Design guidelines for spatial modulation

A new class of low-complexity, yet energyefficient Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) transmission techniques, namely the family of Spatial Modulation (SM) aided MIMOs (SM-MIMO) has emerged. These systems are capable of exploiting the spatial dimensions (i.e. the antenna indices) as an additional dimension invoked for transmitting information, apart from the traditional Amplitude and Phase Modulation (APM). SM is capable of efficiently operating in diverse MIMO configurations in the context of future communication systems. It constitutes a promising transmission candidate for large-scale MIMO design and for the indoor optical wireless communication whilst relying on a single-Radio Frequency (RF) chain. Moreover, SM may also be viewed as an entirely new hybrid modulation scheme, which is still in its infancy. This paper aims for providing a general survey of the SM design framework as well as of its intrinsic limits. In particular, we focus our attention on the associated transceiver design, on spatial constellation optimization, on link adaptation techniques, on distributed/ cooperative protocol design issues, and on their meritorious variants

Coded DS-CDMA Systems with Iterative Channel Estimation and no Pilot Symbols

In this paper, we describe direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) systems with quadriphase-shift keying in which channel estimation, coherent demodulation, and decoding are iteratively performed without the use of any training or pilot symbols. An expectation-maximization channel-estimation algorithm for the fading amplitude, phase, and the interference power spectral density (PSD) due to the combined interference and thermal noise is proposed for DS-CDMA systems with irregular repeat-accumulate codes. After initial estimates of the fading amplitude, phase, and interference PSD are obtained from the received symbols, subsequent values of these parameters are iteratively updated by using the soft feedback from the channel decoder. The updated estimates are combined with the received symbols and iteratively passed to the decoder. The elimination of pilot symbols simplifies the system design and allows either an enhanced information throughput, an improved bit error rate, or greater spectral efficiency. The interference-PSD estimation enables DS-CDMA systems to significantly suppress interference.Comment: To appear, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Pilot embedding for channel estimation and tracking in OFDM systems

Journal ArticleAbstract-We consider the problem of channel estimation and tracking in OFDM systems and explore the idea of adding pilot symbols to the data symbols as a means to conserve bandwidth. The term pilot embedding (PE) is used to refer to this scheme. Compared to the pilot insertion (PI) scheme, i.e., the conventional pilot symbol assisted modulation (PSAM), PE is more bandwidth efficient since no separate subcarriers/timeslots are allocated to pilots. We formalize this by evaluating the capacity of the two schemes and showing that PE indeed has the potential to transmit at a higher rate. The problem of channel tracking using a decision directed approach is reviewed and found to be unreliable, in the sense that the channel estimator fails to track the channel variations after some iterations because of unavoidable decision errors. We propose an ad hoc channel estimation algorithm that uses the embedded pilots along with the past decisions of data for reliable tracking of the channel

Two-tier channel estimation aided near-capacity MIMO transceivers relying on norm-based joint transmit and receive antenna selection

We propose a norm-based joint transmit and receive antenna selection (NBJTRAS) aided near-capacity multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system relying on the assistance of a novel two-tier channel estimation scheme. Specifically, a rough estimate of the full MIMO channel is first generated using a low-complexity, low-training-overhead minimum mean square error based channel estimator, which relies on reusing a modest number of radio frequency (RF) chains. NBJTRAS is then carried out based on this initial full MIMO channel estimate. The NBJTRAS aided MIMO system is capable of significantly outperforming conventional MIMO systems equipped with the same modest number of RF chains, while dispensing with the idealised simplifying assumption of having perfectly known channel state information (CSI). Moreover, the initial subset channel estimate associated with the selected subset MIMO channel matrix is then used for activating a powerful semi-blind joint channel estimation and turbo detector-decoder, in which the channel estimate is refined by a novel block-of-bits selection based soft-decision aided channel estimator (BBSB-SDACE) embedded in the iterative detection and decoding process. The joint channel estimation and turbo detection-decoding scheme operating with the aid of the proposed BBSB-SDACE channel estimator is capable of approaching the performance of the near-capacity maximumlikelihood (ML) turbo transceiver associated with perfect CSI. This is achieved without increasing the complexity of the ML turbo detection and decoding process

