Interference-Mitigating Waveform Design for Next-Generation Wireless Systems

A brief historical perspective of the evolution of waveform designs employed in consecutive generations of wireless communications systems is provided, highlighting the range of often conflicting demands on the various waveform characteristics. As the culmination of recent advances in the field the underlying benefits of various Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) schemes are highlighted and exemplified. As an integral part of the appropriate waveform design, cognizance is given to the particular choice of the duplexing scheme used for supporting full-duplex communications and it is demonstrated that Time Division Duplexing (TDD) is substantially outperformed by Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD), unless the TDD scheme is combined with further sophisticated scheduling, MIMOs and/or adaptive modulation/coding. It is also argued that the specific choice of the Direct-Sequence (DS) spreading codes invoked in DS-CDMA predetermines the properties of the system. It is demonstrated that a specifically designed family of spreading codes exhibits a so-called interference-free window (IFW) and hence the resultant system is capable of outperforming its standardised counterpart employing classic Orthogonal Variable Spreading Factor (OVSF) codes under realistic dispersive channel conditions, provided that the interfering multi-user and multipath components arrive within this IFW. This condition may be ensured with the aid of quasisynchronous adaptive timing advance control. However, a limitation of the system is that the number of spreading codes exhibiting a certain IFW is limited, although this problem may be mitigated with the aid of novel code design principles, employing a combination of several spreading sequences in the time-frequency and spatial-domain. The paper is concluded by quantifying the achievable user load of a UTRA-like TDD Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) system employing Loosely Synchronized (LS) spreading codes exhibiting an IFW in comparison to that of its counterpart using OVSF codes. Both system's performance is enhanced using beamforming MIMOs

Near-capacity MIMOs using iterative detection

In this thesis, Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) techniques designed for transmission over narrowband Rayleigh fading channels are investigated. Specifically, in order to providea diversity gain while eliminating the complexity of MIMO channel estimation, a Differential Space-Time Spreading (DSTS) scheme is designed that employs non-coherent detection. Additionally, in order to maximise the coding advantage of DSTS, it is combined with Sphere Packing (SP) modulation. The related capacity analysis shows that the DSTS-SP scheme exhibits a higher capacity than its counterpart dispensing with SP. Furthermore, in order to attain additional performance gains, the DSTS system invokes iterative detection, where the outer code is constituted by a Recursive Systematic Convolutional (RSC) code, while the inner code is a SP demapper in one of the prototype systems investigated, while the other scheme employs a Unity Rate Code (URC) as its inner code in order to eliminate the error floor exhibited by the system dispensing with URC. EXIT charts are used to analyse the convergence behaviour of the iteratively detected schemes and a novel technique is proposed for computing the maximum achievable rate of the system based on EXIT charts. Explicitly, the four-antenna-aided DSTSSP system employing no URC precoding attains a coding gain of 12 dB at a BER of 10-5 and performs within 1.82 dB from the maximum achievable rate limit. By contrast, the URC aidedprecoded system operates within 0.92 dB from the same limit.On the other hand, in order to maximise the DSTS system’s throughput, an adaptive DSTSSP scheme is proposed that exploits the advantages of differential encoding, iterative decoding as well as SP modulation. The achievable integrity and bit rate enhancements of the system are determined by the following factors: the specific MIMO configuration used for transmitting data from the four antennas, the spreading factor used and the RSC encoder’s code rate.Additionally, multi-functional MIMO techniques are designed to provide diversity gains, multiplexing gains and beamforming gains by combining the benefits of space-time codes, VBLASTand beamforming. First, a system employing Nt=4 transmit Antenna Arrays (AA) with LAA number of elements per AA and Nr=4 receive antennas is proposed, which is referred to as a Layered Steered Space-Time Code (LSSTC). Three iteratively detected near-capacity LSSTC-SP receiver structures are proposed, which differ in the number of inner iterations employed between the inner decoder and the SP demapper as well as in the choice of the outer code, which is either an RSC code or an Irregular Convolutional Code (IrCC). The three systems are capable of operating within 0.9, 0.4 and 0.6 dB from the maximum achievable rate limit of the system. A comparison between the three iteratively-detected schemes reveals that a carefully designed two-stage iterative detection scheme is capable of operating sufficiently close to capacity at a lower complexity, when compared to a three-stage system employing a RSC or a two-stage system using an IrCC as an outer code. On the other hand, in order to allow the LSSTC scheme to employ less receive antennas than transmit antennas, while still accommodating multiple users, a Layered Steered Space-Time Spreading (LSSTS) scheme is proposed that combines the benefits of space-time spreading, V-BLAST, beamforming and generalised MC DS-CDMA. Furthermore, iteratively detected LSSTS schemes are presented and an LLR post-processing technique is proposed in order to improve the attainable performance of the iteratively detected LSSTS system.Finally, a distributed turbo coding scheme is proposed that combines the benefits of turbo coding and cooperative communication, where iterative detection is employed by exchanging extrinsic information between the decoders of different single-antenna-aided users. Specifically, the effect of the errors induced in the first phase of cooperation, where the two users exchange their data, on the performance of the uplink in studied, while considering different fading channel characteristics

