Improved distance metric technique for deriving soft reliability information over Rayleigh Fading Channel

This paper presents an improved Distance Metric (DM) technique for deriving soft reliability information over Rayleigh fading channel. We compared this proposed DM technique with the conventionally used DM technique in the literature. The conventional DM method derives the soft reliability information from the output received symbols while the proposed DM method derives the soft reliability information from the Channel State Information (CSI) which result due to variations in the channel gain. Performance analysis of these DM methods are verified over flat Rayleigh fading channels, and on time-varying frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels using rectangular M-QAM and OFDM systems respectively. Also, two channel estimation techniques are used to derived the CSI assuming different normalized Doppler frequency and frame length size. The performance of the conventional and proposed soft reliability derivation methods are documented through computer simulations assuming Koetter and Vardy, Reed-Solomon (KV-RS) soft decision decoding algorithm as the Forward Error Correction (FEC) scheme. From the computer simulation results, the proposed DM method offers significant improvement in Codeword Error Rate (CER) performance in comparison with the conventional DM method with no significant increase in computational delay and time complexity.Keywords: CSI, cubic estimators, DM, fading channels, KV-RS decoder, LMMSE, OFDM, R-matrix, 16QA

Trade-offs in a 1 Tbps MIMO Communication System Between an Airship and an Array of Ground Receive Antennas

As demand for higher data-rate wireless communications increases, so will the interest in multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In a single transmitter, single receiver communication system, there is a fundamental limit to the data-rate capacity of the system proportional to the systems bandwidth. Since increasing the bandwidth is expensive and limited, another option is increasing the system\u27s capacity by adding multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver to create a MIMO communication system. With a T transmitter, R receiver MIMO communication system, TR channels are created which allow extremely high data-rates. MIMO systems are attractive because they are extremely robust as they are able to operate when encountering channels with severe attenuation also known as deep fades. MIMO systems are known for their ability to achieve extremely high data-rates created by the multiple channels while improving bit error rate (BER) through diversity

Development And Implementation Of Improved Coded OFDM System Using SDR Platform

he increasing demand for high speed wireless connectivity at low cost poses new challenges for communication system designers, to implement solutions that increase the data rate by utilizing the limited radio resources more efficiently at a low additional complexity. Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) exploits the flexibility of channel coding and constellation in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) to obtain higher data rates. This technique employs multiple modulation and coding schemes to instantaneously adapt to the variations in the channel Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), thus maximizing the system throughput and improving Bit Error Rate (BER) performance. On the other hand, OFDM system suffers from inter-symbol interference (ISI), especially in mobile communication environments. This problem may be tackled by increasing the individual symbol duration for each subcarrier together with the use of guard time. Nevertheless, this does not solve the problem completely in multipath fading channel, because all subcarriers will arrive at the receiver with different amplitudes. Unfortunately, some subcarriers may be completely lost because of deep fades. Hence even though most subcarriers may be detected without errors, the overall BER will be largely dominated by a few subcarriers with bad SNR. To eliminate this problem, OFDM based systems usually employ a special technique like error correction coding (ECC). Various coding methods are adopted by many standards to mitigate the effects of frequency selective channel which causes bit errors to occur in bur

Space-Time Codes Concatenated with Turbo Codes over Fading Channels

The uses of space-time code (STC) and iterative processing have enabled robust communications over fading channels at previously unachievable signal-to-noise ratios. Maintaining desired transmission rate while improving the diversity from STC is challenging, and the performance of the STC suffers considerably due to lack of channel state information (CSI). This dissertation research addresses issues of considerable importance in the design of STC with emphasis on efficient concatenation of channel coding and STC with theoretical bound derivation of the proposed schemes, iterative space-time trellis coding (STTC), and differential space-time codes. First, we concatenate space-time block code (STBC) with turbo code for improving diversity gain as well as coding gain. Proper soft-information sharing is indispensable to the iterative decoding process. We derive the required soft outputs from STBC decoders for passing to outer turbo code. Traditionally, the performance of STBC schemes has been evaluated under perfect channel estimation. For fast time-varying channel, obtaining the CSI is tedious if not impossible. We introduce a scheme of calculating the CSI at the receiver from the received signal without the explicit channel estimation. The encoder of STTC, which is generally decoded using Viterbi like algorithm, is based on a trellis structure. This trellis structure provides an inherent advantage for the STTC scheme that an iterative decoding is feasible with the minimal addition computational complexity. An iteratively decoded space-time trellis coding (ISTTC) is proposed in this dissertation, where the STTC schemes are used as constituent codes of turbo code. Then, the performance upper bound of the proposed ISTTC is derived. Finally, for implementing STBC without channel estimation and maintaining trans- mission rate, we concatenate differential space-time block codes (DSTBC) with ISTTC. The serial concatenation of DSTBC or STBC with ISTTC offers improving performance, even without an outer channel code. These schemes reduce the system complexity com- pared to the standalone ISTTC and increase the transmission rate under the same SNR condition. Detailed design procedures of these proposed schemes are analyzed

