Advances in Multi-User Scheduling and Turbo Equalization for Wireless MIMO Systems

Nach einer Einleitung behandelt Teil 2 Mehrbenutzer-Scheduling für die Abwärtsstrecke von drahtlosen MIMO Systemen mit einer Sendestation und kanaladaptivem precoding: In jeder Zeit- oder Frequenzressource kann eine andere Nutzergruppe gleichzeitig bedient werden, räumlich getrennt durch unterschiedliche Antennengewichte. Nutzer mit korrelierten Kanälen sollten nicht gleichzeitig bedient werden, da dies die räumliche Trennbarkeit erschwert. Die Summenrate einer Nutzermenge hängt von den Antennengewichten ab, die wiederum von der Nutzerauswahl abhängen. Zur Entkopplung des Problems schlägt diese Arbeit Metriken vor basierend auf einer geschätzten Rate mit ZF precoding. Diese lässt sich mit Hilfe von wiederholten orthogonalen Projektionen abschätzen, wodurch die Berechnung von Antennengewichten beim Scheduling entfällt. Die Ratenschätzung kann basierend auf momentanen Kanalmessungen oder auf gemittelter Kanalkenntnis berechnet werden und es können Datenraten- und Fairness-Kriterien berücksichtig werden. Effiziente Suchalgorithmen werden vorgestellt, die die gesamte Systembandbreite auf einmal bearbeiten können und zur Komplexitätsreduktion die Lösung in Zeit- und Frequenz nachführen können. Teil 3 zeigt wie mehrere Sendestationen koordiniertes Scheduling und kooperative Signalverarbeitung einsetzen können. Mittels orthogonalen Projektionen ist es möglich, Inter-Site Interferenz zu schätzen, ohne Antennengewichte berechnen zu müssen. Durch ein Konzept virtueller Nutzer kann der obige Scheduling-Ansatz auf mehrere Sendestationen und sogar Relays mit SDMA erweitert werden. Auf den benötigten Signalisierungsaufwand wird kurz eingegangen und eine Methode zur Schätzung der Summenrate eines Systems ohne Koordination besprochen. Teil4 entwickelt Optimierungen für Turbo Entzerrer. Diese Nutzen Signalkorrelation als Quelle von Redundanz. Trotzdem kann eine Kombination mit MIMO precoding sinnvoll sein, da bei Annahme realistischer Fehler in der Kanalkenntnis am Sender keine optimale Interferenzunterdrückung möglich ist. Mit Hilfe von EXIT Charts wird eine neuartige Methode zur adaptiven Nutzung von a-priori-Information zwischen Iterationen entwickelt, die die Konvergenz verbessert. Dabei wird gezeigt, wie man semi-blinde Kanalschätzung im EXIT chart berücksichtigen kann. In Computersimulationen werden alle Verfahren basierend auf 4G-Systemparametern überprüft.After an introduction, part 2 of this thesis deals with downlink multi-user scheduling for wireless MIMO systems with one transmitting station performing channel adaptive precoding:Different user subsets can be served in each time or frequency resource by separating them in space with different antenna weight vectors. Users with correlated channel matrices should not be served jointly since correlation impairs the spatial separability.The resulting sum rate for each user subset depends on the precoding weights, which in turn depend on the user subset. This thesis manages to decouple this problem by proposing a scheduling metric based on the rate with ZF precoding such as BD, written with the help of orthogonal projection matrices. It allows estimating rates without computing any antenna weights by using a repeated projection approximation.This rate estimate allows considering user rate requirements and fairness criteria and can work with either instantaneous or long term averaged channel knowledge.Search algorithms are presented to efficiently solve user grouping or selection problems jointly for the entire system bandwidth while being able to track the solution in time and frequency for complexity reduction. Part 3 shows how multiple transmitting stations can benefit from cooperative scheduling or joint signal processing. An orthogonal projection based estimate of the inter-site interference power, again without computing any antenna weights, and a virtual user concept extends the scheduling approach to cooperative base stations and finally included SDMA half-duplex relays in the scheduling.Signalling overhead is discussed and a method to estimate the sum rate without coordination. Part 4 presents optimizations for Turbo Equalizers. There, correlation between user signals can be exploited as a source of redundancy. Nevertheless a combination with transmit precoding which aims at reducing correlation can be beneficial when the channel knowledge at the transmitter contains a realistic error, leading to increased correlation. A novel method for adaptive re-use of a-priori information between is developed to increase convergence by tracking the iterations online with EXIT charts.A method is proposed to model semi-blind channel estimation updates in an EXIT chart. Computer simulations with 4G system parameters illustrate the methods using realistic channel models.Im Buchhandel erhältlich: Advances in Multi-User Scheduling and Turbo Equalization for Wireless MIMO Systems / Fuchs-Lautensack,Martin Ilmenau: ISLE, 2009,116 S. ISBN 978-3-938843-43-

