Multi-rate access schemes and successive interference cancellation for wireless multimedia MC-CDMA communications

To catch up with the fast changes of the information challenges, providing multimedia services has become a very important requirement for future wireless communications. A proper system, capable of supporting multi-rate transmissions as well as handling high quality of service (QoS) requirements in hostile wireless communication environments, should be sought. Multi-carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA), a combination of multi-carrier modulation (MCM) and direct-sequence CDMA (DS-CDMA), appears to be one of the most elegant solutions. In this dissertation, four multi-rate access schemes, termed uncoded fixed spreading length (UFSL), coded fixed spreading length (CFSL), multi-code fixed spreading length (MFSL) and variable spreading length (VSL), are constructed for MC-CDMA. Due to different sub-carrier assignment strategies, they present different properties in spectral utilization efficiency (SUE), rate matching capability, receiver structure and bit-error-rate (BER) performance in correlated Rayleigh fading channels. With these schemes, different information traffic such as voice, video and higher rate data can be transmitted seanilessly through one MC-CDMA infrastructure. The performance of the multi-rate MC-CDMA is mainly limited by multiple access interference (MAI). For example, in the MFSL MC-CDMA systems, the interference is not only presented among different users, but also among different symbols of the same user transmitted in parallel on different spreading codes. To mitigate this problem, a nonlinear zero-forcing successive interference cancellation (ZF-SIC) receiver and a minimum mean square error SIC (MMSE-SIC) receiver are applied in the MFSL MC-CDMA systems. It is well known that SIC is sensitive to the receive power distribution. By providing channel state information (CSI) at the receiver and reliable feedback of power distribution from the receiver to the transmitter, SIC can be integrated with power distribution control (PDC), which improves the system capacity significantly. In this dissertation, the PDC algorithms, under both a short-term power constraint (STPC) and a long-term power constraint (LTPC) are investigated for two different SIC receivers. For the ZF-SIC receiver, the PDC under the equal BER criterion, which ensures the same performance after SIC for all parallel transmit symbols, is first considered. It is found that for a multi-code system, such equal BER PDC is only suboptimal from the viewpoint of minimizing each user\u27s BER, hence, an optimal PDC algorithm is proposed, which significantly outperforms the equal BER PDC, particularly under the STPC and highly-loaded systems. For the MMSE-SIC, the PDC under the equal BER criterion is derived, which cancels interference very effectively, resulting in a performance of a fully-loaded system close to the single user bound (SUB). In comparison to the nonlinear matched-filter SIC (MF-SIC) with the equal BER PDC, studied extensively in the literature, the ZF-SIC and MMSE-SIC with the proposed PDC algorithms present remarkable performance advantage. Finally, the effect of channel estimation errors (CEE) on the performance of the MMSE-SIC with the equal BER PDC is analyzed. A method of second-order approximation is used to estimate the mean excess MSE (MEMSE) of the parallel transmit symbols, under a given decision order. The approximation accuracy is confirmed by simulation results. Furthermore, it is also interesting to find out that the MMSE-SIC with the equal BER PDC presents significant robustness to CEE

On rate capacity and signature sequence adaptation in downlink of MC-CDMA system

This dissertation addresses two topics in the MC-CDMA system: rate capacity and adaptation of users\u27 signature sequences. Both of them are studied for the downlink communication scenario with multi-code scheme. The purpose of studying rate capacity is to understand the potential of applying MC-CDMA technique for high speed wireless data communications. It is shown that, to maintain high speed data transmission with multi-code scheme, each mobile should cooperatively decode its desired user\u27s encoded data symbols which are spread with different signature sequences simultaneously. Higher data rate can be achieved by implementing dirty paper coding (DPC) to cooperatively encode all users\u27 data symbols at the base station. However, the complexity of realizing DPC is prohibitively high. Moreover, it is found that the resource allocation policy has profound impact on the rate capacity that can be maintained in the system. Nevertheless, the widely adopted proportional resource allocation policy is only suitable for the communication scenario in which the disparity of users\u27 channel qualities is small. When the difference between users\u27 channel qualities is large, one must resort to non-proportional assignment of power and signature sequences. Both centralized and distributed schemes are proposed to adapt users\u27 signature sequences in the downlink of MC-CDMA system. With the former, the base station collects complete channel state information and iteratively adapts all users\u27 signature sequences to optimize an overall system performance objective function, e.g. the weighted total mean square error (WTMSE). Since the proposed centralized scheme is designed such that each iteration of signature sequence adaptation decreases the WTMSE which is lower bounded, the convergence of the proposed centralized scheme is guaranteed. With the distributed signature sequence adaptation, each user\u27s signature sequences are independently adapted to optimize the associated user\u27s individual performance objective function with no regard to the performance of other users in the system. Two distributed adaptation schemes are developed. In one scheme, each user adapts its signature sequences under a pre-assigned power constraint which remains unchanged during the process of adaptation. In the other scheme, pricing methodology is applied so that the transmission power at the base station is properly distributed among users when users\u27 signature sequences are adapted. The stability issue of these distributed adaptation schemes is analyzed using game theory frame work. It is proven that there always exists a set of signature sequences at which no user can unilaterally adapt its signature sequences to further improve its individual performance, given the signature sequences chosen by other users in the system