Slow Adaptive OFDMA Systems Through Chance Constrained Programming

Adaptive OFDMA has recently been recognized as a promising technique for providing high spectral efficiency in future broadband wireless systems. The research over the last decade on adaptive OFDMA systems has focused on adapting the allocation of radio resources, such as subcarriers and power, to the instantaneous channel conditions of all users. However, such "fast" adaptation requires high computational complexity and excessive signaling overhead. This hinders the deployment of adaptive OFDMA systems worldwide. This paper proposes a slow adaptive OFDMA scheme, in which the subcarrier allocation is updated on a much slower timescale than that of the fluctuation of instantaneous channel conditions. Meanwhile, the data rate requirements of individual users are accommodated on the fast timescale with high probability, thereby meeting the requirements except occasional outage. Such an objective has a natural chance constrained programming formulation, which is known to be intractable. To circumvent this difficulty, we formulate safe tractable constraints for the problem based on recent advances in chance constrained programming. We then develop a polynomial-time algorithm for computing an optimal solution to the reformulated problem. Our results show that the proposed slow adaptation scheme drastically reduces both computational cost and control signaling overhead when compared with the conventional fast adaptive OFDMA. Our work can be viewed as an initial attempt to apply the chance constrained programming methodology to wireless system designs. Given that most wireless systems can tolerate an occasional dip in the quality of service, we hope that the proposed methodology will find further applications in wireless communications

Cross-Layer Resource Allocation and Scheduling in Wireless Multicarrier Networks

The current dominate layered networking architecture, in which each layer is designed and operated independently, results in inefficient and inflexible resource use in wireless networks due to the nature of the wireless medium, such as time-varying channel fading, mutual interference, and topology variations. In this thesis, we focus on resource allocation and scheduling in wireless orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) networks based on joint physical and medium access control (MAC) layer optimization. To achieve orders of magnitude gains in system performance, we use two major mechanisms in resource management: exploiting the time variance and frequency selectivity of wireless channels through adaptive modulation, coding, as well as packet scheduling and regulating resource allocation through network economics. With the help of utility functions that capture the satisfaction level of users for a given resource assignment, we establish a utility optimization framework for resource allocation in OFDM networks, in which the network utility at the level of applications is maximized subject to the current channel conditions and the modulation and coding techniques employed in the network. Although the nonlinear and combinatorial nature of the cross-layer optimization challenges algorithm development, we propose novel efficient dynamic subcarrier assignment (DSA) and adaptive power allocation (APA) algorithms that are proven to achieve the optimal or near-optimal performance with very low complexity. Based on a holistic design principle, we design max-delay-utility (MDU) scheduling, which senses both channel and queue information. The MDU scheduling can simultaneously improve the spectral efficiency and provide right incentives to ensure that all applications can receive their different required quality of service (QoS). To facilitate the cross-layer design, we also deeply investigate the mechanisms of channel-aware scheduling, such as efficiency, fairness, and stability. First, using extreme value theory, we analyze the impact of multiuser diversity on throughput and packet delay. Second, we reveal a generic relationship between a specific convex utility function and a type of fairness. Third, with rigorous proofs, we provide a method to design cross-layer scheduling algorithms that allow the queueing stability region at the network layer to approach the ergodic capacity region at the physical layer.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Ye (Geoffrey) Li; Committee Member: Ian F. Akyildiz; Committee Member: James McClellan; Committee Member: John R. Barry; Committee Member: Xingxing Y

Adaptive Transmission for OFDM

To respond to dynamic channel conditions caused by fading, shadowing, and other time-varying disturbances, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) packet radio systems should adapt transmission parameters on a packet-by-packet basis to maintain or improve performance over the channel. For this to be possible, there are three key ideas that must be addressed: first, how to determine the subchannel conditions; second, which transmission parameters should be adapted; and third, how to adapt those parameters intelligently. In this thesis, we propose a procedure for determining relative subchannel quality without using any traditional channel measurements. Instead, statistics derived solely from subcarrier error counts allow subchannels to be ranked by order of estimated quality; this order can be exploited for adapting transmission parameters. We investigate adaptive subcarrier power allocation, adaptive subcarrier modulation that allows different subcarriers in the same packet to use different modulation formats, and adaptive coding techniques for OFDM in fading channels. Analysis and systems simulation assess the accuracy of the subcarrier ordering as well as the throughput achieved by the proposed adaptive transmission protocol, showing good performance across a wide range of channel conditions

Peak-to-Average-Power-Ratio (PAPR) Reduction Techniques for Orthogonal-Frequency-Division- Multiplexing (OFDM) Transmission

