Multi-user detection for multi-rate DS/CDMA systems

Wireless cellular communication is witnessing a rapid growth in market, technology and range of services. Current and future demands for wireless communication services motivate the need for handling multi-media traffic types. In a multimedia communication system, users with different and even time-varying rates and quality of services (QoS) requirements, such as voice, image and data, must be accommodated. The use of Spread Spectrum modulation with Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology is an attractive approach for economical spectrally efficient and high quality cellular and personal communication services. This dissertation explores the technologies of applying different interference cancellation techniques to multi-rate CDMA systems that serve users with different QoS. Multiple Access Interference (MAI) and multipath propagation are the major issues in wireless communication systems. It is also true for multi-rate CDMA systems. Multi-user detection has been shown to be effective in combating the near-far problem and providing superior performance over conventional detection method. In this dissertation, we combine both linear minimum mean squared error (LMMSE) detector, nonlinear decision feedback detector, with other signal processing techniques, such as array processing and multipath combining, to create effective near-far resistant detectors for multi-rate CDMA systems. Firstly, we propose MMSE receivers for synchronous multi-rate CDMA system and compare the performance with the corresponding multi-rate decorrelating detectors. The multi-rate decorrelating detector is optimally near-far resistant and easy to implement. The proposed linear MMSE multi-rate receiver can be adaptively implemented only with the knowledge of the desired user. Due to the fact that MMSE detector offers best trade-off between the MAI cancellation and noise variance enhancement, it is shown that multi-rate MMSE receiver can offer better performance than the multi-rate decorrelator when the interfering users\u27 Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) is relatively low comparing to the desired user\u27s SNR. Secondly, the asynchronous multi-rate CDMA system, we propose multi-rate multi-shoot decorrelating detectors and multi-rate multi-shot MMSE detectors. The performance of multi-shot detectors can be improved monotonically with increasing the number of stacked bits, but a great computational complexity is going to be introduced in order to get better performance. A debiasing method is introduced to multi-rate multi-shot linear detectors. Debiasing method optimizes multi-rate detectors based on the multi-rate multi-shot model. Debiasing multi-shot MMSE detector for multi-rate signals can offer performance than the corresponding debiasing multi-shot decorrelating detector. Thirdly, we propose linear space-time receivers for multi-rate CDMA systems. The minimum mean-squared error criteria is used. We perform a comparative study on the multi-rate receiver which uses either multipath (temporal) processing or array (spatial) processing, and the one which uses both array and multipath (space-time) processing. The space-time receiver for the multi-rate CDMA signals give us the potential of improving the capacity of multi-rate systems. The space-time processing combined with multiuser detection have the advantages of combating multipath fading through temporal processing, reducing MAI through MMSE method and provide antenna or diversity gain through spatial processing and increasing the capacity of the multi-rate CDMA systems. Lastly, the group-wise interference cancellation methods are proposed for multi-rate CDMA signals. The non-linear decision feedback detection (DFD) schemes are used in the proposed receivers. The proposed interference cancellation schemes benefit from the nature of the unequal received amplitudes for multi-rate CDMA signals. Users with same data rate are grouped together. Users with the highest data-rate are detected first. Interference between the groups is cancelled in a successive order. The results show that the group-wise MMSE DFD yields better performance than multi-rate linear MMSE detector and multi-rate decorrelating detector, especially for highly loaded CDMA systems

