Antenna subset selection for cyclic prefix assisted MIMO wireless communications over frequency selective channels

Antenna (subset) selection techniques are feasible to reduce the hardware complexity of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, while keeping the benefits of higher-order MIMO systems. Many studies of antenna selection schemes are based on frequency-flat channel models, which are inconsistent to broadband MIMO systems employing spatial-multiplexing. In broadband MIMO systems aiming to provide high-data-rate links, the employed signal bandwidth is typically larger than the coherence bandwidth of the channel so that the channel will be of frequency selective nature. Within this contribution we provide an overview on joint transmitter- and receiver-side antenna subset selection methods for frequency selective channels and deploy them in MIMO orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems and MIMO single-carrier (SC) systems employing frequency domain equalization (FDE).DFG/KA 1154/1

Limited feedback MIMO techniques for temporally correlated channels and linear receivers

Advanced mobile wireless networks will make extensive use of multiantenna (MIMO) transceivers to comply with high requirements of data rates and reliability. The use of feedback channels is of paramount importance to achieve this goal in systems employing frequency division duplexing (FDD). The design of the feedback mechanism is challenging due to the severe constraints imposed by computational complexity and feedback bandwidth restrictions. This thesis addresses the design of transmission strategies in both single-user and multi-user MIMO systems, based on compact feedback messages. First, recursive feedback mechanisms for single-user transmission scenarios are proposed, including stochastic gradient techniques, deterministic updates based on Givens rotations and low computational complexity schemes based on partial update filtering concepts. Thereafter, channel feedback algorithms are proposed, and a convergence analysis for static channels is presented. These algorithms can be used to provide channel side information to any multi-user MIMO solution. A limited-feedback decentralized multi-user MIMO solution is proposed, which avoids the need for explicit channel feedback. A feed-forward technique is proposed, which allows our methods to operate in presence of feedback errors. The performance of all the proposed algorithms is illustrated via link-level simulations, where the effect of different parameter values is assessed. Our results show that the proposed methods outperform existing limited-feedback counterparts over a range of low to medium mobile speeds, for moderate antenna array sizes that are deemed practical for commercial deployment. The computational complexity reduction of some of the proposed algorithms is also shown to be considerable, when compared to existing techniques

Linear space-time modulation in multiple-antenna channels

This thesis develops linear space–time modulation techniques for (multi-antenna) multi-input multi-output (MIMO) and multiple-input single-output (MISO) wireless channels. Transmission methods tailored for such channels have recently emerged in a number of current and upcoming standards, in particular in 3G and "beyond 3G" wireless systems. Here, these transmission concepts are approached primarily from a signal processing perspective. The introduction part of the thesis describes the transmit diversity concepts included in the WCDMA and cdma2000 standards or standard discussions, as well as promising new transmission methods for MIMO and MISO channels, crucial for future high data-rate systems. A number of techniques developed herein have been adopted in the 3G standards, or are currently being proposed for such standards, with the target of improving data rates, signal quality, capacity or system flexibility. The thesis adopts a model involving matrix-valued modulation alphabets, with different dimensions usually defined over space and time. The symbol matrix is formed as a linear combination of symbols, and the space-dimension is realized by using multiple transmit and receive antennas. Many of the transceiver concepts and modulation methods developed herein provide both spatial multiplexing gain and diversity gain. For example, full-diversity full-rate schemes are proposed where the symbol rate equals the number of transmit antennas. The modulation methods are developed for open-loop transmission. Moreover, the thesis proposes related closed-loop transmission methods, where space–time modulation is combined either with automatic retransmission or multiuser scheduling.reviewe

MIMO and beamforming techniques for reliable off-body communication using textile antennas

Wireless communication systems with textile antennas can be entirely integrated into clothing or garment and do not hinder the user’s movements. Great interest in such an off-body communication system exists in the field of rescue operations, such as firefighting, where the automated communication of vital data between rescue workers or to a base station improves the coordination of the operation and the safety of the rescue workers. To set up a reliable wireless off-body communication link, a number of specific challenges need to be overcome. Persons equipped with wearable antennas constantly change position, orientation, walking pace and body posture. This results in unpredictably variable fading and shadowing on the received signals, producing bit errors, even in case of a high average received signal-to-noise ratio. Fading and shadowing hence dramatically limit the reliability of a communication system with single antennas at both link ends. Using multiple textile antennas, the performance degradation is drastically limited, by means of MIMO and/or beamforming techniques, which mitigate the signal variation and/or produce a higher average signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver, respectively. The research documented in this PhD thesis includes multiple measurement campaigns and their analysis for a diverse number of off-body communication configurations, using MIMO and beamforming techniques with textile antennas. Off-body MIMO techniques are shown to result in a significant improvement of the reliability of the communication, an improvement which further increases when more antennas are used. Channel variation typically of the off-body scenario is tracked with a computationally low-cost system, using adaptive digital low-pass filtering on decision-oriented channel estimation information. Off-body static beamforming techniques are shown to often outperform transmit diversity systems, producing a lower bit error rate at the receiver, provided that receiver diversity is employed to compensate for the channel variation. Finally, a new theoretical model specifically for the off-body MIMO communication channel is presented, allowing an accurate reproduction of bit error rate and channel capacity characteristics as well as the generation of measurement-like random off-body MIMO channel realizations for simulation purposes