Wireless communication has experienced an incredible growth in the last decade. Two decades ago,the number of mobile subscribers was less than 1% of the world\u27s population. As of 2011, the number of mobile subscribers has increased tremendously to 79.86% of the world\u27s population. Robust and high-rate data transmission in mobile environments faces severe problems due to the time-variant channel conditions, multipath fading and shadow fading. Fading is the main limitation on wireless communication channels. Frequency selective interference and fading, such as multipath fading, is a bandwidth bottleneck in the last mile which runs from the access point to the user. The last mile problem in wireless communication networks is caused by the environment of free space channels through which the signal propagates. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a promising modulation and multiplexing technique due to its robustness against multipath fading. Nevertheless, OFDM suffers from high Peak-to-Average- Power-Ratio (PAPR), which results in a complex OFDM signal. In this research, reduction of PAPR considering the out-of-band radiation and the regeneration of the time-domain signal peaks caused by filtering has been studied and is presented. Our PAPR reduction was 30% of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) with Interleaved Frequency Division Multiple Access (IFDMA) utilizing Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK) and varying the roll-off factor. We show that pulse shaping does not affect the PAPR of Localized Frequency Division Multiple Access (LFDMA) as much as it affects the PAPR of IFDMA. Therefore, IFDMA has an important trade-off relationship between excess bandwidth and PAPR performance, since excess bandwidth increases as the roll-off factor increases. In addition, we studied a low complexity clipping scheme, applicable to IFDMA uplink and OFDM downlink systems for PAPR reduction. We show that the performance of the PAPR of the Interleaved-FDMA scheme is better than traditional OFDMA for the uplink transmission system. Our reduction of PAPR is 53% when IFDMA is used instead of OFDMA in the uplink direction. Furthermore, we also examined an important trade-off relationship between clipping distortion and quantization noise when the clipping scheme is used for OFDM downlink systems. Our results show a significant reduction in the PAPR and the out-of-band radiation caused by clipping for OFDM downlink transmission system

Narrowband Interference Suppression in Wireless OFDM Systems

Signal distortions in communication systems occur between the transmitter and the receiver; these distortions normally cause bit errors at the receiver. In addition interference by other signals may add to the deterioration in performance of the communication link. In order to achieve reliable communication, the effects of the communication channel distortion and interfering signals must be reduced using different techniques. The aim of this paper is to introduce the fundamentals of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), to review and examine the effects of interference in a digital data communication link and to explore methods for mitigating or compensating for these effects

High Capacity CDMA and Collaborative Techniques

The thesis investigates new approaches to increase the user capacity and improve the error performance of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) by employing adaptive interference cancellation and collaborative spreading and space diversity techniques. Collaborative Coding Multiple Access (CCMA) is also investigated as a separate technique and combined with CDMA. The advantages and shortcomings of CDMA and CCMA are analysed and new techniques for both the uplink and downlink are proposed and evaluated. Multiple access interference (MAI) problem in the uplink of CDMA is investigated first. The practical issues of multiuser detection (MUD) techniques are reviewed and a novel blind adaptive approach to interference cancellation (IC) is proposed. It exploits the constant modulus (CM) property of digital signals to blindly suppress interference during the despreading process and obtain amplitude estimation with minimum mean squared error for use in cancellation stages. Two new blind adaptive receiver designs employing successive and parallel interference cancellation architectures using the CM algorithm (CMA) referred to as ‘CMA-SIC’ and ‘BA-PIC’, respectively, are presented. These techniques have shown to offer near single user performance for large number of users. It is shown to increase the user capacity by approximately two fold compared with conventional IC receivers. The spectral efficiency analysis of the techniques based on output signal-to interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) also shows significant gain in data rate. Furthermore, an effective and low complexity blind adaptive subcarrier combining (BASC) technique using a simple gradient descent based algorithm is proposed for Multicarrier-CDMA. It suppresses MAI without any knowledge of channel amplitudes and allows large number of users compared with equal gain and maximum ratio combining techniques normally used in practice. New user collaborative schemes are proposed and analysed theoretically and by simulations in different channel conditions to achieve spatial diversity for uplink of CCMA and CDMA. First, a simple transmitter diversity and its equivalent user collaborative diversity techniques for CCMA are designed and analysed. Next, a new user collaborative scheme with successive interference cancellation for uplink of CDMA referred to as collaborative SIC (C-SIC) is investigated to reduce MAI and achieve improved diversity. To further improve the performance of C-SIC under high system loading conditions, Collaborative Blind Adaptive SIC (C-BASIC) scheme is proposed. It is shown to minimize the residual MAI, leading to improved user capacity and a more robust system. It is known that collaborative diversity schemes incur loss in throughput due to the need of orthogonal time/frequency slots for relaying source’s data. To address this problem, finally a novel near-unity-rate scheme also referred to as bandwidth efficient collaborative diversity (BECD) is proposed and evaluated for CDMA. Under this scheme, pairs of users share a single spreading sequence to exchange and forward their data employing a simple superposition or space-time encoding methods. At the receiver collaborative joint detection is performed to separate each paired users’ data. It is shown that the scheme can achieve full diversity gain at no extra bandwidth as inter-user channel SNR becomes high. A novel approach of ‘User Collaboration’ is introduced to increase the user capacity of CDMA for both the downlink and uplink. First, collaborative group spreading technique for the downlink of overloaded CDMA system is introduced. It allows the sharing of the same single spreading sequence for more than one user belonging to the same group. This technique is referred to as Collaborative Spreading CDMA downlink (CS-CDMA-DL). In this technique T-user collaborative coding is used for each group to form a composite codeword signal of the users and then a single orthogonal sequence is used for the group. At each user’s receiver, decoding of composite codeword is carried out to extract the user’s own information while maintaining a high SINR performance. To improve the bit error performance of CS-CDMA-DL in Rayleigh fading conditions, Collaborative Space-time Spreading (C-STS) technique is proposed by combining the collaborative coding multiple access and space-time coding principles. A new scheme for uplink of CDMA using the ‘User Collaboration’ approach, referred to as CS-CDMA-UL is presented next. When users’ channels are independent (uncorrelated), significantly higher user capacity can be achieved by grouping multiple users to share the same spreading sequence and performing MUD on per group basis followed by a low complexity ML decoding at the receiver. This approach has shown to support much higher number of users than the available sequences while also maintaining the low receiver complexity. For improved performance under highly correlated channel conditions, T-user collaborative coding is also investigated within the CS-CDMA-UL system

