Multiband Spectrum Access: Great Promises for Future Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio has been widely considered as one of the prominent solutions to tackle the spectrum scarcity. While the majority of existing research has focused on single-band cognitive radio, multiband cognitive radio represents great promises towards implementing efficient cognitive networks compared to single-based networks. Multiband cognitive radio networks (MB-CRNs) are expected to significantly enhance the network's throughput and provide better channel maintenance by reducing handoff frequency. Nevertheless, the wideband front-end and the multiband spectrum access impose a number of challenges yet to overcome. This paper provides an in-depth analysis on the recent advancements in multiband spectrum sensing techniques, their limitations, and possible future directions to improve them. We study cooperative communications for MB-CRNs to tackle a fundamental limit on diversity and sampling. We also investigate several limits and tradeoffs of various design parameters for MB-CRNs. In addition, we explore the key MB-CRNs performance metrics that differ from the conventional metrics used for single-band based networks.Comment: 22 pages, 13 figures; published in the Proceedings of the IEEE Journal, Special Issue on Future Radio Spectrum Access, March 201

MIMO Assisted Space-Code-Division Multiple-Access: Linear Detectors and Performance over Multipath Fading Channels

In this contribution we propose and investigate a multiple-input multiple-output space-division, code-division multiple-access (MIMO SCDMA) scheme. The main objective is to improve the capacity of the existing DS-CDMA systems, for example, for supporting an increased number of users, by deploying multiple transmit and receive antennas in the corresponding systems and by using some advanced transmission and detection algorithms. In the proposed MIMO SCDMA system, each user can be distinguished jointly by its spreading code-signature and its unique channel impulse response (CIR) transfer function referred to as spatial-signature. Hence, the number of users might be supported by the MIMO SCDMA system and the corresponding achievable performance are determined by the degrees of freedom provided by both the code-signatures and the spatial-signatures, as well as by how efficiently the degrees of freedom are exploited. Specifically, the number of users supported by the proposed MIMO SCDMA can be significantly higher than the number of chips per bit, owing to the employment of space-division. In this contribution space-time spreading (STS) is employed for configuring the transmitted signals. Three types of low-complexity linear detectors, namely correlation, decorrelating and minimum mean-square error (MMSE), are considered for detecting the MIMO SCDMA signals. The BER performance of the MIMO SCDMA system associated with these linear detectors are evaluated by simulations, when assuming that the MIMO SCDMA signals are transmitted over multipath Rayleigh fading channels. Our study and simulation results show that MIMO SCDMA assisted by multiuser detection is capable of facilitating joint space-time de-spreading, multipath combining and receiver diversity combining, while simultaneously suppressing the multiuser interfering signals

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

Cluster-based cooperative subcarrier sensing using antenna diversity-based weighted data fusion

Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is used in cognitive radio (CR) networks to improve the spectrum sensing performance in shadow fading environments. Moreover, clustering in CR networks is used to reduce reporting time and bandwidth overhead during CSS. Thus, cluster-based cooperative spectrum sensing (CBCSS) has manifested satisfactory spectrum sensing results in harsh environments under processing constraints. On the other hand, the antenna diversity of multiple input multiple output CR systems can be exploited to further improve the spectrum sensing performance. This paper presents the CBCSS performance in a CR network which is comprised of single- as well as multiple-antenna CR systems. We give theoretical analysis of CBCSS for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing signal sensing and propose a novel fusion scheme at the fusion center which takes into account the receiver antenna diversity of the CRs present in the network. We introduce the concept of weighted data fusion in which the sensing results of different CRs are weighted proportional to the number of receiving antennas they are equipped with. Thus, the receiver diversity is used to the advantage of improving spectrum sensing performance in a CR cluster. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional CBCSS scheme

Performance of the Smart Antenna Aided Generalized Multicarrier DS-CDMA Downlink using both Time-Domain Spreading and Steered Space-Time Spreading

In this contribution a generalized MC DS-CDMA system invoking smart antennas for improving the achievable performance in the downlink of the system is studied, which is capable of minimizing the downlink interference inflicted upon co-channel mobiles, while achieving frequency, time and spatial diversity. In the MC DS-CDMA system considered the transmitter employs multiple antenna arrays and each of the antenna arrays consists of several antenna elements. More specifically, the space-time transmitter processing scheme considered is based on the principles of Steered Space-Time Spreading (SSTS). Furthermore, the generalized MC DS-CDMA system employs time and frequency (TF)-domain spreading, where a user-grouping technique is employed for reducing the effects of multiuser interference

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