DMT Optimality of LR-Aided Linear Decoders for a General Class of Channels, Lattice Designs, and System Models

The work identifies the first general, explicit, and non-random MIMO encoder-decoder structures that guarantee optimality with respect to the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT), without employing a computationally expensive maximum-likelihood (ML) receiver. Specifically, the work establishes the DMT optimality of a class of regularized lattice decoders, and more importantly the DMT optimality of their lattice-reduction (LR)-aided linear counterparts. The results hold for all channel statistics, for all channel dimensions, and most interestingly, irrespective of the particular lattice-code applied. As a special case, it is established that the LLL-based LR-aided linear implementation of the MMSE-GDFE lattice decoder facilitates DMT optimal decoding of any lattice code at a worst-case complexity that grows at most linearly in the data rate. This represents a fundamental reduction in the decoding complexity when compared to ML decoding whose complexity is generally exponential in rate. The results' generality lends them applicable to a plethora of pertinent communication scenarios such as quasi-static MIMO, MIMO-OFDM, ISI, cooperative-relaying, and MIMO-ARQ channels, in all of which the DMT optimality of the LR-aided linear decoder is guaranteed. The adopted approach yields insight, and motivates further study, into joint transceiver designs with an improved SNR gap to ML decoding.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure (3 subfigures), submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Short Packets over Block-Memoryless Fading Channels: Pilot-Assisted or Noncoherent Transmission?

We present nonasymptotic upper and lower bounds on the maximum coding rate achievable when transmitting short packets over a Rician memoryless block-fading channel for a given requirement on the packet error probability. We focus on the practically relevant scenario in which there is no \emph{a priori} channel state information available at the transmitter and at the receiver. An upper bound built upon the min-max converse is compared to two lower bounds: the first one relies on a noncoherent transmission strategy in which the fading channel is not estimated explicitly at the receiver; the second one employs pilot-assisted transmission (PAT) followed by maximum-likelihood channel estimation and scaled mismatched nearest-neighbor decoding at the receiver. Our bounds are tight enough to unveil the optimum number of diversity branches that a packet should span so that the energy per bit required to achieve a target packet error probability is minimized, for a given constraint on the code rate and the packet size. Furthermore, the bounds reveal that noncoherent transmission is more energy efficient than PAT, even when the number of pilot symbols and their power is optimized. For example, for the case when a coded packet of $168$ symbols is transmitted using a channel code of rate $0.48$ bits/channel use, over a block-fading channel with block size equal to $8$ symbols, PAT requires an additional $1.2$ dB of energy per information bit to achieve a packet error probability of $10^{-3}$ compared to a suitably designed noncoherent transmission scheme. Finally, we devise a PAT scheme based on punctured tail-biting quasi-cyclic codes and ordered statistics decoding, whose performance are close ($1$ dB gap at $10^{-3}$ packet error probability) to the ones predicted by our PAT lower bound. This shows that the PAT lower bound provides useful guidelines on the design of actual PAT schemes.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figures, journa

On the Performance of the Relay-ARQ Networks

This paper investigates the performance of relay networks in the presence of hybrid automatic repeat request (ARQ) feedback and adaptive power allocation. The throughput and the outage probability of different hybrid ARQ protocols are studied for independent and spatially-correlated fading channels. The results are obtained for the cases where there is a sum power constraint on the source and the relay or when each of the source and the relay are power-limited individually. With adaptive power allocation, the results demonstrate the efficiency of relay-ARQ techniques in different conditions.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol. 201

Indoor off-body wireless communication: static beamforming versus space-time coding

The performance of beamforming versus space-time coding using a body-worn textile antenna array is experimentally evaluated for an indoor environment, where a walking rescue worker transmits data in the 2.45 GHz ISM band, relying on a vertical textile four-antenna array integrated into his garment. The two transmission scenarios considered are static beamforming at low-elevation angles and space-time code based transmit diversity. Signals are received by a base station equipped with a horizontal array of four dipole antennas providing spatial receive diversity through maximum-ratio combining. Signal-to-noise ratios, bit error rate characteristics, and signal correlation properties are assessed for both off-body transmission scenarios. Without receiver diversity, the performance of space-time coding is generally better. In case of fourth-order receiver diversity, beamforming is superior in line-of-sight conditions. For non-line-of-sight propagation, the space-time codes perform better as soon as bit error rates are low enough for a reliable data link

Space-time coding techniques with bit-interleaved coded modulations for MIMO block-fading channels

The space-time bit-interleaved coded modulation (ST-BICM) is an efficient technique to obtain high diversity and coding gain on a block-fading MIMO channel. Its maximum-likelihood (ML) performance is computed under ideal interleaving conditions, which enables a global optimization taking into account channel coding. Thanks to a diversity upperbound derived from the Singleton bound, an appropriate choice of the time dimension of the space-time coding is possible, which maximizes diversity while minimizing complexity. Based on the analysis, an optimized interleaver and a set of linear precoders, called dispersive nucleo algebraic (DNA) precoders are proposed. The proposed precoders have good performance with respect to the state of the art and exist for any number of transmit antennas and any time dimension. With turbo codes, they exhibit a frame error rate which does not increase with frame length.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, Submission: January 2006 - First review: June 200

Full Diversity Unitary Precoded Integer-Forcing

We consider a point-to-point flat-fading MIMO channel with channel state information known both at transmitter and receiver. At the transmitter side, a lattice coding scheme is employed at each antenna to map information symbols to independent lattice codewords drawn from the same codebook. Each lattice codeword is then multiplied by a unitary precoding matrix ${\bf P}$ and sent through the channel. At the receiver side, an integer-forcing (IF) linear receiver is employed. We denote this scheme as unitary precoded integer-forcing (UPIF). We show that UPIF can achieve full-diversity under a constraint based on the shortest vector of a lattice generated by the precoding matrix ${\bf P}$. This constraint and a simpler version of that provide design criteria for two types of full-diversity UPIF. Type I uses a unitary precoder that adapts at each channel realization. Type II uses a unitary precoder, which remains fixed for all channel realizations. We then verify our results by computer simulations in $2\times2$, and $4\times 4$ MIMO using different QAM constellations. We finally show that the proposed Type II UPIF outperform the MIMO precoding X-codes at high data rates.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, to appear in IEEE-TW