AirSync: Enabling Distributed Multiuser MIMO with Full Spatial Multiplexing

The enormous success of advanced wireless devices is pushing the demand for higher wireless data rates. Denser spectrum reuse through the deployment of more access points per square mile has the potential to successfully meet the increasing demand for more bandwidth. In theory, the best approach to density increase is via distributed multiuser MIMO, where several access points are connected to a central server and operate as a large distributed multi-antenna access point, ensuring that all transmitted signal power serves the purpose of data transmission, rather than creating "interference." In practice, while enterprise networks offer a natural setup in which distributed MIMO might be possible, there are serious implementation difficulties, the primary one being the need to eliminate phase and timing offsets between the jointly coordinated access points. In this paper we propose AirSync, a novel scheme which provides not only time but also phase synchronization, thus enabling distributed MIMO with full spatial multiplexing gains. AirSync locks the phase of all access points using a common reference broadcasted over the air in conjunction with a Kalman filter which closely tracks the phase drift. We have implemented AirSync as a digital circuit in the FPGA of the WARP radio platform. Our experimental testbed, comprised of two access points and two clients, shows that AirSync is able to achieve phase synchronization within a few degrees, and allows the system to nearly achieve the theoretical optimal multiplexing gain. We also discuss MAC and higher layer aspects of a practical deployment. To the best of our knowledge, AirSync offers the first ever realization of the full multiuser MIMO gain, namely the ability to increase the number of wireless clients linearly with the number of jointly coordinated access points, without reducing the per client rate.Comment: Submitted to Transactions on Networkin

Collaborative modulation multiple access for single hop and multihop networks

While the bandwidth available for wireless networks is limited, the world has seen an unprecedented growth in the number of mobile subscribers and an ever increasing demand for high data rates. Therefore efficient utilisation of bandwidth to maximise link spectral efficiency and number of users that can be served simultaneously are primary goals in the design of wireless systems. To achieve these goals, in this thesis, a new non-orthogonal uplink multiple access scheme which combines the functionalities of adaptive modulation and multiple access called collaborative modulation multiple access (CMMA) is proposed. CMMA enables multiple users to access the network simultaneously and share the same bandwidth even when only a single receive antenna is available and in the presence of high channel correlation. Instead of competing for resources, users in CMMA share resources collaboratively by employing unique modulation sets (UMS) that differ in phase, power, and/or mapping structure. These UMS are designed to insure that the received signal formed from the superposition of all users’ signals belongs to a composite QAM constellation (CC) with a rate equal to the sum rate of all users. The CC and its constituent UMSs are designed centrally at the BS to remove ambiguity, maximize the minimum Euclidian distance (dmin) of the CC and insure a minimum BER performance is maintained. Users collaboratively precode their transmitted signal by performing truncated channel inversion and phase rotation using channel state information (CSI ) obtained from a periodic common pilot to insure that their combined signal at the BS belongs to the CC known at the BS which in turn performs a simple joint maximum likelihood detection without the need for CSI. The coherent addition of users’ power enables CMMA to achieve high link spectral efficiency at any time without extra power or bandwidth but on the expense of graceful degradation in BER performance. To improve the BER performance of CMMA while preserving its precoding and detection structure and without the need for pilot-aided channel estimation, a new selective diversity combining scheme called SC-CMMA is proposed. SC-CMMA optimises the overall group performance providing fairness and diversity gain for various users with different transmit powers and channel conditions by selecting a single antenna out of a group of L available antennas that minimises the total transmit power required for precoding at any one time. A detailed study of capacity and BER performance of CMMA and SC-CMMA is carried out under different level of channel correlations which shows that both offer high capacity gain and resilience to channel correlation. SC-CMMA capacity even increase with high channel correlation between users’ channels. CMMA provides a practical solution for implementing the multiple access adder channel (MAAC) in fading environments hence a hybrid approach combining both collaborative coding and modulation referred to as H-CMMA is investigated. H-CMMA divides users into a number of subgroups where users within a subgroup are assigned the same modulation set and different multiple access codes. H-CMMA adjusts the dmin of the received CC by varying the number of subgroups which in turn varies the number of unique constellation points for the same number of users and average total power. Therefore H-CMMA can accommodate many users with different rates while flexibly managing the complexity, rate and BER performance depending on the SNR. Next a new scheme combining CMMA with opportunistic scheduling using only partial CSI at the receiver called CMMA-OS is proposed to combine both the power gain of CMMA and the multiuser diversity gain that arises from users’ channel independence. To avoid the complexity and excessive feedback associated with the dynamic update of the CC, the BS takes into account the independence of users’ channels in the design of the CC and its constituent UMSs but both remain unchanged thereafter. However UMS are no longer associated with users, instead channel gain’s probability density function is divided into regions with identical probability and each UMS is associated with a specific region. This will simplify scheduling as users can initially chose their UMS based on their CSI and the BS will only need to resolve any collision when the channels of two or more users are located at the same region. Finally a high rate cooperative communication scheme, called cooperative modulation (CM) is proposed for cooperative multiuser systems. CM combines the reliability of the cooperative diversity with the high spectral efficiency and multiple access capabilities of CMMA. CM maintains low feedback and high spectral efficiency by restricting relaying to a single route with the best overall channel. Two possible variations of CM are proposed depending on whether CSI available only at the users or just at the BS and the selected relay. The first is referred to Precode, Amplify, and Forward (PAF) while the second one is called Decode, Remap, and Forward (DMF). A new route selection algorithm for DMF based on maximising dmin of random CC is also proposed using a novel fast low-complexity multi-stage sphere based algorithm to calculate the dmin at the relay of random CC that is used for both relay selection and detection

