Intersymbol and Intercarrier Interference in OFDM Systems: Unified Formulation and Analysis

A unified matrix formulation is presented for the analysis of intersymbol and intercarrier interference in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The proposed formulation relies on six parameters and allows studying various schemes, including those with windowing in the transmitter and/or in the receiver (called windowed OFDM systems), which may add cyclic suffix and/or cyclic prefix (CP), besides the conventional CP-OFDM. The proposed framework encompasses seven different OFDM systems. It considers the overlap-and-add procedure performed in the transmitter of windowed OFDM systems, being jointly formulated with the channel convolution. The intersymbol and intercarrier interference, caused when the order of the channel impulse response is higher than the number of CP samples, is characterized. A new equivalent channel matrix that is useful for calculating both the received signal and the interference power is defined and characterized. Unlike previous works, this new channel matrix has no restrictions on the length of the channel impulse response, which means that the study is not constrained to the particular case of two or three data blocks interfering in the received signal. Theoretical expressions for the powers of three different kinds of interference are derived. These expressions allow calculating the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio, useful for computing the data rate of each OFDM system. The proposed formulation is applied to realistic examples, showing its effectiveness through comparisons based on numerical performance assessments of the considered OFDM systems

Performance Analysis of Asynchronous NB-IoT Up-link Systems

The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) published LTE release 13, which standardized a new radio access network (RAN) called Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT). Such networks, particularly designed for massive machine-type communications (mMTC), inherit theIR functionalities from the existing LTE systems with slight differences and operate in a narrow frequency band of 180 kHz, consisting of one resource block (RB) of 12 LTE subcarriers. This thesis is mainly focused on single-tone in-band transmission with one 15 kHz subcarrier of the NB-IoT RB in the middle of the LTE RBs. The aim of this thesis is to examine the performance of both NB-IoT transmission and LTE transmission after certain enhancements of the NB-IoT transmitter. These additional approaches including time-domain windowing and filtering. Also a nonlinear power amplifier model for the NB-IoT transmitter is included in the study. It is worth to mention that NB-IoT and LTE signals are transmitted together through asynchronous channels to evaluate the effect of noise and Inter-Carrier Interference (ICI). In order to compare the effects of different modulation schemes, 4-QAM and 64-QAM are both considered for LTE transmission. Filters are designed to suppress the spectral sidelobes of transmitted signals to reduce the interferences due to asynchronous operation. What’s more, transmissions with one-subcarrier-wide guard band between the active NB-IoT and LTE subcarriers or without guard band are both examined from bit error-rate (BER) perspective

Performance Analysis of Asynchronous NB-IoT Up-link Systems

The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) published LTE release 13, which standardized a new radio access network (RAN) called Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT). Such networks, particularly designed for massive machine-type communications (mMTC), inherit theIR functionalities from the existing LTE systems with slight differences and operate in a narrow frequency band of 180 kHz, consisting of one resource block (RB) of 12 LTE subcarriers. This thesis is mainly focused on single-tone in-band transmission with one 15 kHz subcarrier of the NB-IoT RB in the middle of the LTE RBs. The aim of this thesis is to examine the performance of both NB-IoT transmission and LTE transmission after certain enhancements of the NB-IoT transmitter. These additional approaches including time-domain windowing and filtering. Also a nonlinear power amplifier model for the NB-IoT transmitter is included in the study. It is worth to mention that NB-IoT and LTE signals are transmitted together through asynchronous channels to evaluate the effect of noise and Inter-Carrier Interference (ICI). In order to compare the effects of different modulation schemes, 4-QAM and 64-QAM are both considered for LTE transmission. Filters are designed to suppress the spectral sidelobes of transmitted signals to reduce the interferences due to asynchronous operation. What’s more, transmissions with one-subcarrier-wide guard band between the active NB-IoT and LTE subcarriers or without guard band are both examined from bit error-rate (BER) perspective

