A Comparison of CP-OFDM, PCC-OFDM and UFMC for 5G Uplink Communications

Polynomial-cancellation-coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (PCC-OFDM) is a form of OFDM that has waveforms which are very well localized in both the time and frequency domains and so it is ideally suited for use in the 5G network. This paper analyzes the performance of PCC-OFDM in the uplink of a multiuser system using orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) and compares it with conventional cyclic prefix OFDM (CP-OFDM), and universal filtered multicarrier (UFMC). PCC-OFDM is shown to be much less sensitive than either CP-OFDM or UFMC to time and frequency offsets. For a given constellation size, PCC-OFDM in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) requires 3dB lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for a given bit-error-rate, and the SNR advantage of PCC-OFDM increases rapidly when there are timing and/or frequency offsets. For PCC-OFDM no frequency guard band is required between different OFDMA users. PCC-OFDM is completely compatible with CP-OFDM and adds negligible complexity and latency, as it uses a simple mapping of data onto pairs of subcarriers at the transmitter, and a simple weighting-and-adding of pairs of subcarriers at the receiver. The weighting and adding step, which has been omitted in some of the literature, is shown to contribute substantially to the SNR advantage of PCC-OFDM. A disadvantage of PCC-OFDM (without overlapping) is the potential reduction in spectral efficiency because subcarriers are modulated in pairs, but this reduction is more than regained because no guard band or cyclic prefix is required and because, for a given channel, larger constellations can be used

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

Capacity, coding and interference cancellation in multiuser multicarrier wireless communications systems

Multicarrier modulation and multiuser systems have generated a great deal of research during the last decade. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a multicarrier modulation generated with the inverse Discrete Fourier Transform, which has been adopted for standards in wireless and wire-line communications. Multiuser wireless systems using multicarrier modulation suffer from the effects of dispersive fading channels, which create multi-access, inter-symbol, and inter-carrier interference (MAI, ISI, ICI). Nevertheless, channel dispersion also provides diversity, which can be exploited and has the potential to increase robustness against fading. Multiuser multi-carrier systems can be implemented using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), a flexible orthogonal multiplexing scheme that can implement time and frequency division multiplexing, and using multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA). Coding, interference cancellation, and resource sharing schemes to improve the performance of multiuser multicarrier systems on wireless channels were addressed in this dissertation. Performance of multiple access schemes applied to a downlink multiuser wireless system was studied from an information theory perspective and from a more practical perspective. For time, frequency, and code division, implemented using OFDMA and MC-CDMA, the system outage capacity region was calculated for a correlated fading channel. It was found that receiver complexity determines which scheme offers larger capacity regions, and that OFDMA results in a better compromise between complexity and performance than MC-CDMA. From the more practical perspective of bit error rate, the effects of channel coding and interleaving were investigated. Results in terms of coding bounds as well as simulation were obtained, showing that OFDMAbased orthogonal multiple access schemes are more sensitive to the effectiveness of the code to provide diversity than non-orthogonal, MC-CDMA-based schemes. While cellular multiuser schemes suffer mainly from MAI, OFDM-based broadcasting systems suffer from ICI, in particular when operating as a single frequency network (SFN). It was found that for SFN the performance of a conventional OFDM receiver rapidly degrades when transmitters have frequency synchronization errors. Several methods based on linear and decision-feedback ICI cancellation were proposed and evaluated, showing improved robustness against ICI. System function characterization of time-variant dispersive channels is important for understanding their effects on single carrier and multicarrier modulation. Using time-frequency duality it was shown that MC-CDMA and DS-CDMA are strictly dual on dispersive channels. This property was used to derive optimal matched filter structures, and to determine a criterion for the selection of spreading sequences for both DS and MC CDMA. The analysis of multiple antenna systems provided a unified framework for the study of DS-CDMA and MC-CDMA on time and frequency dispersive channels, which can also be used to compare their performance

Near-Instantaneously Adaptive HSDPA-Style OFDM Versus MC-CDMA Transceivers for WIFI, WIMAX, and Next-Generation Cellular Systems

Burts-by-burst (BbB) adaptive high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) style multicarrier systems are reviewed, identifying their most critical design aspects. These systems exhibit numerous attractive features, rendering them eminently eligible for employment in next-generation wireless systems. It is argued that BbB-adaptive or symbol-by-symbol adaptive orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) modems counteract the near instantaneous channel quality variations and hence attain an increased throughput or robustness in comparison to their fixed-mode counterparts. Although they act quite differently, various diversity techniques, such as Rake receivers and space-time block coding (STBC) are also capable of mitigating the channel quality variations in their effort to reduce the bit error ratio (BER), provided that the individual antenna elements experience independent fading. By contrast, in the presence of correlated fading imposed by shadowing or time-variant multiuser interference, the benefits of space-time coding erode and it is unrealistic to expect that a fixed-mode space-time coded system remains capable of maintaining a near-constant BER

