Linear Operation of Switch-Mode Outphasing Power Amplifiers

Radio transceivers are playing an increasingly important role in modern society. The ”connected” lifestyle has been enabled by modern wireless communications. The demand that has been placed on current wireless and cellular infrastructure requires increased spectral efficiency however this has come at the cost of power efficiency. This work investigates methods of improving wireless transceiver efficiency by enabling more efficient power amplifier architectures, specifically examining the role of switch-mode power amplifiers in macro cell scenarios. Our research focuses on the mechanisms within outphasing power amplifiers which prevent linear amplification. From the analysis it was clear that high power non-linear effects are correctable with currently available techniques however non-linear effects around the zero crossing point are not. As a result signal processing techniques for suppressing and avoiding non-linear operation in low power regions are explored. A novel method of digital pre-distortion is presented, and conventional techniques for linearisation are adapted for the particular needs of the outphasing power amplifier. More unconventional signal processing techniques are presented to aid linearisation of the outphasing power amplifier, both zero crossing and bandwidth expansion reduction methods are designed to avoid operation in nonlinear regions of the amplifiers. In combination with digital pre-distortion the techniques will improve linearisation efforts on outphasing systems with dynamic range and bandwidth constraints respectively. Our collaboration with NXP provided access to a digital outphasing power amplifier, enabling empirical analysis of non-linear behaviour and comparative analysis of behavioural modelling and linearisation efforts. The collaboration resulted in a bench mark for linear wideband operation of a digital outphasing power amplifier. The complimentary linearisation techniques, bandwidth expansion reduction and zero crossing reduction have been evaluated in both simulated and practical outphasing test benches. Initial results are promising and indicate that the benefits they provide are not limited to the outphasing amplifier architecture alone. Overall this thesis presents innovative analysis of the distortion mechanisms of the outphasing power amplifier, highlighting the sensitivity of the system to environmental effects. Practical and novel linearisation techniques are presented, with a focus on enabling wide band operation for modern communications standards

DESIGN OF EMBEDDED FILTERS FOR INNER-LOOP POWER CONTROL IN WIRELESS CDMA COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

ABSTRACT We study inner-loop power control for mobile wireless communication systems using code division multiple access transmission. We focus on the uplink, i.e., on communication from the mobile-to the base-station, and show how to minimise the variance of the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) tracking error through incorporation of recursive filters. These filters complement existing power controllers and are designed by using a linear model which takes into account quantisation of the power control signal, dynamics of channel gains, interference from other users, target SIR, and SIR estimation errors. Simulation results indicate that significant performance gains can be obtained, even in situations where the models used for design are only an approximation

ワイヤレス通信のための先進的な信号処理技術を用いた非線形補償法の研究

The inherit nonlinearity in analogue front-ends of transmitters and receivers have had primary impact on the overall performance of the wireless communication systems, as it gives arise of substantial distortion when transmitting and processing signals with such circuits. Therefore, the nonlinear compensation (linearization) techniques become essential to suppress the distortion to an acceptable extent in order to ensure sufficient low bit error rate. Furthermore, the increasing demands on higher data rate and ubiquitous interoperability between various multi-coverage protocols are two of the most important features of the contemporary communication system. The former demand pushes the communication system to use wider bandwidth and the latter one brings up severe coexistence problems. Having fully considered the problems raised above, the work in this Ph.D. thesis carries out extensive researches on the nonlinear compensations utilizing advanced digital signal processing techniques. The motivation behind this is to push more processing tasks to the digital domain, as it can potentially cut down the bill of materials (BOM) costs paid for the off-chip devices and reduce practical implementation difficulties. The work here is carried out using three approaches: numerical analysis & computer simulations; experimental tests using commercial instruments; actual implementation with FPGA. The primary contributions for this thesis are summarized as the following three points: 1) An adaptive digital predistortion (DPD) with fast convergence rate and low complexity for multi-carrier GSM system is presented. Albeit a legacy system, the GSM, however, has a very strict requirement on the out-of-band emission, thus it represents a much more difficult hurdle for DPD application. It is successfully implemented in an FPGA without using any other auxiliary processor. A simplified multiplier-free NLMS algorithm, especially suitable for FPGA implementation, for fast adapting the LUT is proposed. Many design methodologies and practical implementation issues are discussed in details. Experimental results have shown that the DPD performed robustly when it is involved in the multichannel transmitter. 2) The next generation system (5G) will unquestionably use wider bandwidth to support higher throughput, which poses stringent needs for using high-speed data converters. Herein the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) tends to be the most expensive single device in the whole transmitter/receiver systems. Therefore, conventional DPD utilizing high-speed ADC becomes unaffordable, especially for small base stations (micro, pico and femto). A digital predistortion technique utilizing spectral extrapolation is proposed in this thesis, wherein with band-limited feedback signal, the requirement on ADC speed can be significantly released. Experimental results have validated the feasibility of the proposed technique for coping with band-limited feedback signal. It has been shown that adequate linearization performance can be achieved even if the acquisition bandwidth is less than the original signal bandwidth. The experimental results obtained by using LTE-Advanced signal of 320 MHz bandwidth are quite satisfactory, and to the authors’ knowledge, this is the first high-performance wideband DPD ever been reported. 3) To address the predicament that mobile operators do not have enough contiguous usable bandwidth, carrier aggregation (CA) technique is developed and imported into 4G LTE-Advanced. This pushes the utilization of concurrent dual-band transmitter/receiver, which reduces the hardware expense by using a single front-end. Compensation techniques for the respective concurrent dual-band transmitter and receiver front-ends are proposed to combat the inter-band modulation distortion, and simultaneously reduce the distortion for the both lower-side band and upper-side band signals.電気通信大学201