Design and development of mobile channel simulators using digital signal processing techniques

A mobile channel simulator can be constructed either in the time domain using a tapped delay line filter or in the frequency domain using the time variant transfer function of the channel. Transfer function modelling has many advantages over impulse response modelling. Although the transfer function channel model has been envisaged by several researchers as an alternative to the commonly employed tapped delay line model, so far it has not been implemented. In this work, channel simulators for single carrier and multicarrier OFDM system based on time variant transfer function of the channel have been designed and implemented using DSP techniques in SIMULINK. For a single carrier system, the simulator was based on Bello's transfer function channel model. Bello speculated that about 10Βτ(_MAX) frequency domain branches might result in a very good approximation of the channel (where в is the signal bandwidth and τ(_MAX) is the maximum excess delay of the multi-path channel). The simulation results showed that 10Bτ(_MAX) branches gave close agreement with the tapped delay line model(where Be is the coherence bandwidth). This number is π times higher than the previously speculated 10Bτ(_MAX).For multicarrier OFDM system, the simulator was based on the physical (PHY) layer standard for IEEE 802.16-2004 Wireless Metropolitan Area Network (WirelessMAN) and employed measured channel transfer functions at the 2.5 GHz and 3.5 GHz bands in the simulations. The channel was implemented in the frequency domain by carrying out point wise multiplication of the spectrum of OFDM time The simulator was employed to study BER performance of rate 1/2 and rate 3/4 coded systems with QPSK and 16-QAM constellations under a variety of measured channel transfer functions. The performance over the frequency selective channel mainly depended upon the frequency domain fading and the channel coding rate

WIMAX TESTBED

WiMAX, the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, is a telecommunications technology aimed at providing wireless data over long distances in a variety of ways, from point-to-point links to full mobile cellular type access. It is based on the IEEE 802.16 standard, which is also called Wire IessMAN. The name WiMAX was created by the WiMAX Forum, which was formed in June 2001 to promote conformance and interoperability of the standard. The forum describes WiMAX as a standards-based technology enabling the delivery of last mile wireless broadband access as an alternative to cable and DSL. This Final Year Project attempts to simulate via Simulink, the working mechanism of a WiMAX testbed that includes a transmitter, channel and receiver. This undertaking will involve the baseband physical radio link. Rayleigh channel model together with frequency and timing offsets are introduced to the system and a blind receiver will attempt to correct these offsets and provide channel equalization. The testbed will use the Double Sliding Window for timing offset synchronization and the Schmid! & Cox algorithm for Fractional Frequency Offset estimation. The Integer Frequency Offset synchronization is achieved via correlation of the incoming preamble with its local copy whereas Residual Carrier Fr~quency Offset is estimated using the L th extension method. A linear Channel Estimator is added and combined with all the other blocks to form the testbed. From the results, this testbed matches the standard requirements for the BER when SNR is 18dB or higher. At these SNRs, the receiver side of the testbed is successful in performing the required synchronization and obtaining the same data sent. Sending data with SNR lower than 18dB compromises its performance as the channel equalizer is non-linear. This project also takes the first few steps of hardware implementation by using Real Time Workshop to convert the Simulink model into C codes which run outside MATLAB. In addition, the Double Sliding Window and Schmid! & Cox blocks are converted to Xilinx blocks and proven to be working like their Simulink counterparts