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

System capacity enhancement for 5G network and beyond

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyThe demand for wireless digital data is dramatically increasing year over year. Wireless communication systems like Laptops, Smart phones, Tablets, Smart watch, Virtual Reality devices and so on are becoming an important part of people’s daily life. The number of mobile devices is increasing at a very fast speed as well as the requirements for mobile devices such as super high-resolution image/video, fast download speed, very short latency and high reliability, which raise challenges to the existing wireless communication networks. Unlike the previous four generation communication networks, the fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication network includes many technologies such as millimetre-wave communication, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), visual light communication (VLC), heterogeneous network (HetNet) and so forth. Although 5G has not been standardised yet, these above technologies have been studied in both academia and industry and the goal of the research is to enhance and improve the system capacity for 5G networks and beyond by studying some key problems and providing some effective solutions existing in the above technologies from system implementation and hardware impairments’ perspective. The key problems studied in this thesis include interference cancellation in HetNet, impairments calibration for massive MIMO, channel state estimation for VLC, and low latency parallel Turbo decoding technique. Firstly, inter-cell interference in HetNet is studied and a cell specific reference signal (CRS) interference cancellation method is proposed to mitigate the performance degrade in enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC). This method takes carrier frequency offset (CFO) and timing offset (TO) of the user’s received signal into account. By reconstructing the interfering signal and cancelling it afterwards, the capacity of HetNet is enhanced. Secondly, for massive MIMO systems, the radio frequency (RF) impairments of the hardware will degrade the beamforming performance. When operated in time duplex division (TDD) mode, a massive MIMO system relies on the reciprocity of the channel which can be broken by the transmitter and receiver RF impairments. Impairments calibration has been studied and a closed-loop reciprocity calibration method is proposed in this thesis. A test device (TD) is introduced in this calibration method that can estimate the transmitters’ impairments over-the-air and feed the results back to the base station via the Internet. The uplink pilots sent by the TD can assist the BS receivers’ impairment estimation. With both the uplink and downlink impairments estimates, the reciprocity calibration coefficients can be obtained. By computer simulation and lab experiment, the performance of the proposed method is evaluated. Channel coding is an essential part of a wireless communication system which helps fight with noise and get correct information delivery. Turbo codes is one of the most reliable codes that has been used in many standards such as WiMAX and LTE. However, the decoding process of turbo codes is time-consuming and the decoding latency should be improved to meet the requirement of the future network. A reverse interleave address generator is proposed that can reduce the decoding time and a low latency parallel turbo decoder has been implemented on a FPGA platform. The simulation and experiment results prove the effectiveness of the address generator and show that there is a trade-off between latency and throughput with a limited hardware resource. Apart from the above contributions, this thesis also investigated multi-user precoding for MIMO VLC systems. As a green and secure technology, VLC is achieving more and more attention and could become a part of 5G network especially for indoor communication. For indoor scenario, the MIMO VLC channel could be easily ill-conditioned. Hence, it is important to study the impact of the channel state to the precoding performance. A channel state estimation method is proposed based on the signal to interference noise ratio (SINR) of the users’ received signal. Simulation results show that it can enhance the capacity of the indoor MIMO VLC system

Timing and Carrier Synchronization in Wireless Communication Systems: A Survey and Classification of Research in the Last 5 Years

Timing and carrier synchronization is a fundamental requirement for any wireless communication system to work properly. Timing synchronization is the process by which a receiver node determines the correct instants of time at which to sample the incoming signal. Carrier synchronization is the process by which a receiver adapts the frequency and phase of its local carrier oscillator with those of the received signal. In this paper, we survey the literature over the last 5 years (2010–2014) and present a comprehensive literature review and classification of the recent research progress in achieving timing and carrier synchronization in single-input single-output (SISO), multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), cooperative relaying, and multiuser/multicell interference networks. Considering both single-carrier and multi-carrier communication systems, we survey and categorize the timing and carrier synchronization techniques proposed for the different communication systems focusing on the system model assumptions for synchronization, the synchronization challenges, and the state-of-the-art synchronization solutions and their limitations. Finally, we envision some future research directions

Wavelet based multicarrier CDMA system

Emerging demands for high data rate services, high user capacity and low power consumption systems are the key driving forces behind the continued technology evolution in wireless communications. Multicarrier Modulation techniques support variety of services requiring different data rates and different QoS (quality of service) levels. Multicarrier CDMA is a wireless communication system that can be seen as a combination of direct sequence CDMA and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing techniques. The main benefits of this system are its robustness to inter symbol interference and multipath propagation in fading channels. This paper studies and simulates the Discrete Wavelet Transform based Multicarrier CDMA and compares it with the  Discrete Fourier Transform based one using different number of sub carriers, and different modulation techniques. The results shows that the Wavelet based system outperforms the Fourier based one since it has lower bit error rate BER performance, lower peak to verage power ratio PAPR and higher user capacity