Novel multiuser detection and multi-rate schemes for multi-carrier CDMA

A large variety of services is [sic] expected for wireless systems, in particular, high data rate services, such as wireless Internet access. Users with different data rates and quality of service (QoS) requirements must be accommodated. A suitable multiple access scheme is key to enabling wireless systems to support both the high data rate and the integrated multiple data rate transmissions with satisfactory performance and flexibility. A multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) scheme is a promising candidate for emerging broadband wireless systems. MC-CDMA is a hybrid of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and code division multiple access (CDMA). The most salient feature of MC-CDMA is that the rate of transmission is not limited by the wireless channel\u27s frequency-selective fading effects caused by multipath propagation. In MC-CDMA, each chip of the desired user\u27s spreading code, multiplied by the current data bit, is modulated onto a separate subcarrier. Therefore, each subcarrier has a narrow bandwidth and undergoes frequency-flat fading. Two important issues for an MC-CDMA wireless system, multiuser detection and multi-rate access, are discussed in this dissertation. Several advanced receiver structures capable of suppressing multiuser interference in an uplink MC-CDMA system, operating in a frequency-selective fading channel, are studied in this dissertation. One receiver is based on a so-called multishot structure, in which the interference introduced by the asynchronous reception of different users is successfully suppressed by a receiver based on the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) criterion with a built-in de-biasing feature. Like many other multiuser schemes, this receiver is very sensitive to a delay estimation error. A blind adaptive two-stage decorrelating receiver based on the bootstrap algorithm is developed to combat severe performance degradation due to a delay estimation error. It is observed that in the presence of a delay estimation error the blind adaptive bootstrap receiver is more near-far resistant than the MMSE receiver. Furthermore, a differential bootstrap receiver is proposed to extend the limited operating range of the two-stage bootstrap receiver which suffers from a phase ambiguity problem. Another receiver is based on a partial sampling (PS) demodulation structure, which further reduces the sensitivity to unknown user delays in an uplink scenario. Using this partial sampling structure, it is no longer necessary to synchronize the receiver with the desired user. Following the partial sampling demodulator, a minimum mean-square error combining (MMSEC) detector is applied. The partial sampling MMSEC (PS-MMSEC) receiver is shown to have strong interference suppression and timing acquisition capabilities. The complexity of this receiver can be reduced significantly, with negligible performance loss, by choosing a suitable partial sampling rate and using a structure called reduced complexity PS-MMSEC (RPS-MMSEC). The adaptive implementation of these receivers yields a superior rate of convergence and symbol error rate performance in comparison to a conventional MMSEC receiver with known timing. All the above receiver structures are for a single-rate MC-CDMA. Three novel multi-rate access schemes for multi-rate MC-CDMA, fixed spreading length (FSL), coded FSL (CFSL) and variable spreading length (VSL), have been developed. These multi-rate access schemes enable users to transmit information at different data rates in one MC-CDMA system. Hence, voice, data, image and video can be transmitted seamlessly through a wireless infrastructure. The bit error rate performance of these schemes is investigated for both low-rate and high-rate users

Multi-rate access schemes and successive interference cancellation for wireless multimedia MC-CDMA communications

