Performance improvements in wireless CDMA communications utilizing adaptive antenna arrays

This dissertation studies applications of adaptive antenna arrays and space-time adaptive processing (STAP) in wireless code-division multiple-access (CDMA) communications. The work addresses three aspects of the CDMA communications problems: (I) near-far resistance, (2) reverse link, (3) forward link. In each case, adaptive arrays are applied and their performance is investigated. The near-far effect is a well known problem which affects the reverse link of CDMA communication systems. The near-far resistance of STAP is analyzed for two processing methods: maximal ratio combining and optimum combining. It. is shown that while maximal ratio combining is not near-far resistant, optimum combining is near-far resistant when the number of cochannel interferences is less than the system dimensionality. The near-far effect can be mitigated by accurate power control at the mobile station. With practical limitations, the received signal power at a base station from a power-controlled user is a random variable clue to power control error. The statistical model of signal-to-interference ratio at the antenna array output of a base station is presented, and the outage probability of the CDMA reverse link is analyzed while considering Rayleigh fading, voice activity and power control error. New analytical expressions are obtained and demonstrated by computer simulations. For the application of an adaptive antenna. array at the forward link, a receiver architecture is suggested for the mobile station that utilizes a small two-antenna array For interference suppression. Such a receiver works well only when the channel vector of the desired signal is known. The identifying spreading codes (as in IS-95A for example) are used to provide an adaptive channel vector estimate, and control the beam steering weight, hence improve the receiver performance. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the operation of the proposed receiver model and the improvement in performance and capacity

Adaptive space-time processing for digital mobile radio communication systems

The performance of digital mobile radio communication systems is primarily limited by cochannel interference and multipath fading. Antenna arrays, with optimum combining (OC), have been shown to combat multipath fading of the desired signal and are capable of reducing the power of interfering signals at the receiver through spatial filtering. With OC, the signals received by several antenna elements are weighted and combined to maximize the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SLNR). We derive new closed-form expressions for (1) the probability density function (PDF) of the SINR at the output of the optimum combiner, (2) the average probability of bit error rate (BER) and its upper bound, and (3) the outage probability in a Rayleigh fading environment with multiple cochannel interferers. The study covers both the case when the number of antenna elements exceeds the number of interferers and vice versa. We consider independent fading at each antenna element, as well as the effect of fading correlation. The analysis is also extended to processing using maximal ratio combining (MRC). The performance of the optimum combiner is compared to that of the maximal ratio combiner and results show that OC performs significantly better than MRC. We investigate the performance of OC in a microcellular environment where the desired signal and the cochannel interference can have different statistical characteristics. The desired signal is assumed to have Rician statistics implying that a dominant multipath reflection or a line-of-sight (LOS) propagation exists within-cell transmission. Interfering signals from cochannel cells are assumed to be subject to Rayleigh fading due to the absence of LOS propagation. This is the so called Rician/Rayleigh model. We also study OC for a special case of the Rician/Rayleigh model, the Nonfading/Rayleigh model. We derive expressions for the PDF of the SJNR, the BER and the outage probability for both Rician/Rayleigh and Nonfading/Rayleigh models. Similar expressions are derived with MRC. Another area in which space-time processing may provide significant benefits is when wideband signals (such as code division multiple access (CDMA) signals) are overlaid on existing narrowband user signals. The conventional approach of rejecting narrowband interference in direct-sequence (DS) CDMA systems has been to sample the received signal at the chip interval, and to exploit the high correlation between the interference samples prior to spread spectrum demodulation. A different approach is space-time processing. We study two space-time receiver architectures, referred to as cascade and joint, respectively, and evaluate the performance of a DS-CDMA signal overlaying a narrowband signal for personal communication systems (PCS). We define aild evaluate the asymptotic efficiency of each configuration. We develop new closed-form expressions for the PDF of the SINR at the array output, the BER and its upper bound, for both cascade and joint configurations. We also analyze the performance of this system in the presence of multiple access interference (MAJ)

Cooperative diversity for the cellular uplink: Sharing strategies, performance analysis, and receiver design

