Asynchronous CDMA Systems with Random Spreading-Part I: Fundamental Limits

Spectral efficiency for asynchronous code division multiple access (CDMA) with random spreading is calculated in the large system limit allowing for arbitrary chip waveforms and frequency-flat fading. Signal to interference and noise ratios (SINRs) for suboptimal receivers, such as the linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) detectors, are derived. The approach is general and optionally allows even for statistics obtained by under-sampling the received signal. All performance measures are given as a function of the chip waveform and the delay distribution of the users in the large system limit. It turns out that synchronizing users on a chip level impairs performance for all chip waveforms with bandwidth greater than the Nyquist bandwidth, e.g., positive roll-off factors. For example, with the pulse shaping demanded in the UMTS standard, user synchronization reduces spectral efficiency up to 12% at 10 dB normalized signal-to-noise ratio. The benefits of asynchronism stem from the finding that the excess bandwidth of chip waveforms actually spans additional dimensions in signal space, if the users are de-synchronized on the chip-level. The analysis of linear MMSE detectors shows that the limiting interference effects can be decoupled both in the user domain and in the frequency domain such that the concept of the effective interference spectral density arises. This generalizes and refines Tse and Hanly's concept of effective interference. In Part II, the analysis is extended to any linear detector that admits a representation as multistage detector and guidelines for the design of low complexity multistage detectors with universal weights are provided

Adaptive bootstrap signal separators for BPSK/QAM-modulated wireless CDMA systems in a multipath environment

CDMA is an attractive multiple-access scheme, because of its potential capacity increase and its anti-multipath fading capability. For satisfactory performance, however, the effect of the near-far problem has to be resolved. This problem can be combated by using power-control, which, however, results in an overall reduction in communication ranges, and thus in a loss of capacity. Among other methods for mitigating the near-far problem is the use of decorrelating receivers, both of fixed type, which directly utilizes the cross-correlation of the users codes, and of adaptive type, which uses recursive algorithms that leads to signal decorrelation. Not to lessen the importance of other adaptive algorithms, the current research concentrates on what was termed in the literature bootstrap algorithm . Although the emphasis will be on applying the adaptive bootstrap decorrelator, the fixed type will be used primarily to provide comparison. Also used for comparison are both blind adaptive and training sequence based MMSE. Most of the literature on multiuser detection has been assuming BPSK. However, a need for transferring wideband data demands using modulation schemes with high bits/cycle, such as QAM. Therefore, modification of the receiver is considered, so that QAM-modulation can be applied efficiently, using the complex signal approach of this modulation. For the asynchronous channel, vast amounts of research have been devoted to using one-shot matched filter banks followed by conventional decorrelators which implement the inverse of some (partial) correlation matrix. In this work, an adaptive bootstrap version is presented, which is suitable for the one-shot structure shown previously to be more robust to errors in delay estimation. It has also been noted that such a correlation matrix can, depending on the channel characteristics, become ill-conditioned or even singular. Therefore, another matched filtering structure, followed by what is called a multishot conventional (fixed type) decorrelator, has been previously suggested to mitigate this singularity problem. However, the fixed type of the multishot decorrelator is expected to have similar non-robustness to errors in delay estimation as was previously shown for the one-shot. Therefore, the adaptive multishot bootstrap decorrelator is presented and evaluated. Also, by adding an adaptive canceler, an extension to the above matched filter-decorrelator combination, will be proposed and evaluated. A multipath time-variant fading environment will be used in some of these performance evaluations. Finally, when handling multipath channels, the question is raised whether path combining should be done before or after the signals are decorrelated. For the asynchronous case, a one-shot extension of the bootstrap algorithm is presented, which is capable of decorrelating the signals from resolved paths of different users, to facilitate the decorrelate before combining case