An Overview of Physical Layer Security with Finite-Alphabet Signaling

Providing secure communications over the physical layer with the objective of achieving perfect secrecy without requiring a secret key has been receiving growing attention within the past decade. The vast majority of the existing studies in the area of physical layer security focus exclusively on the scenarios where the channel inputs are Gaussian distributed. However, in practice, the signals employed for transmission are drawn from discrete signal constellations such as phase shift keying and quadrature amplitude modulation. Hence, understanding the impact of the finite-alphabet input constraints and designing secure transmission schemes under this assumption is a mandatory step towards a practical implementation of physical layer security. With this motivation, this article reviews recent developments on physical layer security with finite-alphabet inputs. We explore transmit signal design algorithms for single-antenna as well as multi-antenna wiretap channels under different assumptions on the channel state information at the transmitter. Moreover, we present a review of the recent results on secure transmission with discrete signaling for various scenarios including multi-carrier transmission systems, broadcast channels with confidential messages, cognitive multiple access and relay networks. Throughout the article, we stress the important behavioral differences of discrete versus Gaussian inputs in the context of the physical layer security. We also present an overview of practical code construction over Gaussian and fading wiretap channels, and we discuss some open problems and directions for future research.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials (1st Revision

High capacity multiuser multiantenna communication techniques

One of the main issues involved in the development of future wireless communication systems is the multiple access technique used to efficiently share the available spectrum among users. In rich multipath environment, spatial dimension can be exploited to meet the increasing number of users and their demands without consuming extra bandwidth and power. Therefore, it is utilized in the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology to increase the spectral efficiency significantly. However, multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems are still challenging to be widely adopted in next generation standards. In this thesis, new techniques are proposed to increase the channel and user capacity and improve the error performance of MU-MIMO over Rayleigh fading channel environment. For realistic system design and performance evaluation, channel correlation is considered as one of the main channel impurities due its severe influence on capacity and reliability. Two simple methods called generalized successive coloring technique (GSCT) and generalized iterative coloring technique (GICT) are proposed for accurate generation of correlated Rayleigh fading channels (CRFC). They are designed to overcome the shortcomings of existing methods by avoiding factorization of desired covariance matrix of the Gaussian samples. The superiority of these techniques is demonstrated by extensive simulations of different practical system scenarios. To mitigate the effects of channel correlations, a novel constellation constrained MU-MIMO (CC-MU-MIMO) scheme is proposed using transmit signal design and maximum likelihood joint detection (MLJD) at the receiver. It is designed to maximize the channel capacity and error performance based on principles of maximizing the minimum Euclidean distance (dmin) of composite received signals. Two signal design methods named as unequal power allocation (UPA) and rotation constellation (RC) are utilized to resolve the detection ambiguity caused by correlation. Extensive analysis and simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of considered scheme compared with conventional MU-MIMO. Furthermore, significant gain in SNR is achieved particularly in moderate to high correlations which have direct impact to maintain high user capacity. A new efficient receive antenna selection (RAS) technique referred to as phase difference based selection (PDBS) is proposed for single and multiuser MIMO systems to maximize the capacity over CRFC. It utilizes the received signal constellation to select the subset of antennas with highest (dmin) constellations due to its direct impact on the capacity and BER performance. A low complexity algorithm is designed by employing the Euclidean norm of channel matrix rows with their corresponding phase differences. Capacity analysis and simulation results show that PDBS outperforms norm based selection (NBS) and near to optimal selection (OS) for all correlation and SNR values. This technique provides fast RAS to capture most of the gains promised by multiantenna systems over different channel conditions. Finally, novel group layered MU-MIMO (GL-MU-MIMO) scheme is introduced to exploit the available spectrum for higher user capacity with affordable complexity. It takes the advantages of spatial difference among users and power control at base station to increase the number of users beyond the available number of RF chains. It is achieved by dividing the users into two groups according to their received power, high power group (HPG) and low power group (LPG). Different configurations of low complexity group layered multiuser detection (GL-MUD) and group power allocation ratio (η) are utilized to provide a valuable tradeoff between complexity and overall system performance. Furthermore, RAS diversity is incorporated by using NBS and a new selection algorithm called HPG-PDBS to increase the channel capacity and enhance the error performance. Extensive analysis and simulations demonstrate the superiority of proposed scheme compared with conventional MU-MIMO. By using appropriate value of (η), it shows higher sum rate capacity and substantial increase in the user capacity up to two-fold at target BER and SNR values

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