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

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

Space time transceiver design over multipath fading channels

Imperial Users onl