Soft detection and decoding in wideband CDMA systems

A major shift is taking place in the world of telecommunications towards a communications environment where a range of new data services will be available for mobile users. This shift is already visible in several areas of wireless communications, including cellular systems, wireless LANs, and satellite systems. The provision of flexible high-quality wireless data services requires a new approach on both the radio interface specification and the design and the implementation of the various transceiver algorithms. On the other hand, when the processing power available in the receivers increases, more complex receiver algorithms become feasible. The general problem addressed in this thesis is the application of soft detection and decoding algorithms in the wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) receivers, both in the base stations and in the mobile terminals, so that good performance is achieved but that the computational complexity remains acceptable. In particular, two applications of soft detection and soft decoding are studied: coded multiuser detection in the CDMA base station and improved RAKE-based reception employing soft detection in the mobile terminal. For coded multiuser detection, we propose a novel receiver structure that utilizes the decoding information for multiuser detection. We analyze the performance and derive lower bounds for the capacity of interference cancellation CDMA receivers when using channel coding to improve the reliability of tentative decisions. For soft decision and decoding techniques in the CDMA downlink, we propose a modified maximal ratio combining (MRC) scheme that is more suitable for RAKE receivers in WCDMA mobile terminals than the conventional MRC scheme. We also introduce an improved soft-output RAKE detector that is especially suitable for low spreading gains and high-order modulation schemes. Finally we analyze the gain obtained through the use of Brennan's MRC scheme and our modified MRC scheme. Throughout this thesis Bayesian networks are utilized to develop algorithms for soft detection and decoding problems. This approach originates from the initial stages of this research, where Bayesian networks and algorithms using such graphical models (e.g. the so-called sum-product algorithm) were used to identify new receiver algorithms. In the end, this viewpoint may not be easily noticeable in the final form of the algorithms, mainly because the practical efficiency considerations forced us to select simplified variants of the algorithms. However, this viewpoint is important to emphasize the underlying connection between the apparently different soft detection and decision algorithms described in this thesis.reviewe

Combined turbo coding and interference rejection for DS-CDMA.

Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2004.This dissertation presents interference cancellation techniques for both the Forward Error Correction (FEC) coded and the uncoded Direct Sequence Code Division Multiple Access (DS-CDMA) systems. Analytical models are also developed for the adaptive and the non-adaptive Parallel Interference Cancellation (PlC) receivers. Results that are obtained from the computer simulations of the PlC receiver types confirm the accuracy of the analytical models that are developed. Results show that the Least Mean Square (LMS) algorithm based adaptive PlC receivers have bit error rate performances that are better than those of the non-adaptive PlC receivers. In the second part of this dissertation, a novel iterative multiuser detector for the Turbo coded DS-CDMA system is developed. The performance of the proposed receiver in the multirate CDMA system is also investigated. The developed receiver is found to have an error rate performance that is very close to the single user limit after a few numbers of iterations. The receiver is also resilient against the near-far effect. A methodology is also presented on the use of the Gaussian approximation method in the convergence analysis of iterative interference cancellation receivers for turbo coded DS-CDMA systems

Coherent receiver design and analysis for interleaved division multiple access (IDMA)