Técnicas de pré-codificação para sistemas multicelulares coordenados

Doutoramento em TelecomunicaçõesCoordenação Multicélula é um tópico de investigação em rápido crescimento e uma solução promissora para controlar a interferência entre células em sistemas celulares, melhorando a equidade do sistema e aumentando a sua capacidade. Esta tecnologia já está em estudo no LTEAdvanced sob o conceito de coordenação multiponto (COMP). Existem várias abordagens sobre coordenação multicélula, dependendo da quantidade e do tipo de informação partilhada pelas estações base, através da rede de suporte (backhaul network), e do local onde essa informação é processada, i.e., numa unidade de processamento central ou de uma forma distribuída em cada estação base. Nesta tese, são propostas técnicas de pré-codificação e alocação de potência considerando várias estratégias: centralizada, todo o processamento é feito na unidade de processamento central; semidistribuída, neste caso apenas parte do processamento é executado na unidade de processamento central, nomeadamente a potência alocada a cada utilizador servido por cada estação base; e distribuída em que o processamento é feito localmente em cada estação base. Os esquemas propostos são projectados em duas fases: primeiro são propostas soluções de pré-codificação para mitigar ou eliminar a interferência entre células, de seguida o sistema é melhorado através do desenvolvimento de vários esquemas de alocação de potência. São propostas três esquemas de alocação de potência centralizada condicionada a cada estação base e com diferentes relações entre desempenho e complexidade. São também derivados esquemas de alocação distribuídos, assumindo que um sistema multicelular pode ser visto como a sobreposição de vários sistemas com uma única célula. Com base neste conceito foi definido uma taxa de erro média virtual para cada um desses sistemas de célula única que compõem o sistema multicelular, permitindo assim projectar esquemas de alocação de potência completamente distribuídos. Todos os esquemas propostos foram avaliados em cenários realistas, bastante próximos dos considerados no LTE. Os resultados mostram que os esquemas propostos são eficientes a remover a interferência entre células e que o desempenho das técnicas de alocação de potência propostas é claramente superior ao caso de não alocação de potência. O desempenho dos sistemas completamente distribuídos é inferior aos baseados num processamento centralizado, mas em contrapartida podem ser usados em sistemas em que a rede de suporte não permita a troca de grandes quantidades de informação.Multicell coordination is a promising solution for cellular wireless systems to mitigate inter-cell interference, improving system fairness and increasing capacity and thus is already under study in LTE-A under the coordinated multipoint (CoMP) concept. There are several coordinated transmission approaches depending on the amount of information shared by the transmitters through the backhaul network and where the processing takes place i.e. in a central processing unit or in a distributed way on each base station. In this thesis, we propose joint precoding and power allocation techniques considering different strategies: Full-centralized, where all the processing takes place at the central unit; Semi-distributed, in this case only some process related with power allocation is done at the central unit; and Fulldistributed, where all the processing is done locally at each base station. The methods are designed in two phases: first the inter-cell interference is removed by applying a set of centralized or distributed precoding vectors; then the system is further optimized by centralized or distributed power allocation schemes. Three centralized power allocation algorithms with per-BS power constraint and different complexity tradeoffs are proposed. Also distributed power allocation schemes are proposed by considering the multicell system as superposition of single cell systems, where we define the average virtual bit error rate (BER) of interference-free single cell system, allowing us to compute the power allocation coefficients in a distributed manner at each BS. All proposed schemes are evaluated in realistic scenarios considering LTE specifications. The numerical evaluations show that the proposed schemes are efficient in removing inter-cell interference and improve system performance comparing to equal power allocation. Furthermore, fulldistributed schemes can be used when the amounts of information to be exchanged over the backhaul is restricted, although system performance is slightly degraded from semi-distributed and full-centralized schemes, but the complexity is considerably lower. Besides that for high degrees of freedom distributed schemes show similar behaviour to centralized ones