High Capacity CDMA and Collaborative Techniques

The thesis investigates new approaches to increase the user capacity and improve the error performance of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) by employing adaptive interference cancellation and collaborative spreading and space diversity techniques. Collaborative Coding Multiple Access (CCMA) is also investigated as a separate technique and combined with CDMA. The advantages and shortcomings of CDMA and CCMA are analysed and new techniques for both the uplink and downlink are proposed and evaluated. Multiple access interference (MAI) problem in the uplink of CDMA is investigated first. The practical issues of multiuser detection (MUD) techniques are reviewed and a novel blind adaptive approach to interference cancellation (IC) is proposed. It exploits the constant modulus (CM) property of digital signals to blindly suppress interference during the despreading process and obtain amplitude estimation with minimum mean squared error for use in cancellation stages. Two new blind adaptive receiver designs employing successive and parallel interference cancellation architectures using the CM algorithm (CMA) referred to as ‘CMA-SIC’ and ‘BA-PIC’, respectively, are presented. These techniques have shown to offer near single user performance for large number of users. It is shown to increase the user capacity by approximately two fold compared with conventional IC receivers. The spectral efficiency analysis of the techniques based on output signal-to interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) also shows significant gain in data rate. Furthermore, an effective and low complexity blind adaptive subcarrier combining (BASC) technique using a simple gradient descent based algorithm is proposed for Multicarrier-CDMA. It suppresses MAI without any knowledge of channel amplitudes and allows large number of users compared with equal gain and maximum ratio combining techniques normally used in practice. New user collaborative schemes are proposed and analysed theoretically and by simulations in different channel conditions to achieve spatial diversity for uplink of CCMA and CDMA. First, a simple transmitter diversity and its equivalent user collaborative diversity techniques for CCMA are designed and analysed. Next, a new user collaborative scheme with successive interference cancellation for uplink of CDMA referred to as collaborative SIC (C-SIC) is investigated to reduce MAI and achieve improved diversity. To further improve the performance of C-SIC under high system loading conditions, Collaborative Blind Adaptive SIC (C-BASIC) scheme is proposed. It is shown to minimize the residual MAI, leading to improved user capacity and a more robust system. It is known that collaborative diversity schemes incur loss in throughput due to the need of orthogonal time/frequency slots for relaying source’s data. To address this problem, finally a novel near-unity-rate scheme also referred to as bandwidth efficient collaborative diversity (BECD) is proposed and evaluated for CDMA. Under this scheme, pairs of users share a single spreading sequence to exchange and forward their data employing a simple superposition or space-time encoding methods. At the receiver collaborative joint detection is performed to separate each paired users’ data. It is shown that the scheme can achieve full diversity gain at no extra bandwidth as inter-user channel SNR becomes high. A novel approach of ‘User Collaboration’ is introduced to increase the user capacity of CDMA for both the downlink and uplink. First, collaborative group spreading technique for the downlink of overloaded CDMA system is introduced. It allows the sharing of the same single spreading sequence for more than one user belonging to the same group. This technique is referred to as Collaborative Spreading CDMA downlink (CS-CDMA-DL). In this technique T-user collaborative coding is used for each group to form a composite codeword signal of the users and then a single orthogonal sequence is used for the group. At each user’s receiver, decoding of composite codeword is carried out to extract the user’s own information while maintaining a high SINR performance. To improve the bit error performance of CS-CDMA-DL in Rayleigh fading conditions, Collaborative Space-time Spreading (C-STS) technique is proposed by combining the collaborative coding multiple access and space-time coding principles. A new scheme for uplink of CDMA using the ‘User Collaboration’ approach, referred to as CS-CDMA-UL is presented next. When users’ channels are independent (uncorrelated), significantly higher user capacity can be achieved by grouping multiple users to share the same spreading sequence and performing MUD on per group basis followed by a low complexity ML decoding at the receiver. This approach has shown to support much higher number of users than the available sequences while also maintaining the low receiver complexity. For improved performance under highly correlated channel conditions, T-user collaborative coding is also investigated within the CS-CDMA-UL system