Cooperative diversity schemes for wireless communication systems

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrónica e TelecomunicaçõesA presente dissertação insere-se na área das comunicações sem fios, ou mais especificamente na temática da diversidade cooperativa. Neste trabalho é feito o estudo, implementação e avaliação do desempenho de esquemas de diversidade cooperativa de baixa complexidade para sistemas de comunicação móvel. Estes esquemas são mapeados em modelos de simulação baseados em OFDMA e são completamente simulados em CoCentric System Studio. Os resultados obtidos com os modelos desenvolvidos mostram que os esquemas de diversidade cooperativa atenuam os efeitos do desvanecimento induzido pela propagação multipercurso, aumentando desta forma a capacidade e cobertura dos sistemas wireless. Os ganhos são particularmente altos quando as perdas de percurso são consideráveis, como é o caso das zonas urbanas densas. ABSTRACT: This dissertation is inserted into the wireless communication, or more specifically, into the cooperative diversity field. within this thesis, the performance of low-complexity cooperative diversity schemes projected for mobile communication systems are studied, implemented and evaluated. These schemes are mapped into simulation models based on OFDMA and are fully simulated in the CoCentric System Studio environment. The obtained results show that the proposed cooperative schemes for the uplink communication mitigate fading induced by multipath propagation, thereby increasing the capacity and coverage of wireless systems. Cooperation gains are particularly high when multipath losses are considerable, as is the case for dense urban regions

Signal processing techniques for mobile multimedia systems

Recent trends in wireless communication systems show a significant demand for the delivery of multimedia services and applications over mobile networks - mobile multimedia - like video telephony, multimedia messaging, mobile gaming, interactive and streaming video, etc. However, despite the ongoing development of key communication technologies that support these applications, the communication resources and bandwidth available to wireless/mobile radio systems are often severely limited. It is well known, that these bottlenecks are inherently due to the processing capabilities of mobile transmission systems, and the time-varying nature of wireless channel conditions and propagation environments. Therefore, new ways of processing and transmitting multimedia data over mobile radio channels have become essential which is the principal focus of this thesis. In this work, the performance and suitability of various signal processing techniques and transmission strategies in the application of multimedia data over wireless/mobile radio links are investigated. The proposed transmission systems for multimedia communication employ different data encoding schemes which include source coding in the wavelet domain, transmit diversity coding (space-time coding), and adaptive antenna beamforming (eigenbeamforming). By integrating these techniques into a robust communication system, the quality (SNR, etc) of multimedia signals received on mobile devices is maximised while mitigating the fast fading and multi-path effects of mobile channels. To support the transmission of high data-rate multimedia applications, a well known multi-carrier transmission technology known as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has been implemented. As shown in this study, this results in significant performance gains when combined with other signal-processing techniques such as spa ce-time block coding (STBC). To optimise signal transmission, a novel unequal adaptive modulation scheme for the communication of multimedia data over MIMO-OFDM systems has been proposed. In this system, discrete wavelet transform/subband coding is used to compress data into their respective low-frequency and high-frequency components. Unlike traditional methods, however, data representing the low-frequency data are processed and modulated separately as they are more sensitive to the distortion effects of mobile radio channels. To make use of a desirable subchannel state, such that the quality (SNR) of the multimedia data recovered at the receiver is optimized, we employ a lookup matrix-adaptive bit and power allocation (LM-ABPA) algorithm. Apart from improving the spectral efficiency of OFDM, the modified LM-ABPA scheme, sorts and allocates subcarriers with the highest SNR to low-frequency data and the remaining to the least important data. To maintain a target system SNR, the LM-ABPA loading scheme assigns appropriate signal constella tion sizes and transmit power levels (modulation type) across all subcarriers and is adapted to the varying channel conditions such that the average system error-rate (SER/BER) is minimised. When configured for a constant data-rate load, simulation results show significant performance gains over non-adaptive systems. In addition to the above studies, the simulation framework developed in this work is applied to investigate the performance of other signal processing techniques for multimedia communication such as blind channel equalization, and to examine the effectiveness of a secure communication system based on a logistic chaotic generator (LCG) for chaos shift-keying (CSK)