Frequency Domain Independent Component Analysis Applied To Wireless Communications Over Frequency-selective Channels

In wireless communications, frequency-selective fading is a major source of impairment for wireless communications. In this research, a novel Frequency-Domain Independent Component Analysis (ICA-F) approach is proposed to blindly separate and deconvolve signals traveling through frequency-selective, slow fading channels. Compared with existing time-domain approaches, the ICA-F is computationally efficient and possesses fast convergence properties. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed ICA-F. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems are widely used in wireless communications nowadays. However, OFDM systems are very sensitive to Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO). Thus, an accurate CFO compensation technique is required in order to achieve acceptable performance. In this dissertation, two novel blind approaches are proposed to estimate and compensate for CFO within the range of half subcarrier spacing: a Maximum Likelihood CFO Correction approach (ML-CFOC), and a high-performance, low-computation Blind CFO Estimator (BCFOE). The Bit Error Rate (BER) improvement of the ML-CFOC is achieved at the expense of a modest increase in the computational requirements without sacrificing the system bandwidth or increasing the hardware complexity. The BCFOE outperforms the existing blind CFO estimator [25, 128], referred to as the YG-CFO estimator, in terms of BER and Mean Square Error (MSE), without increasing the computational complexity, sacrificing the system bandwidth, or increasing the hardware complexity. While both proposed techniques outperform the YG-CFO estimator, the BCFOE is better than the ML-CFOC technique. Extensive simulation results illustrate the performance of the ML-CFOC and BCFOE approaches

Optimality Properties, Distributed Strategies, and Measurement-Based Evaluation of Coordinated Multicell OFDMA Transmission

The throughput of multicell systems is inherently limited by interference and the available communication resources. Coordinated resource allocation is the key to efficient performance, but the demand on backhaul signaling and computational resources grows rapidly with number of cells, terminals, and subcarriers. To handle this, we propose a novel multicell framework with dynamic cooperation clusters where each terminal is jointly served by a small set of base stations. Each base station coordinates interference to neighboring terminals only, thus limiting backhaul signalling and making the framework scalable. This framework can describe anything from interference channels to ideal joint multicell transmission. The resource allocation (i.e., precoding and scheduling) is formulated as an optimization problem (P1) with performance described by arbitrary monotonic functions of the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratios (SINRs) and arbitrary linear power constraints. Although (P1) is non-convex and difficult to solve optimally, we are able to prove: 1) Optimality of single-stream beamforming; 2) Conditions for full power usage; and 3) A precoding parametrization based on a few parameters between zero and one. These optimality properties are used to propose low-complexity strategies: both a centralized scheme and a distributed version that only requires local channel knowledge and processing. We evaluate the performance on measured multicell channels and observe that the proposed strategies achieve close-to-optimal performance among centralized and distributed solutions, respectively. In addition, we show that multicell interference coordination can give substantial improvements in sum performance, but that joint transmission is very sensitive to synchronization errors and that some terminals can experience performance degradations.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 15 pages, 7 figures. This version corrects typos related to Eq. (4) and Eq. (28