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

Successive interference cancellation schemes for time-reversal space-time block codes

In this paper, we propose two simple signal detectors that are based on successive interference cancellation (SIC) for time-reversal space-time block codes to combat intersymbol interference in frequency-selective fading environments. The main idea is to treat undetected symbols and noise together as Gaussian noise with matching mean and variance and use the already-detected symbols to help current signal recovery. The first scheme is a simple SIC signal detector whose ordering is based on the channel powers. The second proposed SIC scheme, which is denoted parallel arbitrated SIC (PA-SIC), is a structure that concatenates in parallel a certain number of SIC detectors with different ordering sequences and then combines the soft output of each individual SIC to achieve performance gains. For the proposed PA-SIC, we describe the optimal ordering algorithm as a combinatorial problem and present a low-complexity ordering technique for signal decoding. Simulations show that the new schemes can provide a performance that is very close to maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) decoding under time-invariant conditions. Results for frequency-selective and doubly selective fading channels show that the proposed schemes significantly outperform the conventional minimum mean square error-(MMSE) like receiver and that the new PA-SIC performs much better than the proposed conventional SIC and is not far in performance from the MLSE. The computational complexity of the SIC algorithms is only linear with the number of transmit antennas and transmission rates, which is very close to the MMSE and much lower than the MLSE. The PA-SIC also has a complexity that is linear with the number of SIC components that are in parallel, and the optimum tradeoff between performance and complexity can be easily determined according to the number of SIC detectors