To catch up with the fast changes of the information challenges, providing multimedia services has become a very important requirement for future wireless communications. A proper system, capable of supporting multi-rate transmissions as well as handling high quality of service (QoS) requirements in hostile wireless communication environments, should be sought. Multi-carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA), a combination of multi-carrier modulation (MCM) and direct-sequence CDMA (DS-CDMA), appears to be one of the most elegant solutions. In this dissertation, four multi-rate access schemes, termed uncoded fixed spreading length (UFSL), coded fixed spreading length (CFSL), multi-code fixed spreading length (MFSL) and variable spreading length (VSL), are constructed for MC-CDMA. Due to different sub-carrier assignment strategies, they present different properties in spectral utilization efficiency (SUE), rate matching capability, receiver structure and bit-error-rate (BER) performance in correlated Rayleigh fading channels. With these schemes, different information traffic such as voice, video and higher rate data can be transmitted seanilessly through one MC-CDMA infrastructure. The performance of the multi-rate MC-CDMA is mainly limited by multiple access interference (MAI). For example, in the MFSL MC-CDMA systems, the interference is not only presented among different users, but also among different symbols of the same user transmitted in parallel on different spreading codes. To mitigate this problem, a nonlinear zero-forcing successive interference cancellation (ZF-SIC) receiver and a minimum mean square error SIC (MMSE-SIC) receiver are applied in the MFSL MC-CDMA systems. It is well known that SIC is sensitive to the receive power distribution. By providing channel state information (CSI) at the receiver and reliable feedback of power distribution from the receiver to the transmitter, SIC can be integrated with power distribution control (PDC), which improves the system capacity significantly. In this dissertation, the PDC algorithms, under both a short-term power constraint (STPC) and a long-term power constraint (LTPC) are investigated for two different SIC receivers. For the ZF-SIC receiver, the PDC under the equal BER criterion, which ensures the same performance after SIC for all parallel transmit symbols, is first considered. It is found that for a multi-code system, such equal BER PDC is only suboptimal from the viewpoint of minimizing each user\u27s BER, hence, an optimal PDC algorithm is proposed, which significantly outperforms the equal BER PDC, particularly under the STPC and highly-loaded systems. For the MMSE-SIC, the PDC under the equal BER criterion is derived, which cancels interference very effectively, resulting in a performance of a fully-loaded system close to the single user bound (SUB). In comparison to the nonlinear matched-filter SIC (MF-SIC) with the equal BER PDC, studied extensively in the literature, the ZF-SIC and MMSE-SIC with the proposed PDC algorithms present remarkable performance advantage. Finally, the effect of channel estimation errors (CEE) on the performance of the MMSE-SIC with the equal BER PDC is analyzed. A method of second-order approximation is used to estimate the mean excess MSE (MEMSE) of the parallel transmit symbols, under a given decision order. The approximation accuracy is confirmed by simulation results. Furthermore, it is also interesting to find out that the MMSE-SIC with the equal BER PDC presents significant robustness to CEE

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

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

A General Framework for Analyzing, Characterizing, and Implementing Spectrally Modulated, Spectrally Encoded Signals

Fourth generation (4G) communications will support many capabilities while providing universal, high speed access. One potential enabler for these capabilities is software defined radio (SDR). When controlled by cognitive radio (CR) principles, the required waveform diversity is achieved via a synergistic union called CR-based SDR. Research is rapidly progressing in SDR hardware and software venues, but current CR-based SDR research lacks the theoretical foundation and analytic framework to permit efficient implementation. This limitation is addressed here by introducing a general framework for analyzing, characterizing, and implementing spectrally modulated, spectrally encoded (SMSE) signals within CR-based SDR architectures. Given orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a 4G candidate signal, OFDM-based signals are collectively classified as SMSE since modulation and encoding are spectrally applied. The proposed framework provides analytic commonality and unification of SMSE signals. Applicability is first shown for candidate 4G signals, and resultant analytic expressions agree with published results. Implementability is then demonstrated in multiple coexistence scenarios via modeling and simulation to reinforce practical utility

Intelligent genetic algorithms for next-generation broadband multi-carrier CDMA wireless networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This dissertation proposes a novel intelligent system architecture for next-generation broadband multi-carrier CDMA wireless networks. In our system, two novel and similar intelligent genetic algorithms, namely Minimum Distance guided GAs (MDGAs) are invented for both peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction at the transmitter side and multi-user detection (MUD) at the receiver side. Meanwhile, we derive a theoretical BER performance analysis for the proposed MC-CDMA system in A WGN channel. Our analytical results show that the theoretical BER performance of synchronized MC-CDMA system is the same as that of the synchronized DS-CDMA system which is also used as a theoretical guidance of our novel MUD receiver design. In contrast to traditional GAs, our MDGAs start with a balanced ratio of exploration and exploitation which is maintained throughout the process. In our algorithms, a new replacement strategy is designed which increases significantly the convergence rate and reduces dramatically computational complexity as compared to the conventional GAs. The simulation results demonstrate that, if compared to those schemes using exhaustive search and traditional GAs, (1) our MDGA-based P APR reduction scheme achieves 99.52% and 50+% reductions in computational complexity, respectively; (2) our MDGA-based MUD scheme achieves 99.54% and 50+% reductions in computational complexity, respectively. The use of one core MDGA solution for both issues can ease the hardware design and dramatically reduce the implementation cost in practice