Interference suppression and diversity for CDMA systems

In code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems, due to non-orthogonality of the spreading codes and multipath channels, the desired signal suffers interference from other users. Signal fading due to multipath propagation is another source of impairment in wireless CDMA systems, often severely impacting performance. In this dissertation, reduced-rank minimum mean square error (MMSE) receiver and reduced-rank minimum variance receiver are investigated to suppress interference; transmit diversity is applied to multicarrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) systems to combat fading; packet combing is studied to provide both interference suppression and diversity for CDMA random access systems. The reduced-rank MMSE receiver that uses a reduced-rank estimated covariance matrix is studied to improve the performance of MMSE receiver in CDMA systems. It is shown that the reduced-rank MMSE receiver has much better performance than the full-rank MMSE receiver when the covariance matrix is estimated by using a finite number of data samples and the desired signal is in a low dimensional subspace. It is also demonstrated that the reduced-rank minimum variance receiver outperforms the full-rank minimum variance receiver. The probability density function of the output SNR of the full-rank and reduced-rank linear MMSE estimators is derived for a general linear signal model under the assumption that the signals and noise are Gaussian distributed. Space-time coding that is originally proposed for narrow band systems is applied to an MC-CDMA system in order to get transmit diversity for such a wideband system. Some techniques to jointly decode the space-time code and suppress interference are developed. The channel estimation using either pilot channels or pilot symbols is studied for MC-CDMA systems with space-time coding. Performance of CDMA random access systems with packet combining in fading channels is analyzed. By combining the current retransmitted packet with all its previous transmitted copies, the receiver obtains a diversity gain plus an increased interference and noise suppression gain. Therefore, the bit error rate dramatically decreases with the number of transmissions increasing, which in turn improves the system throughput and reduces the average delay

A space-time channel estimator and single-user receiver for code-reuse DS-CDMA systems

Published versio

Channel estimation and signal enhancement for DS-CDMA systems

This dissertation focuses on topics of Bayesian-based multiuser detection, space-time (S-T) transceiver design, and S-T channel parameter estimation for direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) systems. Using the Bayesian framework, various linear and simplified nonlinear multiuser detectors are proposed, and their performances are analyzed. The simplified non-linear Bayesian solutions can bridge the performance gap between sub-optimal linear multiuser detectors and the optimum multiuser detector. To further improve the system capacity and performance, S-T transceiver design approaches with complexity constraint are investigated. Novel S-T receivers of low-complexity that jointly use the temporal code-signature and the spatial signature are proposed. Our solutions, which lead to generalized near-far resistant S-T RAKE receivers, achieve better interference suppression than the existing S-T RAKE receivers. From transmitter side, we also proposed a transmit diversity (TD) technique in combination with differential detection for the DS-CDMA systems. It is shown that the proposed S-T TD scheme in combination with minimum variance distortionless response transceiver (STTD+MVDR) is near-far resistant and outperforms the conventional STTD and matched filter based (STTD+MF) transceiver scheme. Obtaining channel state information (CSI) is instrumental to optimum S-T transceiver design in wireless systems. Another major focus of this dissertation is to estimate the S-T channel parameters. We proposed an asymptotic, joint maximum likelihood (ML) method of estimating multipath channel parameters for DS-CDMA systems. An iterative estimator is proposed to further simplify the computation. Analytical and simulation results show that the iterative estimation scheme is near-far resistant for both time delays and DOAs. And it reaches the corresponding CRBs after a few iterations

Interference characterization and suppression for multiuser direct-sequence spread-spectrum system

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-184).In this thesis we investigate efficient modulation and detection techniques for the uplink (i.e. transmission from mobile to base station) of a DS-CDMA network. Specifically, the thesis contains three parts. In the first part, we focus on the mobile transmitter. In particular, we evaluate and compare the spectral efficiency of two promising variable rate DS-CDMA transmission techniques, multicode (MCD) and variable-spreading-gain (VSG), under the presence of multiple-access (user-to-user) interferences (MAI) and multipath interferences. The uniqueness of our study is that in bit-error-rate evaluation, instead of approximating the interference as Gaussian noise (which has been done in most of the previous studies), we incorporate both power and distribution of interferences into consideration. We show where the Gaussian assumption may give misleading answers and how our results in these cases are different from those obtained in the past. In part two and three of the thesis, we focus on the base station receiver. Specifically, we present effective joint detection techniques that have good performance-complexity tradeoff. Part two of the thesis introduces a class of novel multistage parallel interference cancellation algorithms based on stage-by-stage minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) optimization. We show that this scheme is capable of achieving significantly better performance than other algorithms with similar complexity. Part three of the thesis presents a low-complexity dual-mode multiuser detector that dynamically switches its detection mode between the matched-filter receiver and the decorrelator. We show that this detector is capable of achieving the performance of a decorrelator but with significant savings in processing power and complexity.by Mingxi Fan.Ph.D