Multiantenna Interference Mitigation Schemes and Resource Allocation for Cognitive Radio

Maximum and efficient utilization of available resources has been a central theme of research on various areas of science and engineering. Wireless communication is not an exception to this. With the rapid growth of wireless communication applications, radio frequency spectrum has become a valuable commodity. Supporting very high demands for data rate and throughput has become a challenging problem which requires innovative solutions. Dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) based cognitive radio (CR) is envisioned as a promising technology for future wireless communication systems, such as fifth generation (5G) further development and sixth generation (6G). Extensive research has been done in the areas of CRs and it is considered to mitigate the spectral crowding problem by introducing the notion of opportunistic spectrum usage. Spectrum sensing, which enables CRs to identify spectral holes, is a critical component in CR technology. Furthermore, improving the efficiency of the radio spectrum use through spectrum sensing and dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is one of the emerging trends. In the first part of this thesis, we focus on enhancing the spectrum usage of CR’s using interference cancellation methods that provides considerable performance gains with realistic computational complexity, especially, in the context of the widely used multicarrier waveforms. The primary focus is on interference rejection combining (IRC) methods, applied to the black-space cognitive radio (BS-CR). Earlier studies on the BS-CR in the literature were focused on using CRs as repeaters for the primary transmitter to guarantee that the CR is not causing significant interference to nearby primary users’ receivers. This kind of approaches are transmitter-centric in nature. In this thesis, receiver-centric approaches such as multi-antenna diversity combining, especially enhanced IRC methods, are considered and evaluated. IRC methods have been widely studied and adopted in several practical wireless communication systems. We focus on developing such BS-CR schemes under strong interference conditions, which has not been studied in the CR literature so far. Spatial covariance matrix estimation under mobility and high carrier frequencies is found to be the most critical part of such scheme. Algorithms and methods to mitigate these effects are developed in this thesis and they are evaluated under realistic BS-CR receiver operating conditions. We use sample covariance estimation approach with silent gaps in the CR transmisison. Covariance interpolation between silent gaps improves greatly the robustness with time-varying channels. Good link performance can be reached with low mobility at carrier frequency considered for the TV white-spaced case. The proposed BS-CR scheme could be feasible at below 6 GHz frequencies with pedestrian mobilities. The second part of this thesis investigates the effect of radio frequency (RF) impairments on the performance of the cognitive wireless communication. There are various unavoidable imperfections, mainly due to the limitations of analog high-frequency transmitter and receiver circuits. These imperfections include power amplifier (PA) non-linearities, receiver nonlinearities, and carrier frequency offset (CFO), which are considered in this study. These effects lead to significant signal distortion and, as a result of this, the wireless link quality may deteriorate. In multicarrier communications such signal distortions may lead to additional interference, and it is important to evaluate their effects on spectrum sensing quality and on the performance of the proposed BS-CR scheme. This part of the thesis provides critical analysis and insights into such issues caused by RF imperfections and demonstrates the need for designing proper compensation techniques required to avoid/reduce such degradations. It is found that the transmitter’s PA nonlinearities affect in the same way as in basic OFDM systems and BS-CR receiver’s linearity requirements are similar to those for advanced DSP-intensive software defined radios. The CR receiver’s CFO with respect to the PU has the most critical effect. However, synchronizing the CR with the needed high accuracy is considered achievable due to the PU signal’s high-power level. The final part of the thesis briefly looks at alternate waveforms and techniques that can be used in CRs. The filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) waveforms are considered as an alternative to the widely used OFDM schemes. Here the core idea is interference avoidance, targeting to reduce the interference leakage between CRs and the primary systems, by means of using a waveform with good spectrum localization properties. FBMC system’s performance is compared with OFDM based system in the context of CRs. The performance is compared from a combined spectrum sensing and resource allocation point of view through simulations. It is found that well-localized CR waveforms improve the CR link capacity, but with poorly localized primary signals, these possibilities are rather limited