This thesis discusses a new multiuser detection technique for cellular wireless communications. Multiuser communications is critical in cellular systems as multiple terminals (users) transmit to base stations (or wireless infrastructure). Efficient receiver methods are needed to maximise the performance of these links and maximise overall throughput and coverage while minimising inter-cell interference. Recently a new technique, Interleave-Division Multiple Access (IDMA), was developed as a variant of direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA). In this new scheme users are separated by user specific interleavers, and each user is allocated a low rate code. As a result, the bandwidth expansion is devoted to the low rate code and not weaker spreading codes. IDMA has shown to have significant performance gains over traditional DS-CDMA with a modest increase in complexity. The literature on IDMA primarily focuses on the design of low rate forward error correcting (FEC) codes, as well as channel estimation. However, the practical aspects of an IDMA receiver such as timing acquisition, tracking, block asynchronous detection, and cellular analysis are rarely studied. The objective of this thesis is to design and analyse practical synchronisation, detection and power optimisation techniques for IDMA systems. It also, for the first time, provides a novel analysis and design of a multi-cell system employing a general multiuser receiver. These tools can be used to optimise and evaluate the performance of an IDMA communication system. The techniques presented in this work can be easily employed for DS-CDMA or other multiuser receiver designs with slight modification. Acquisition and synchronisation are essential processes that a base-station is required to perform before user's data can be detected and decoded. For high capacity IDMA systems, which can be heavily loaded and operate close to the channel capacity, the performance of acquisition and tracking can be severely affected by multiple access interference as well as severe drift. This thesis develops acquisition and synchronisation algorithms which can cope with heavy multiple access interference as well as high levels of drift. Once the timing points have been estimated for an IDMA receiver the detection and decoding process can proceed. An important issue with uplink systems is the alignment of frame boundaries for efficient detection. This thesis demonstrates how a fully asynchronous system can be modelled for detection. This thesis presents a model for the frame asynchronous IDMA system, and then develops a maximum likelihood receiver for the proposed system. This thesis develops tools to analyse and optimise IDMA receivers. The tools developed are general enough to be applied to other multiuser receiver techniques. The conventional EXIT chart analysis of unequal power allocated multiuser systems use an averaged EXIT chart analysis for all users to reduce the complexity of the task. This thesis presents a multidimensional analysis for power allocated IDMA, and shows how it can be utilised in power optimisation. Finally, this work develops a novel power zoning technique for multicell multiuser receivers using the optimised power levels, and illustrates a particular example where there is a 50% capacity improvement using the proposed scheme. -- provided by Candidate

Reduced Complexity Sequential Monte Carlo Algorithms for Blind Receivers

Monte Carlo algorithms can be used to estimate the state of a system given relative observations. In this dissertation, these algorithms are applied to physical layer communications system models to estimate channel state information, to obtain soft information about transmitted symbols or multiple access interference, or to obtain estimates of all of these by joint estimation. Initially, we develop and analyze a multiple access technique utilizing mutually orthogonal complementary sets (MOCS) of sequences. These codes deliberately introduce inter-chip interference, which is naturally eliminated during processing at the receiver. However, channel impairments can destroy their orthogonality properties and additional processing becomes necessary. We utilize Monte Carlo algorithms to perform joint channel and symbol estimation for systems utilizing MOCS sequences as spreading codes. We apply Rao-Blackwellization to reduce the required number of particles. However, dense signaling constellations, multiuser environments, and the interchannel interference introduced by the spreading codes all increase the dimensionality of the symbol state space significantly. A full maximum likelihood solution is computationally expensive and generally not practical. However, obtaining the optimum solution is critical, and looking at only a part of the symbol space is generally not a good solution. We have sought algorithms that would guarantee that the correct transmitted symbol is considered, while only sampling a portion of the full symbol space. The performance of the proposed method is comparable to the Maximum Likelihood (ML) algorithm. While the computational complexity of ML increases exponentially with the dimensionality of the problem, the complexity of our approach increases only quadratically. Markovian structures such as the one imposed by MOCS spreading sequences can be seen in other physical layer structures as well. We have applied this partitioning approach with some modification to blind equalization of frequency selective fading channel and to multiple-input multiple output receivers that track channel changes. Additionally, we develop a method that obtains a metric for quantifying the convergence rate of Monte Carlo algorithms. Our approach yields an eigenvalue based method that is useful in identifying sources of slow convergence and estimation inaccuracy.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Douglas B. Williams; Committee Member: Brani Vidakovic; Committee Member: G. Tong zhou; Committee Member: Gordon Stuber; Committee Member: James H. McClella

Iterative Detection for Overloaded Multiuser MIMO OFDM Systems

Inspired by multiuser detection (MUD) and the ‘Turbo principle’, this thesis deals with iterative interference cancellation (IIC) in overloaded multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Linear detection schemes, such as zero forcing (ZF) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) cannot be used for the overloaded system because of the rank deficiency of channel matrix, while the optimal approach, the maximum likelihood (ML) detection has high computational complexity. In this thesis, an iterative interference cancellation (IIC) multiuser detection scheme with matched filter and convolutional codes is considered. The main idea of this combination is a low complexity receiver. Parallel interference cancellation (PIC) is employed to improve the multiuser receiver performance for overloaded systems. A log-likelihood ratio (LLR) converter is proposed to further improve the reliability of the soft value converted from the output of the matched filter. Simulation results show that the bit error rate (BER) performance of this method is close to the optimal approach for a two user system. However, for the four user or more user system, it has an error floor of the BER performance. For this case, a channel selection scheme is proposed to distinguish whether the channel is good or bad by using the mutual information based on the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart. The mutual information can be predicted in a look-up table which greatly reduces the complexity. For those ‘bad’ channels identified by the channel selection, we introduce two adaptive transmission methods to deal with such channels: one uses a lower code rate, and the other is multiple transmissions. The use of an IIC receiver with the interleave-division multiple access (IDMA) to further improve the BER performance without any channel selection is also investigated. It has been shown that this approach can remove the error floor. Finally, the influence of channel accuracy on the IIC is investigated. Pilot-based Wiener filter channel estimation is used to test and verify how much the IIC is influenced by the channel accuracy