In this thesis, we propose data sharing schemes for the cooperative diversity in a cellular uplink to exploit diversity and enhance throughput performance of the system. Particularly, we consider new two and three-or-more user decode and forward (DF) protocols using space time block codes. We discuss two-user and three-user amplify and forward (AF) protocols and evaluate the performance of the above mentioned data sharing protocols in terms of the bit error rate and the throughput in an asynchronous code division multiple access (CDMA) cellular uplink. We develop a linear receiver for joint space-time decoding and multiuser detection that provides full diversity and near maximum-likelihood performance.;We also focus on a practical situation where inter-user channel is noisy and cooperating users can not successfully estimate other user\u27s data. We further design our system model such that, users decide not to forward anything in case of symbol errors. Channel estimation plays an important role here, since cooperating users make random estimation errors and the base station can not have the knowledge of the errors or the inter-user channels. We consider a training-based approach for channel estimation. We provide an information outage probability analysis for the proposed multi-user sharing schemes. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Role of Interference and Computational Complexity in Modern Wireless Networks: Analysis, Optimization, and Design

Owing to the popularity of smartphones, the recent widespread adoption of wireless broadband has resulted in a tremendous growth in the volume of mobile data traffic, and this growth is projected to continue unabated. In order to meet the needs of future systems, several novel technologies have been proposed, including cooperative communications, cloud radio access networks (RANs) and very densely deployed small-cell networks. For these novel networks, both interference and the limited availability of computational resources play a very important role. Therefore, the accurate modeling and analysis of interference and computation is essential to the understanding of these networks, and an enabler for more efficient design.;This dissertation focuses on four aspects of modern wireless networks: (1) Modeling and analysis of interference in single-hop wireless networks, (2) Characterizing the tradeoffs between the communication performance of wireless transmission and the computational load on the systems used to process such transmissions, (3) The optimization of wireless multiple-access networks when using cost functions that are based on the analytical findings in this dissertation, and (4) The analysis and optimization of multi-hop networks, which may optionally employ forms of cooperative communication.;The study of interference in single-hop wireless networks proceeds by assuming that the random locations of the interferers are drawn from a point process and possibly constrained to a finite area. Both the information-bearing and interfering signals propagate over channels that are subject to path loss, shadowing, and fading. A flexible model for fading, based on the Nakagami distribution, is used, though specific examples are provided for Rayleigh fading. The analysis is broken down into multiple steps, involving subsequent averaging of the performance metrics over the fading, the shadowing, and the location of the interferers with the aim to distinguish the effect of these mechanisms that operate over different time scales. The analysis is extended to accommodate diversity reception, which is important for the understanding of cooperative systems that combine transmissions that originate from different locations. Furthermore, the role of spatial correlation is considered, which provides insight into how the performance in one location is related to the performance in another location.;While it is now generally understood how to communicate close to the fundamental limits implied by information theory, operating close to the fundamental performance bounds is costly in terms of the computational complexity required to receive the signal. This dissertation provides a framework for understanding the tradeoffs between communication performance and the imposed complexity based on how close a system operates to the performance bounds, and it allows to accurately estimate the required data processing resources of a network under a given performance constraint. The framework is applied to Cloud-RAN, which is a new cellular architecture that moves the bulk of the signal processing away from the base stations (BSs) and towards a centralized computing cloud. The analysis developed in this part of the dissertation helps to illuminate the benefits of pooling computing assets when decoding multiple uplink signals in the cloud. Building upon these results, new approaches for wireless resource allocation are proposed, which unlike previous approaches, are aware of the computing limitations of the network.;By leveraging the accurate expressions that characterize performance in the presence of interference and fading, a methodology is described for optimizing wireless multiple-access networks. The focus is on frequency hopping (FH) systems, which are already widely used in military systems, and are becoming more common in commercial systems. The optimization determines the best combination of modulation parameters (such as the modulation index for continuous-phase frequency-shift keying), number of hopping channels, and code rate. In addition, it accounts for the adjacent-channel interference (ACI) and determines how much of the signal spectrum should lie within the operating band of each channel, and how much can be allowed to splatter into adjacent channels.;The last part of this dissertation contemplates networks that involve multi-hop communications. Building on the analytical framework developed in early parts of this dissertation, the performance of such networks is analyzed in the presence of interference and fading, and it is introduced a novel paradigm for a rapid performance assessment of routing protocols. Such networks may involve cooperative communications, and the particular cooperative protocol studied here allows the same packet to be transmitted simultaneously by multiple transmitters and diversity combined at the receiver. The dynamics of how the cooperative protocol evolves over time is described through an absorbing Markov chain, and the analysis is able to efficiently capture the interference that arises as packets are periodically injected into the network by a common source, the temporal correlation among these packets and their interdependence

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