Massive MIMO with Non-Ideal Arbitrary Arrays: Hardware Scaling Laws and Circuit-Aware Design

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are cellular networks where the base stations (BSs) are equipped with unconventionally many antennas, deployed on co-located or distributed arrays. Huge spatial degrees-of-freedom are achieved by coherent processing over these massive arrays, which provide strong signal gains, resilience to imperfect channel knowledge, and low interference. This comes at the price of more infrastructure; the hardware cost and circuit power consumption scale linearly/affinely with the number of BS antennas $N$. Hence, the key to cost-efficient deployment of large arrays is low-cost antenna branches with low circuit power, in contrast to today's conventional expensive and power-hungry BS antenna branches. Such low-cost transceivers are prone to hardware imperfections, but it has been conjectured that the huge degrees-of-freedom would bring robustness to such imperfections. We prove this claim for a generalized uplink system with multiplicative phase-drifts, additive distortion noise, and noise amplification. Specifically, we derive closed-form expressions for the user rates and a scaling law that shows how fast the hardware imperfections can increase with $N$ while maintaining high rates. The connection between this scaling law and the power consumption of different transceiver circuits is rigorously exemplified. This reveals that one can make the circuit power increase as $\sqrt{N}$, instead of linearly, by careful circuit-aware system design.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 16 pages, 8 figures. The results can be reproduced using the following Matlab code: https://github.com/emilbjornson/hardware-scaling-law

Multiuser MIMO-OFDM for Next-Generation Wireless Systems

This overview portrays the 40-year evolution of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) research. The amelioration of powerful multicarrier OFDM arrangements with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems has numerous benefits, which are detailed in this treatise. We continue by highlighting the limitations of conventional detection and channel estimation techniques designed for multiuser MIMO OFDM systems in the so-called rank-deficient scenarios, where the number of users supported or the number of transmit antennas employed exceeds the number of receiver antennas. This is often encountered in practice, unless we limit the number of users granted access in the base station’s or radio port’s coverage area. Following a historical perspective on the associated design problems and their state-of-the-art solutions, the second half of this treatise details a range of classic multiuser detectors (MUDs) designed for MIMO-OFDM systems and characterizes their achievable performance. A further section aims for identifying novel cutting-edge genetic algorithm (GA)-aided detector solutions, which have found numerous applications in wireless communications in recent years. In an effort to stimulate the cross pollination of ideas across the machine learning, optimization, signal processing, and wireless communications research communities, we will review the broadly applicable principles of various GA-assisted optimization techniques, which were recently proposed also for employment inmultiuser MIMO OFDM. In order to stimulate new research, we demonstrate that the family of GA-aided MUDs is capable of achieving a near-optimum performance at the cost of a significantly lower computational complexity than that imposed by their optimum maximum-likelihood (ML) MUD aided counterparts. The paper is concluded by outlining a range of future research options that may find their way into next-generation wireless systems

A New Method For Increasing the Accuracy of EM-based Channel Estimation

It was recently shown that the detection performance can be significantly improved if the statistics of channel estimation errors are available and properly used at the receiver. Although in pilot-only channel estimation it is usually straightforward to characterize the statistics of channel estimation errors, this is not the case for the class of data-aided (semi-blind) channel estimation techniques. In this paper, we focus on the widely-used data-aided channel estimation techniques based on the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. This is achieved by a modified formulation of the EM algorithm which provides the receiver with the statistics of the estimation errors and properly using this additional information. Simulation results show that the proposed data-aided estimator outperform its classical counterparts in terms of accuracy, without requiring additional complexity at the receiver