their directions are estimated at the second stage, by high-resolution angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation algorithms. Specifically, the compressive sensing technology has been studied for AoA detection with the ESPAR antenna, which is demonstrated to provide high-resolution estimation results and even to outperform the reactance-domain multiple signal classification

Transmit Beamforming in Dense Networks-A Review

Communication technology has prospered in manifolds over the last decade. The scarcity of spectrum as well as the demand for higher data rates and increase in capacity has become a matter of concern. Newer technologies have evolved time and again, the latest of which is Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) systems more commonly known as 4G technology. The striking feature of LTE/LTE-A is the deployment of smaller cells (femto cells) in the vicinity of a large macro cells resulting in a dense network. As a result the data rate as well as capacity has increased in manifolds but the detrimental factor is the issue of interference between the various cells. Beamforming provides a solution in removing the issues of interference in dense networks. This paper focuses on the interference scenario in LTE dense networks and gives an overview of different beamforming methods that can provide a solution to the interference problem. Further, a review of several such methods so far proposed in available literature has been presented in this paper.Keywords:LTE/LTE-A, Dense Network, Interference,Beamformin

Interference mitigation in cognitive femtocell networks

“A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy”.Femtocells have been introduced as a solution to poor indoor coverage in cellular communication which has hugely attracted network operators and stakeholders. However, femtocells are designed to co-exist alongside macrocells providing improved spatial frequency reuse and higher spectrum efficiency to name a few. Therefore, when deployed in the two-tier architecture with macrocells, it is necessary to mitigate the inherent co-tier and cross-tier interference. The integration of cognitive radio (CR) in femtocells introduces the ability of femtocells to dynamically adapt to varying network conditions through learning and reasoning. This research work focuses on the exploitation of cognitive radio in femtocells to mitigate the mutual interference caused in the two-tier architecture. The research work presents original contributions in mitigating interference in femtocells by introducing practical approaches which comprises a power control scheme where femtocells adaptively controls its transmit power levels to reduce the interference it causes in a network. This is especially useful since femtocells are user deployed as this seeks to mitigate interference based on their blind placement in an indoor environment. Hybrid interference mitigation schemes which combine power control and resource/scheduling are also implemented. In a joint threshold power based admittance and contention free resource allocation scheme, the mutual interference between a Femtocell Access Point (FAP) and close-by User Equipments (UE) is mitigated based on admittance. Also, a hybrid scheme where FAPs opportunistically use Resource Blocks (RB) of Macrocell User Equipments (MUE) based on its traffic load use is also employed. Simulation analysis present improvements when these schemes are applied with emphasis in Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks especially in terms of Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR)

LTE-Advanced radio access enhancements: A survey

Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-Advanced) is the next step in LTE evolution and allows operators to improve network performance and service capabilities through smooth deployment of new techniques and technologies. LTE-Advanced uses some new features on top of the existing LTE standards to provide better user experience and higher throughputs. Some of the most significant features introduced in LTE-Advanced are carrier aggregation, enhancements in heterogeneous networks, coordinated multipoint transmission and reception, enhanced multiple input multiple output usage and deployment of relay nodes in the radio network. Mentioned features are mainly aimed to enhance the radio access part of the cellular networks. This survey article presents an overview of the key radio access features and functionalities of the LTE-Advanced radio access network, supported by the simulation results. We also provide a detailed review of the literature together with a very rich list of the references for each of the features. An LTE-Advanced roadmap and the latest updates and trends in LTE markets are also presented

