A Novel Beamformed Control Channel Design for LTE with Full Dimension-MIMO

The Full Dimension-MIMO (FD-MIMO) technology is capable of achieving huge improvements in network throughput with simultaneous connectivity of a large number of mobile wireless devices, unmanned aerial vehicles, and the Internet of Things (IoT). In FD-MIMO, with a large number of antennae at the base station and the ability to perform beamforming, the capacity of the physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) has increased a lot. However, the current specifications of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) does not allow the base station to perform beamforming techniques for the physical downlink control channel (PDCCH), and hence, PDCCH has neither the capacity nor the coverage of PDSCH. Therefore, PDCCH capacity will still limit the performance of a network as it dictates the number of users that can be scheduled at a given time instant. In Release 11, 3GPP introduced enhanced PDCCH (EPDCCH) to increase the PDCCH capacity at the cost of sacrificing the PDSCH resources. The problem of enhancing the PDCCH capacity within the available control channel resources has not been addressed yet in the literature. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel beamformed PDCCH (BF-PDCCH) design which is aligned to the 3GPP specifications and requires simple software changes at the base station. We rely on the sounding reference signals transmitted in the uplink to decide the best beam for a user and ingeniously schedule the users in PDCCH. We perform system level simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed design and show that the proposed BF-PDCCH achieves larger network throughput when compared with the current state of art algorithms, PDCCH and EPDCCH schemes

Theoretical and experimental design of an alternative system to 2 x 2 MIMO for LTE over 60 km directly modulated RoF link

Relay nodes (RN) are used as an important structure to extend the coverage of the Third Generation Partnership Program’s Long Term Evolution (3GPP-LTE). The promising technology as the interface between eNodeB (eNB) and RN is radio-over-fibre (RoF), due to its longer span transmission capability. In this paper, we propose an alternative technique to 2×2 multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) in LTE structure for transmission over 60 km directly modulated RoF link by introducing frequency division multiplexing (FDM) for orthogonal FDM (OFDM). The system is demonstrated theoretically and experimentally. In the baseband, quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and 64-QAM are considered as the single carrier modulations (SCM) according to the LTE standard. The system degradation pattern is identical between the theoretical and experimental system, thus proving the accuracy of the theoretical system design. The real time QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-QAM system achieved an average EVM of 5.84%, 5.90% and 5.97%, respectively for 2 GHz and 2.6 GHz bands. These resultant EVMs are below the 8% 3GPP-LTE EVM requirement

A LTE MIMO OTA Test System Using Vector Signal Transceivers

A 2 × 2 multiple-input-multiple-output over-the-air (MIMO OTA) test system based on four field-programmable Vector-Signal-Transceiver (VST) modules is presented. The system enables 2 x 2 MIMO OTA testing by assembling of a twochannel Evolved Node B (eNodeB) LTE base station emulator, a 2x2 channel emulator, and a two-channel user equipment (UE) simulator. A two-stage MIMO OTA test method has been demonstrated with downlink Long-Term Evolution Time-Division Duplex (LTE-TDD) mode using different modulation and coding schemes (MCSs). Test results and analysis are shown. This system will allow a systematic study of MIMO OTA metrology needs

Advanced Radio Resource Management for Multi Antenna Packet Radio Systems

In this paper, we propose fairness-oriented packet scheduling (PS) schemes with power-efficient control mechanism for future packet radio systems. In general, the radio resource management functionality plays an important role in new OFDMA based networks. The control of the network resource division among the users is performed by packet scheduling functionality based on maximizing cell coverage and capacity satisfying, and certain quality of service requirements. Moreover, multiantenna transmit-receive schemes provide additional flexibility to packet scheduler functionality. In order to mitigate inter-cell and co-channel interference problems in OFDMA cellular networks soft frequency reuse with different power masks patterns is used. Stemming from the earlier enhanced proportional fair scheduler studies for single-input multiple-output (SIMO) and multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) systems, we extend the development of efficient packet scheduling algorithms by adding transmit power considerations in the overall priority metrics calculations and scheduling decisions. Furthermore, we evaluate the proposed scheduling schemes by simulating practical orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based packet radio system in terms of throughput, coverage and fairness distribution among users. As a concrete example, under reduced overall transmit power constraint and unequal power distribution for different sub-bands, we demonstrate that by using the proposed power-aware multi-user scheduling schemes, significant coverage and fairness improvements in the order of 70% and 20%, respectively, can be obtained, at the expense of average throughput loss of only 15%.Comment: 14 Pages, IJWM

Two-Layered Superposition of Broadcast/Multicast and Unicast Signals in Multiuser OFDMA Systems

We study optimal delivery strategies of one common and $K$ independent messages from a source to multiple users in wireless environments. In particular, two-layered superposition of broadcast/multicast and unicast signals is considered in a downlink multiuser OFDMA system. In the literature and industry, the two-layer superposition is often considered as a pragmatic approach to make a compromise between the simple but suboptimal orthogonal multiplexing (OM) and the optimal but complex fully-layered non-orthogonal multiplexing. In this work, we show that only two-layers are necessary to achieve the maximum sum-rate when the common message has higher priority than the $K$ individual unicast messages, and OM cannot be sum-rate optimal in general. We develop an algorithm that finds the optimal power allocation over the two-layers and across the OFDMA radio resources in static channels and a class of fading channels. Two main use-cases are considered: i) Multicast and unicast multiplexing when $K$ users with uplink capabilities request both common and independent messages, and ii) broadcast and unicast multiplexing when the common message targets receive-only devices and $K$ users with uplink capabilities additionally request independent messages. Finally, we develop a transceiver design for broadcast/multicast and unicast superposition transmission based on LTE-A-Pro physical layer and show with numerical evaluations in mobile environments with multipath propagation that the capacity improvements can be translated into significant practical performance gains compared to the orthogonal schemes in the 3GPP specifications. We also analyze the impact of real channel estimation and show that significant gains in terms of spectral efficiency or coverage area are still available even with estimation errors and imperfect interference cancellation for the two-layered superposition system