Improved decoder metrics for DS-CDMA in practical 3G systems

While 4G mobile networks have been deployed since 2008. In several of the more developed markets, 3G mobile networks are still growing with 3G having the largest market -in terms of number of users- by 2019. 3G networks are based on Direct- Sequence Code-Division Multiple-Access (DS-CDMA). DS-CDMA suffers mainly from the Multiple Access Interference (MAI) and fading. Multi-User Detectors (MUDs) and Error Correcting Codes (ECCs) are the primary means to combat MAI and fading. MUDs, however, suffer from high complexity, including most of sub-optimal algorithms. Hence, most commercial implementations still use conventional single-user matched filter detectors. This thesis proposes improved channel decoder metrics for enhancing uplink performance in 3G systems. The basic idea is to model the MAI as conditionally Gaussian, instead of Gaussian, conditioned on the users’ cross-correlations and/or the channel fading coefficients. The conditioning implies a time-dependent variance that provides enhanced reliability estimates at the decoder inputs. We derive improved log-likelihood ratios (ILLRs) for bit- and chip- asynchronous multipath fading channels. We show that while utilizing knowledge of all users’ code sequences for the ILLR metric is very complicated in chip-asynchronous reception, a simplified expression relying on truncated group delay results in negligible performance loss. We also derive an expression for the error probability using the standard Gaussian approximation for asynchronous channels for the widely used raised cosine pule shaping. Our study framework considers practical 3G systems, with finite interleaving, correlated multipath fading channel models, practical pulse shaping, and system parameters obtained from CDMA2000 standard. Our results show that for the fully practical cellular uplink channel, the performance advantage due to ILLRs is significant and approaches 3 dB

Final report on the evaluation of RRM/CRRM algorithms

Deliverable public del projecte EVERESTThis deliverable provides a definition and a complete evaluation of the RRM/CRRM algorithms selected in D11 and D15, and evolved and refined on an iterative process. The evaluation will be carried out by means of simulations using the simulators provided at D07, and D14.Preprin

Joint Pose and Radio Channel Estimation

This thesis investigates the combination of pose and radio channel estimation. Pose is the knowledge of the position and orientation of a device whereas the radio channel describes the transmission medium between radio transmitters and receivers. The two subjects are both active research topics with a long history of applications but there has to the author's knowledge been very little work published about combining the two areas using a sensor fusion framework. A well established approach for pose estimation is using an inertial measurement unit (IMU). Using an inexpensive IMU standalone for dead reckoning pose estimation is tempting but it is not a working solution due to noise and other imperfections in the IMU. There is also a fundamental limitation of inertial sensors, they can not, because of Galileo's principle, obtain any information about absolute velocity of the device. To obtain reliable pose estimates for a longer time, the measurements from the IMU must be fused with some other sensor information. This thesis shows how the pervasive electric magnetic fields from existing radio communication systems such as the cellular mobile systems GSM, 3G, or 4G can be used. Angle of arrival estimation using antenna arrays is a well studied problem with many different algorithms resolving the individual rays impinging on the array. However, less attention has been given to so called virtual array antennas where only one receiver element is used. By tracking the movement of the element, an array with properties similar to a stationary array with multiple elements is formed. By combining the IMU and the radio channel information, a map of the local radio environment can be obtained. At the same time, the map is used for adjusting for the errors in the IMU that lead to inaccurate pose estimates by using tightly coupled nonlinear state estimation algorithms from the sensor fusion framework. The goals for this thesis is to develop a dynamic model for kinematics and a ray-trace based radio channel model that can be used together with the particle filter for sensor fusion. It also contains an initial investigation of limitations and achievable performance for the joint pose and radio channel estimation problem, including radio imperfection such as thermal noise, and phase/frequency error. The proposed model is evaluated using both simulations and datasets from experiments. The analysis of the evaluation shows that the proposed model, together with sensor fusion algorithms, provides a breakthrough in pose estimation using a low cost IMU

Hybrid ARQ with parallel and serial concatenated convolutional codes for next generation wireless communications

This research focuses on evaluating the currently used FEC encoding-decoding schemes and improving the performance of error control systems by incorporating these schemes in a hybrid FEC-ARQ environment. Beginning with an overview of wireless communications and the various ARQ protocols, the thesis provides an in-depth explanation of convolutional encoding and Viterbi decoding, turbo (PCCC) and serial concatenated convolutional (SCCC) encoding with their respective MAP decoding strategies.;A type-II hybrid ARQ scheme with SCCCs is proposed for the first time and is a major contribution of this thesis. A vast improvement is seen in the BER performance of the successive individual FEC schemes discussed above. Also, very high throughputs can be achieved when these schemes are incorporated in an adaptive type-II hybrid ARQ system.;Finally, the thesis discusses the equivalence of the PCCCs and the SCCCs and proposes a technique to generate a hybrid code using both schemes