Antenna arrays for the downlink of FDD wideband CDMA communication systems

The main subject of this thesis is the investigation of antenna array techniques for improving the performance of the downlink of wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) mobile communication systems. These communication systems operate in frequency division duplex (FDD) mode and the antenna arrays are employed in the base station. A number of diversity, beamforming and hybrid techniques are analysed and their bit error ratio (BER) versus signalto- noise ratio (SNR) performance is calculated as a function of the eigenvalues of the mean channel correlation matrix, where this is applicable. Also, their BER versus SNR performance is evaluated by means of computer simulations in various channel environments and using different numbers of transmit antenna elements in the base station. The simulation results of the techniques, along with other characteristics, are compared to examine the relationship among their performance in various channel environments and investigate which technique is most suitable for each channel environment. Next, a combination of the channel correlation matrix eigenvalue decomposition and space-time processing is proposed as a possible open loop approach to the downlink data signal transmission. It decomposes the channel into M components in the form of eigenvectors (M is the number of transmit antennas in the base station), and attempts to minimise the transmit power that is needed to achieve a target BER at the mobile receiver by employing the optimum number of these eigenvectors. The lower transmit power and the directional transmission by means of eigenvectors are expected to lower interference levels to non-desired users (especially to those users who are not physically close to the direction(s) of transmission). Theoretical and simulation results suggest that this approach performs better than other presented open loop techniques, while the performance gain depends on M and the channel environment. In simulations it is usually assumed that the base and mobile station have access to perfect estimates of all needed parameters (e.g. channel coecients). However, in practical systems they make use of pilot and/or feedback signals to obtain estimates of these parameters, which result in noisy estimates. The impact of the noisy estimates on the performance of various techniques is investigated by computer simulations, and the results suggest that there is typically some performance loss. The loss depends on the parameter that is estimated from pilot signals, and may be a function of M, SNR and/or the channel environment. In certain beamforming techniques the base station operates the transmit antenna array in an open loop fashion by estimating the downlink weight vector from the directional information of the uplink channel. Nevertheless, in FDD systems this results in performance loss due to the separation between the uplink and downlink carrier frequencies (`FDD gap'). This loss is quantified and the results show that it is a function of M and the FDD gap. Also, a very simple technique for compensating this loss is proposed, and results obtained after its application suggest that it eliminates most of the loss. Comparison of the proposed technique with an existing compensation technique suggests that, even though the latter is more complex than the former, it yields very little additional improvement

MIMO Systems

In recent years, it was realized that the MIMO communication systems seems to be inevitable in accelerated evolution of high data rates applications due to their potential to dramatically increase the spectral efficiency and simultaneously sending individual information to the corresponding users in wireless systems. This book, intends to provide highlights of the current research topics in the field of MIMO system, to offer a snapshot of the recent advances and major issues faced today by the researchers in the MIMO related areas. The book is written by specialists working in universities and research centers all over the world to cover the fundamental principles and main advanced topics on high data rates wireless communications systems over MIMO channels. Moreover, the book has the advantage of providing a collection of applications that are completely independent and self-contained; thus, the interested reader can choose any chapter and skip to another without losing continuity

Multi-Antenna Techniques for Next Generation Cellular Communications

Future cellular communications are expected to offer substantial improvements for the pre- existing mobile services with higher data rates and lower latency as well as pioneer new types of applications that must comply with strict demands from a wider range of user types. All of these tasks require utmost efficiency in the use of spectral resources. Deploying multiple antennas introduces an additional signal dimension to wireless data transmissions, which provides a significant alternative solution against the plateauing capacity issue of the limited available spectrum. Multi-antenna techniques and the associated key enabling technologies possess unquestionable potential to play a key role in the evolution of next generation cellular systems. Spectral efficiency can be improved on downlink by concurrently serving multiple users with high-rate data connections on shared resources. In this thesis optimized multi-user multi-input multi-output (MIMO) transmissions are investigated on downlink from both filter design and resource allocation/assignment points of view. Regarding filter design, a joint baseband processing method is proposed specifically for high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, where the necessary signaling overhead can be compensated for. Regarding resource scheduling, greedy- and genetic-based algorithms are proposed that demand lower complexity with large number of resource blocks relative to prior implementations. Channel estimation techniques are investigated for massive MIMO technology. In case of channel reciprocity, this thesis proposes an overhead reduction scheme for the signaling of user channel state information (CSI) feedback during a relative antenna calibration. In addition, a multi-cell coordination method is proposed for subspace-based blind estimators on uplink, which can be implicitly translated to downlink CSI in the presence of ideal reciprocity. Regarding non-reciprocal channels, a novel estimation technique is proposed based on reconstructing full downlink CSI from a select number of dominant propagation paths. The proposed method offers drastic compressions in user feedback reports and requires much simpler downlink training processes. Full-duplex technology can provide up to twice the spectral efficiency of conventional resource divisions. This thesis considers a full-duplex two-hop link with a MIMO relay and investigates mitigation techniques against the inherent loop-interference. Spatial-domain suppression schemes are developed for the optimization of full-duplex MIMO relaying in a coverage extension scenario on downlink. The proposed methods are demonstrated to generate data rates that closely approximate their global bounds