Performances des Réseaux LTE

Poussé par la demande croissante de services à haut débit sans fil, Long Term Evolution (LTE) a émergé comme une solution prometteuse pour les communications mobiles. Dans plusieurs pays à travers le monde, la mise en oeuvre de LTE est en train de se développer. LTE offre une architecture tout-IP qui fournit des débits élevés et permet une prise en charge efficace des applications de type multimédia. LTE est spécifié par le 3GPP ; cette technologie fournit une architecture capable de mettre en place des mécanismes pour traiter des classes de trafic hétérogènes comme la voix, la vidéo, les transferts de fichier, les courriers électroniques, etc. Ces classes de flux hétérogènes peuvent être gérées en fonction de la qualité de service requise mais aussi de la qualité des canaux et des conditions environnementales qui peuvent varier considérablement sur une courte échelle de temps. Les standards du 3GPP ne spécifient pas l algorithmique de l allocation des ressources du réseau d accès, dont l importance est grande pour garantir performance et qualité de service (QoS). Dans cette thèse, nous nous focalisons plus spécifiquement sur la QoS de LTE sur la voie descendante. Nous nous concentrons alors sur la gestion des ressources et l ordonnancement sur l interface radio des réseaux d accès. Dans une première partie, nous nous sommes intéressés à des contextes de macro-cellules. Le premier mécanisme proposé pour l allocation des ressources combine une méthode de jetons virtuels et des ordonnanceurs opportunistes. Les performances obtenues sont très bonnes mais n assurent pas une très bonne équité. Notre seconde proposition repose sur la théorie des jeux, et plus spécifiquement sur la valeur de Shapley, pour atteindre un haut niveau d équité entre les différentes classes de services au détriment de la qualité de service. Cela nous a poussé, dans un troisième mécanisme, à combiner les deux schémas. La deuxième partie de la thèse est consacrée aux femto-cellules (ou femtocells) qui offrent des compléments de couverture appréciables. La difficulté consiste alors à étudier et à minimiser les interférences. Notre premier mécanisme d atténuation des interférences est fondé sur le contrôle de la puissance de transmission. Il fonctionne en utilisant la théorie des jeux non coopératifs. On effectue une négociation constante entre le débit et les interférences pour trouver un niveau optimal de puissance d émission. Le second mécanisme est centralisé et utilise une approche de division de la bande passante afin d obliger les femtocells à ne pas utiliser les mêmes sous-bandes évitant ainsi les interférences. Le partage de bande passante et l allocation sont effectués en utilisant sur la théorie des jeux (valeur de Shapley) et en tenant compte du type d application. Ce schéma réduit les interférences considérablement. Tous les mécanismes proposés ont été testés et évalués dans un environnement de simulation en utilisant l outil LTE-Sim au développement duquel nous avons contribué.Driven by the growing demand for high-speed broadband wireless services, Long term Evolution (LTE) technology has emerged as a competitive alternative to mobile communications solution. In several countries around the world, the implementation of LTE has started. LTE offers an IP-based framework that provides high data rates for multimedia applications. Moreover, based on the 3GPP specifications, the technology provides a set of built in mechanisms to support heterogeneous classes of traffic including data, voice and video, etc. Supporting heterogeneous classes of services means that the traffic is highly diverse and has distinct QoS parameters, channel and environmental conditions may vary dramatically on a short time scale. The 3GPP specifications leave unstandardized the resource management and scheduling mechanisms which are crucial components to guarantee the QoS performance for the services. In this thesis, we evaluate the performance and QoS in LTE technology. Moreover, our research addresses the resource management and scheduling issues on the wireless interface. In fact, after surveying, classifying and comparing different scheduling mechanisms, we propose three QoS mechanisms for resource allocation in macrocell scenarios focused on real time services and two mechanisms for interference mitigation in femtocell scenarios taking into account the QoS of real time services. Our first proposed mechanism for resource allocation in macrocell scenarios combines the well known virtual token (or token buckets) method with opportunistic schedulers, our second scheme utilizes game theory, specifically the Shapley value in order to achieve a higher fairness level among classes of services and our third mechanism combines the first and the second proposed schemes. Our first mechanism for interference mitigation in femtocell scenarios is power control based and works by using non cooperative games. It performs a constant bargain between throughput and SINR to find out the optimal transmit power level. The second mechanism is centralised, it uses a bandwidth division approach in order to not use the same subbands to avoid interference. The bandwidth division and assignation is performed based on game theory (Shapley value) taking into account the application bitrate . This scheme reduces interference considerably and shows an improvement compared to other bandwidth division schemes. All proposed mechanism are performed in a LTE simulation environment. several constraints such as throughput, Packet Loss Ratio, delay, fairness index, SINR are used to evaluate the efficiency of our schemesTOULOUSE-INP (315552154) / SudocSudocFranceF

Altruistic Transmit Beamforming for Cross-layer Interference Mitigation in Heterogeneous Networks

The emergence of heterogeneous networks, with low-power nodes operating under the umbrella of high-power macro cells, simplifies planning procedures for operators, but introduces the problem of cross-layer interference between the overlapping cells. An effective technique for combating interference is transmit beam-forming (TBF), a transmitter-side technique which utilizes partial knowledge of the channel and presence of multiple antennas at the transmitter to enhance the signal reception quality at a receiver. When applied to the base station associated with the receiver, TBF boosts the desired signal. On the other hand, when applied to the interfering base station, TBF reduces the effect of the interference signal. The former technique is commonly referred to as egoistic TBF, while the latter is known as altruistic TBF. In this thesis, we provide theoretical evaluation of the performance gains that altruistic TBF is able to offer to a heavily interfered user in a heterogeneous setting, when channel state information is conveyed from the receiver to the transmitter through a limited feedback channel. We show that the application of altruistic TBF to specifically defined clusters of interferers is able to drastically improve performance for the victim user. Furthermore, we prove the exact upper bound for the performance of the victim user, when only phase feedback is used for altruistic TBF and the source of interference is a single dominant interferer. Finally, we investigate and propose new techniques that can be applied to multi-antenna heterogeneous network scenarios for interference mitigation purposes