A General Framework for Analyzing, Characterizing, and Implementing Spectrally Modulated, Spectrally Encoded Signals

Fourth generation (4G) communications will support many capabilities while providing universal, high speed access. One potential enabler for these capabilities is software defined radio (SDR). When controlled by cognitive radio (CR) principles, the required waveform diversity is achieved via a synergistic union called CR-based SDR. Research is rapidly progressing in SDR hardware and software venues, but current CR-based SDR research lacks the theoretical foundation and analytic framework to permit efficient implementation. This limitation is addressed here by introducing a general framework for analyzing, characterizing, and implementing spectrally modulated, spectrally encoded (SMSE) signals within CR-based SDR architectures. Given orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a 4G candidate signal, OFDM-based signals are collectively classified as SMSE since modulation and encoding are spectrally applied. The proposed framework provides analytic commonality and unification of SMSE signals. Applicability is first shown for candidate 4G signals, and resultant analytic expressions agree with published results. Implementability is then demonstrated in multiple coexistence scenarios via modeling and simulation to reinforce practical utility

Space-time diversity for CDMA systems over frequency-selective fading channels

Supporting the expected high data rates required by wireless Internet and high-speed multimedia services is one of the basic requirements in broadband mobile wireless systems. However, the achievable capacity and data rate of wireless communication systems are limited by the time-varying nature of the channel. Efficient techniques for combating the time-varying effects of wireless channels can be achieved by utilizing different forms of diversity. In recent years, transmit diversity based on space-time coding (STC) has received more attention as an effective technique for combating fading. On the other hand, most existing space-time diversity techniques have been developed for flat-fading channels. Given the fact that wireless channels are generally frequency-selective, in this thesis, we aim to investigate the performance of space-time diversity schemes for wideband code-division multiple-access (WCDMA) systems over frequency-selective fading channels. The proposed receiver in this case is a rake-type receiver, which exploits the path diversity inherent to multipath propagation. Then, a decorrelator detector is used to mitigate the multiple access interference (MAI) and the known near-far problem. We derive the bit error rate (BER) expression over frequency-selective fading channels considering both the fast and slow fading cases. Finally, we show that our proposed receiver achieves the full system diversity through simulation and analytical results. Most of the work conducted in this area considers perfect knowledge of the channel at the receiver. Hence, channel identification brings significant challenges to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) CDMA systems. In light of this, we propose a channel estimation and data detection scheme based on the superimposed training-based approach. The proposed scheme enhances the performance by eliminating the MAI from both the channel and data estimates by employing two decorrelators; channel and data decorrelators. The performance of the proposed estimation technique is investigated over frequency-selective slow fading channels where we derived a closed-form expression for the BER as a function of the number of users, K , the number resolvable paths, L , and the number of receive antennas, V . Finally, our proposed scheme is shown to be more robust to channel estimation errors. Furthermore, both the analytical and simulation results indicate that the full system diversity is achieved. Considering that training estimation techniques suffer either from low spectral efficiency (i.e., conventional training approach) or from high pilot power consumption (i.e., superimposed training-based approach), in the last part of the thesis, we present an iterative joint detection and estimation (JDE) using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for MIMO CDMA systems over frequency-selective fading channels. We also derive a closed-form expression for the optimized weight coefficients of the EM algorithm, which was shown to provide significant performance enhancement relative to the conventional equal-weight EM-based signal decomposition. Finally, our simulation results illustrate that the proposed receiver achieves near-optimum performance with modest complexity using very few training symbols