Network-coded MIMO-NOMA systems with FEC codes in two-way relay networks

This paper assumes two users and a two‐way relay network with the combination of 2×2 multi‐input multi‐output (MIMO) and nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA). To achieve network reliability without sacrificing network throughput, network‐coded MIMO‐NOMA schemes with convolutional, Reed‐Solomon (RS), and turbo codes are applied. Messages from two users at the relay node are network‐coded and combined in NOMA scheme. Interleaved differential encoding with redundancy (R‐RIDE) scheme is proposed together with MIMO‐NOMA system. Quadrature phase‐shift keying (QPSK) modulation technique is used. Bit error rate (BER) versus signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) (dB) and average mutual information (AMI) (bps/Hz) versus SNR (dB) in NOMA and MIMO‐NOMA schemes are evaluated and presented. From the simulated results, the combination of MIMO‐NOMA system with the proposed R‐RIDE‐Turbo network‐coded scheme in two‐way relay networks has better BER and higher AMI performance than conventional coded NOMA system. Furthermore, R‐RIDE‐Turbo scheme in MIMO‐NOMA system outperforms the other coded schemes in both MIMO‐NOMA and NOMA systems

Design of a simulation platform to test next generation of terrestrial DVB

Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting (DTTB) is a member of our daily life routine, and nonetheless, according to new users’ necessities in the fields of communications and leisure, new challenges are coming up. Moreover, the current Standard is not able to satisfy all the potential requirements. For that reason, first of all, a review of the current Standard has been performed within this work. Then, it has been identified the needing of developing a new version of the standard, ready to support enhanced services, as for example broadcasting transmissions to moving terminals or High Definition Television (HDTV) transmissions, among others. The main objective of this project is the design and development of a physical layer simulator of the whole DVB-T standard, including both the complete transmission and reception procedures. The simulator has been developed in Matlab. A detailed description of the simulator both from a functional and an architectural point of view is included. The simulator is the base for testing any possible modifications that may be included into the DVB-T2 future standard. In fact, several proposed enhancements have already been carried out and their performance has been evaluated. Specifically, the use of higher order modulation schemes, and the corresponding modifications in all the system blocks, have been included and evaluated. Furthermore, the simulator will allow testing other enhancements as the use of more efficient encoders and interleavers, MIMO technologies, and so on. A complete set of numerical results showing the performance of the different parts of the system, are presented in order to validate the correctness of the implementation and to evaluate both the current standard performance and the proposed enhancements. This work has been performed within the context of a project called FURIA, which is a strategic research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce. A brief description of this project and its consortium has been also included herein, together with an introduction to the current situation of the DTTB in Spain (called TDT in Spanish)

Advanced OFDM systems for terrestrial multimedia links

Recently, there has been considerable discussion about new wireless technologies and standards able to achieve high data rates. Due to the recent advances of digital signal processing and Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) technologies, the initial obstacles encountered for the implementation of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation schemes, such as massive complex multiplications and high speed memory accesses, do not exist anymore. OFDM offers strong multipath protection due to the insertion of the guard interval; in particular, the OFDM-based DVB-T standard had proved to offer excellent performance for the broadcasting of multimedia streams with bitrates over ten megabits per second in difficult terrestrial propagation channels, for fixed and portable applications. Nevertheless, for mobile scenarios, improving the receiver design is not enough to achieve error-free transmission especially in presence of deep shadow and multipath fading and some modifications of the standard can be envisaged. To address long and medium range applications like live mobile wireless television production, some further modifications are required to adapt the modulated bandwidth and fully exploit channels up to 24MHz wide. For these reasons, an extended OFDM system is proposed that offers variable bandwidth, improved protection to shadow and multipath fading and enhanced robustness thanks to the insertion of deep time-interleaving coupled with a powerful turbo codes concatenated error correction scheme. The system parameters and the receiver architecture have been described in C++ and verified with extensive simulations. In particular, the study of the receiver algorithms was aimed to achieve the optimal tradeoff between performances and complexity. Moreover, the modulation/demodulation chain has been implemented in VHDL and a prototype system has been manufactured. Ongoing field trials are demonstrating the ability of the proposed system to successfully overcome the impairments due to mobile terrestrial channels, like multipath and shadow fading. For short range applications, Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) is an efficient way to share the radio resource between multiple terminals. The main modulation parameters for a TDM system are discussed and it is shown that the 802.16a TDM OFDM physical layer fulfills the application requirements; some practical examples are given. A pre-distortion method is proposed that exploit the reciprocity of the radio channel to perform a partial channel inversion achieving improved performances with no modifications of existing receivers