Low complexity detection for SC-FDE massive MIMO systems

Nowadays we continue to observe a big and fast growth of wireless com-munication usage due to the increasing number of access points, and fields of application of this technology. Furthermore, these new usages can require higher speed and better quality of service in order to create market. As example we can have: live 4K video transmission, M2M (Machine to Machine communication), IoT (Internet of Things), Tactile Internet, between many others. As a consequence of all these factors, the spectrum is getting overloaded with communications, increasing the interference and affecting the system's per-formance. Therefore a different path of ideas has been followed and the commu-nication process has been taken to the next level in 5G by the usage of big arrays of antennas and multi-stream communication (MIMO systems) which in a greater scale are called massive MIMO schemes. These systems can be combined with an SC-FDE (Single-Carrier Frequency Domain Equalization) scheme to im-prove the power efficiency due to the low envelope fluctuations. This thesis focused on the equalization in massive MIMO systems, more specifically in the FDE (Frequency Domain Equalization), studying the perfor-mance of different approaches, namely ZF (Zero Forcing), EGD (Equal Gain De-tector), MRD (Maximum Ratio Detector), IB-DFE (Iterative Block Decision Feed-back Equalizer) and a proposed receiver combining MRD (or EGD) and IB-DFE.With this approach we want to minimize the ICI (Inter Carrier Interference) in order to have almost independent data streams and to produce a low complexity code, so that the receiver's performance doesn't affect the total system's perfor-mance, with a final objective of increasing the data throughput in a great scale

Computationally efficient block diagonalization for downlink multiuser MIMO-OFDM systems

One of the key challenges in downlink multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is the mitigation of the multi-access interference when different users share the same subcarriers. In this work, the block diagonalization (BD) algorithm for inter-user interference pre-cancelation is extended to MIMO-OFDM systems. However, in the context of OFDM, the complexity of the algorithm grows proportionally to the number of OFDM subcarriers. To address this issue, the inherent frequency correlation between adjacent subcarriers is exploited. Simulations show that interpolation of the BD pre/decoding matrices provides a favorable tradeoff between complexity and performance. Specifically, a 50% reduction in computational load is achieved for less than 5% throughput loss and 1 dB error performance penalty at high SNR

Space time transceiver design over multipath fading channels

Imperial Users onl

Adjustable dynamic range for paper reduction schemes in large-scale MIMO-OFDM systems

In a multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) communication system there is a necessity to limit the power that the output antenna amplifiers can deliver. Their signal is a combination of many independent channels, so the demanded amplitude can peak to many times the average value. The orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system causes high peak signals to occur because many subcarrier components are added by an inverse discrete Fourier transformation process at the base station. This causes out-of-band spectral regrowth. If simple clipping of the input signal is used, there will be in-band distortions in the transmitted signals and the bit error rate will increase substantially. This work presents a novel technique that reduces the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). It is a combination of two main stages, a variable clipping level and an Adaptive Optimizer that takes advantage of the channel state information sent from all users in the cell. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves a better overall system performance than that of conventional peak reduction systems in terms of the symbol error rate. As a result, the linear output of the power amplifiers can be minimized with a great saving in cost

Multi-user MIMO beamforming:implementation, verification in L1 capacity, and performance testing

Abstract. A certain piece of technology takes a lot of effort, research, and testing to reach the productisation phase. Radio features are implemented in layer 1 (L1) before moving to the hardware implementation phase, where their functioning is tested and verified. The target of the thesis is to implement and verify beamforming based multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) in L1 capacity and performance testing (PET) environment. The L1 testing environment mainly focuses on 4G and 5G stand-alone (SA) cases, while the focus of this thesis work is only on 5G SA technology, which features beamforming and MU-MIMO. Beamforming and MU-MIMO have been tested in an end-to-end system but not specifically in L1. The L1 testing provides a deeper analysis of beamforming and MU-MIMO in L1 and aids in problem identification at an early productisation phase, saving both time and money. L1 PET has multiple components that work together for L1 data transmission in both uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) directions and handle the verification of the transmitted data. The main components that play a key role in the implementation of multi-user MIMO beamforming concern frame design setup, message setup for UL and DL using correct channels and interfaces, transmission of the generated data in UL and DL, and message capturing at L1 end (whether correct messages are transmitted or not). For verification purposes, methods such as analysing plots from L1 log results based on comparison with radio specifications are used to determine whether the generated test output is correct or not. Finally, performance metrics, such as error vector magnitude (EVM), UE per transmission time interval (TTI), number of layers per UE, channel quality indicator (CQI), physical resource block (PRB) count, and throughput, are evaluated to assess the capacity and performance correctness of the implemented test setup