Optimal cross layer design for CDMA-SFBC wireless systems

The demand for high speed reliable wireless services has been rapidly growing. Wireless networks have limited resources while wireless channels suffer from fading, interference and time variations. Furthermore, wireless applications have diverse end to end quality of service (QoS) requirements. The aforementioned challenges require the design of spectrally efficient transmission systems coupled with the collaboration of the different OSI layers i.e. cross layer design. To this end, we propose a code division multiple access (CDMA)-space frequency block coded (SFBC) systems for both uplink and downlink transmissions. The proposed systems exploit code, frequency and spatial diversities to improve reception. Furthermore, we derive closed form expressions for the average bit error rate of the proposed systems. In this thesis, we also propose a cross layer resource allocation algorithm for star CDMA-SFBC wireless networks. The proposed resource allocation algorithm assigns base transceiver stations (BTS), antenna arrays and frequency bands to users based on their locations such that their pair wise channel cross correlation is minimized while each user is assigned channels with maximum coherence time. The cooperation between the medium access control (MAC) and physical layers as applied by the optimized resource allocation algorithm improves the bit error rate of the users and the spectral efficiency of the network. A joint cross layer routing and resource allocation algorithm for multi radio CDMA-SFBC wireless mesh networks is also proposed in this thesis. The proposed cross layer algorithm assigns frequency bands to links to minimize the interference and channel estimation errors experienced by those links. Channel estimation errors are minimized by selecting channels with maximum coherence time. On top, the optimization algorithm routes network traffic such that the average end to end packet delay is minimized while avoiding links with high interference and short coherence time. The cooperation between physical, MAC and network layers as applied by the optimization algorithm provides noticeable improvements in average end to end packet delay and success rat

Initial Synchronisation in the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Aided Single- and Multi-Carrier DS-CDMA as well as DS-UWB Downlink

In this thesis, we propose and investigate code acquisition schemes employing both colocated and cooperative Multiple Input/Multiple Output (MIMO) aided Single-Carrier (SC) and Multi-Carrier (MC) Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) DownLink (DL) schemes. We study their characteristics and performance in terms of both Non-Coherent (NC) and Differentially Coherent (DC) MIMO scenarios. Furthermore, we also propose iterative code acquisition schemes for the Direct Sequence-Ultra WideBand (DS-UWB) DL. There is a paucity of code acquisition techniques designed for transmit diversity aided systems. Moreover, there are no in-depth studies representing the fundamental characteristics of code acquisition schemes employing both co-located and cooperative MIMOs. Hence we investigate both NC and DC code acquisition schemes in the co-located and cooperative MIMO aided SC and MC DS-CDMA DL, when communicating over spatially uncorrelated Rayleigh channels. The issues of NC initial and post-initial acquisition schemes as well as DC schemes are studied as a function of the number of co-located antennas by quantifying the attainable correct detection probability and mean acquisition time performances. The research of DS-UWB systems has recently attracted a significant interest in both the academic and industrial community. In the DS-UWB DL, initial acquisition is required for both coarse timing as well as code phase alignment. Both of these constitute a challenging problem owing to the extremely short chip-duration of UWB systems. This leads to a huge acquisition search space size, which is represented as the product of the number of legitimate code phases in the uncertainty region of the PN code and the number of legitimate signalling pulse positions. Therefore the benefits of the iterative code acquisition schemes are analysed in terms of the achievable correct detection probability and mean acquisition time performances. Hence we significantly reduce the search space size with the aid of a Tanner graph based Message Passing (MP) technique, which is combined with the employment of beneficially selected generator polynomials, multiple receive antennas and appropriately designed multiple-component decoders. Finally, we characterise a range of two-stage iterative acquisition schemes employing iterative MP designed for a multiple receive antenna assisted DS-UWB DL scenario

Downlink W-CDMA performance analysis and receiver implmentation on SC140 Motorola DSP

High data rate applications are the trend in today's wireless technology. W-CDMA standard was designed to support such high data rates of up to 3.84 Mcps. The main purpose of this research was to analyze the feasibility of a fixed-point implementation of the W-CDMA downlink receiver algorithm on a general-purpose digital signal processor (StarCore SC140 by Motorola). The very large instruction word architecture of SC140 core is utilized to generate optimal implementation, to meet the real time timing requirements of the algorithm. The other main aim of this work was to study and evaluate the performance of the W-CDMA downlink structure with incorporated space-time transmit diversity. The effect of the channel estimation algorithm used was extensively studied too