High Capacity CDMA and Collaborative Techniques

The thesis investigates new approaches to increase the user capacity and improve the error performance of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) by employing adaptive interference cancellation and collaborative spreading and space diversity techniques. Collaborative Coding Multiple Access (CCMA) is also investigated as a separate technique and combined with CDMA. The advantages and shortcomings of CDMA and CCMA are analysed and new techniques for both the uplink and downlink are proposed and evaluated. Multiple access interference (MAI) problem in the uplink of CDMA is investigated first. The practical issues of multiuser detection (MUD) techniques are reviewed and a novel blind adaptive approach to interference cancellation (IC) is proposed. It exploits the constant modulus (CM) property of digital signals to blindly suppress interference during the despreading process and obtain amplitude estimation with minimum mean squared error for use in cancellation stages. Two new blind adaptive receiver designs employing successive and parallel interference cancellation architectures using the CM algorithm (CMA) referred to as ‘CMA-SIC’ and ‘BA-PIC’, respectively, are presented. These techniques have shown to offer near single user performance for large number of users. It is shown to increase the user capacity by approximately two fold compared with conventional IC receivers. The spectral efficiency analysis of the techniques based on output signal-to interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) also shows significant gain in data rate. Furthermore, an effective and low complexity blind adaptive subcarrier combining (BASC) technique using a simple gradient descent based algorithm is proposed for Multicarrier-CDMA. It suppresses MAI without any knowledge of channel amplitudes and allows large number of users compared with equal gain and maximum ratio combining techniques normally used in practice. New user collaborative schemes are proposed and analysed theoretically and by simulations in different channel conditions to achieve spatial diversity for uplink of CCMA and CDMA. First, a simple transmitter diversity and its equivalent user collaborative diversity techniques for CCMA are designed and analysed. Next, a new user collaborative scheme with successive interference cancellation for uplink of CDMA referred to as collaborative SIC (C-SIC) is investigated to reduce MAI and achieve improved diversity. To further improve the performance of C-SIC under high system loading conditions, Collaborative Blind Adaptive SIC (C-BASIC) scheme is proposed. It is shown to minimize the residual MAI, leading to improved user capacity and a more robust system. It is known that collaborative diversity schemes incur loss in throughput due to the need of orthogonal time/frequency slots for relaying source’s data. To address this problem, finally a novel near-unity-rate scheme also referred to as bandwidth efficient collaborative diversity (BECD) is proposed and evaluated for CDMA. Under this scheme, pairs of users share a single spreading sequence to exchange and forward their data employing a simple superposition or space-time encoding methods. At the receiver collaborative joint detection is performed to separate each paired users’ data. It is shown that the scheme can achieve full diversity gain at no extra bandwidth as inter-user channel SNR becomes high. A novel approach of ‘User Collaboration’ is introduced to increase the user capacity of CDMA for both the downlink and uplink. First, collaborative group spreading technique for the downlink of overloaded CDMA system is introduced. It allows the sharing of the same single spreading sequence for more than one user belonging to the same group. This technique is referred to as Collaborative Spreading CDMA downlink (CS-CDMA-DL). In this technique T-user collaborative coding is used for each group to form a composite codeword signal of the users and then a single orthogonal sequence is used for the group. At each user’s receiver, decoding of composite codeword is carried out to extract the user’s own information while maintaining a high SINR performance. To improve the bit error performance of CS-CDMA-DL in Rayleigh fading conditions, Collaborative Space-time Spreading (C-STS) technique is proposed by combining the collaborative coding multiple access and space-time coding principles. A new scheme for uplink of CDMA using the ‘User Collaboration’ approach, referred to as CS-CDMA-UL is presented next. When users’ channels are independent (uncorrelated), significantly higher user capacity can be achieved by grouping multiple users to share the same spreading sequence and performing MUD on per group basis followed by a low complexity ML decoding at the receiver. This approach has shown to support much higher number of users than the available sequences while also maintaining the low receiver complexity. For improved performance under highly correlated channel conditions, T-user collaborative coding is also investigated within the CS-CDMA-UL system