Signal processing for future MIMO-OFDM wireless communication systems

The combination of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is likely to provide the air-interface solution for future broadband wireless systems. A major challenge for MIMO-OFDM systems is the problem of multi-access interference (MAI) induced by the presence of multiple users transmitting over the same bandwidth. Novel signal processing techniques are therefore required to mitigate MAI and thereby increase link performance. A background review of space-time block codes (STBCs) to lever age diversity gain in MIMO systems is provided together with an introduction to OFDM. The link performance of an OFDM system is also shown to be sensitive to time-variation of the channel. Iterative minimum mean square error (MMSE) receivers are therefore proposed to overcome such time-variation. In the context of synchronous uplink transmission, a new two-step hard-decision interference cancellation receiver for STBC MIMO-OFDM is shown to have robust performance and relatively low complexity. Further improvement is obtained through employing error control coding methods and iterative algorithms. A soft output multiuser detector based on MMSE interference suppression and error correction coding at the first stage is shown by frame error rate simulations to provide significant performance improvement over the classical linear scheme. Finally, building on the "turbo principle", a low-complexity iterative interference cancellation and detection scheme is designed to provide a good compromise between the exponential computational complexity of the soft interference cancellation linear MMSE algorithm and the near-capacity performance of a scheme which uses iterative turbo processing for soft interference suppression in combination with multiuser detection.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Signal processing for future MIMO-OFDM wireless communication systems

The combination of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is likely to provide the air-interface solution for future broadband wireless systems. A major challenge for MIMO-OFDM systems is the problem of multi-access interference (MAI) induced by the presence of multiple users transmitting over the same bandwidth. Novel signal processing techniques are therefore required to mitigate MAI and thereby increase link performance. A background review of space-time block codes (STBCs) to lever age diversity gain in MIMO systems is provided together with an introduction to OFDM. The link performance of an OFDM system is also shown to be sensitive to time-variation of the channel. Iterative minimum mean square error (MMSE) receivers are therefore proposed to overcome such time-variation. In the context of synchronous uplink transmission, a new two-step hard-decision interference cancellation receiver for STBC MIMO-OFDM is shown to have robust performance and relatively low complexity. Further improvement is obtained through employing error control coding methods and iterative algorithms. A soft output multiuser detector based on MMSE interference suppression and error correction coding at the first stage is shown by frame error rate simulations to provide significant performance improvement over the classical linear scheme. Finally, building on the "turbo principle", a low-complexity iterative interference cancellation and detection scheme is designed to provide a good compromise between the exponential computational complexity of the soft interference cancellation linear MMSE algorithm and the near-capacity performance of a scheme which uses iterative turbo processing for soft interference suppression in combination with multiuser detection

On Improving Communication Robustness in PLC Systems for More Reliable Smart Grid Applications

Power-line communication (PLC) has been the main enabler for modernizing the aging electrical power grid. As such, PLC systems have been the subject of intensive research in the community. One of the major aspects of PLC is the link interface, for which orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) has been widely adopted. In this paper, we propose the application of orthogonal poly-phase-based multicarrier code division multiple access (OPP-MC-CDMA) due to its inherent better flexibility and signal-envelope properties which can be utilized to further enhance the reliability of PLC signals. The proposed OPP-MC-CDMA system is implemented with a minimum mean square error equalizer and nonlinear preprocessing to overcome the effects of bursty noise and multipath frequency-selective fading commonly experienced in PLC channels. We study the performance of this system in terms of the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and symbol error rate with various constellation sizes of OPP codes under different noise scenarios and nonlinear processor's thresholds. For comparison-sake, the performance of the OFDM scheme is included. The results reveal that the proposed approach always provides superior performance over the OFDM one with a maximum output SNR gain of up to 5.25 dB. It is also shown that the performance of the OPP-MC-CDMA technique improves when increasing the constellation size of the OPP codes, which consequently enhances the reliability of PLC