Is R right for you? If yes…

Blog post to AEA365, a blog sponsored by the American Evaluation Association (AEA) dedicated to highlighting Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources, and Lessons Learned for evaluators. The American Evaluation Association is an international professional association of evaluators devoted to the application and exploration of program evaluation, personnel evaluation, technology, and many other forms of evaluation. Evaluation involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products, and organizations to improve their effectiveness

Cyclic prefix-based universal filtered multicarrier system and performance analysis

Recently proposed universal filtered multicarrier (UFMC) system is not an orthogonal system in multipath channel environments and might cause significant performance loss. In this paper, the authors propose a cyclic prefix (CP) based UFMC system and first analyze the conditions for interference-free one-tap equalization in the absence of transceiver imperfections. Then the corresponding signal model and output signal-to-noise ratio expression are derived. In the presence of carrier frequency offset, timing offset, and insufficient CP length, the authors establish an analytical system model as a summation of desired signal, intersymbol interference, intercarrier interference, and noise. New channel equalization algorithms are proposed based on the derived analytical signal model. Numerical results show that the derived model matches the simulation results precisely, and the proposed equalization algorithms improve the UFMC system performance in terms of bit error rate

Pei-Pei Lei on Using InfoPath as a Project Management/Data Collection Tool

Blog post to AEA365, a blog sponsored by the American Evaluation Association (AEA) dedicated to highlighting Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources, and Lessons Learned for evaluators. The American Evaluation Association is an international professional association of evaluators devoted to the application and exploration of program evaluation, personnel evaluation, technology, and many other forms of evaluation. Evaluation involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products, and organizations to improve their effectiveness

Channel equalization and interference analysis for uplink Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT)

We derive the uplink system model for In-band and Guard-band narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT). The results reveal that the actual channel frequency response (CFR) is not a simple Fourier transform of the channel impulse response, due to sampling rate mismatch between the NB-IoT user and Long Term Evolution (LTE) base station. Consequently, a new channel equalization algorithm is proposed based on the derived effective CFR. In addition, the interference is derived analytically to facilitate the co-existence of NB-IoT and LTE signals. This work provides an example and guidance to support network slicing and service multiplexing in the physical layer

Efficient implementation of filter bank multicarrier systems using circular fast convolution

In this paper, filter bank-based multicarrier systems using a fast convolution approach are investigated. We show that exploiting offset quadrature amplitude modulation enables us to perform FFT/IFFT-based convolution without overlapped processing, and the circular distortion can be discarded as a part of orthogonal interference terms. This property has two advantages. First, it leads to spectral efficiency enhancement in the system by removing the prototype filter transients. Second, the complexity of the system is significantly reduced as the result of using efficient FFT algorithms for convolution. The new scheme is compared with the conventional waveforms in terms of out-of-band radiation, orthogonality, spectral efficiency, and complexity. The performance of the receiver and the equalization methods are investigated and compared with other waveforms through simulations. Moreover, based on the time variant nature of the filter response of the proposed scheme, a pilot-based channel estimation technique with controlled transmit power is developed and analyzed through lower-bound derivations. The proposed transceiver is shown to be a competitive solution for future wireless networks

Multi-service systems: an enabler of flexible 5G air-interface

Multi-service system is an enabler to flexibly support diverse communication requirements for the next generation wireless communications. In such a system, multiple types of services co-exist in one baseband system with each service having its optimal frame structure and low out of band emission (OoBE) waveforms operating on the service frequency band to reduce the inter-service-band-interference (ISvcBI). In this article, a framework for multi-service system is established and the challenges and possible solutions are studied. The multi-service system implementation in both time and frequency domain is discussed. Two representative subband filtered multicarrier (SFMC) waveforms: filtered orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (F-OFDM) and universal filtered multi-carrier (UFMC) are considered in this article. Specifically, the design methodology, criteria, orthogonality conditions and prospective application scenarios in the context of 5G are discussed. We consider both single-rate (SR) and multi-rate (MR) signal processing methods. Compared with the SR system, the MR system has significantly reduced computational complexity at the expense of performance loss due to inter-subband-interference (ISubBI) in MR systems. The ISvcBI and ISubBI in MR systems are investigated with proposed low-complexity interference cancelation algorithms to enable the multi-service operation in low interference level conditions

Sub-graph based joint sparse graph for sparse code multiple access systems

Sparse code multiple access (SCMA) is a promising air interface candidate technique for next generation mobile networks, especially for massive machine type communications (mMTC). In this paper, we design a LDPC coded SCMA detector by combining the sparse graphs of LDPC and SCMA into one joint sparse graph (JSG). In our proposed scheme, SCMA sparse graph (SSG) defined by small size indicator matrix is utilized to construct the JSG, which is termed as sub-graph based joint sparse graph of SCMA (SG-JSG-SCMA). In this paper, we first study the binary-LDPC (B-LDPC) coded SGJSG- SCMA system. To combine the SCMA variable node (SVN) and LDPC variable node (LVN) into one joint variable node (JVN), a non-binary LDPC (NB-LDPC) coded SG-JSG-SCMA is also proposed. Furthermore, to reduce the complexity of NBLDPC coded SG-JSG-SCMA, a joint trellis representation (JTR) is introduced to represent the search space of NB-LDPC coded SG-JSG-SCMA. Based on JTR, a low complexity joint trellis based detection and decoding (JTDD) algorithm is proposed to reduce the computational complexity of NB-LDPC coded SGJSG- SCMA system. According to the simulation results, SG-JSGSCMA brings significant performance improvement compare to the conventional receiver using the disjoint approach, and it can also outperform a Turbo-structured receiver with comparable complexity. Moreover, the joint approach also has advantages in terms of processing latency compare to the Turbo approaches

Carla Hillerns and Pei-Pei Lei on You had me at Hello: Effective Email Subject Lines for Survey Invitations

Blog post to AEA365, a blog sponsored by the American Evaluation Association (AEA) dedicated to highlighting Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources, and Lessons Learned for evaluators. The American Evaluation Association is an international professional association of evaluators devoted to the application and exploration of program evaluation, personnel evaluation, technology, and many other forms of evaluation. Evaluation involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products, and organizations to improve their effectiveness

The Beauty of Banner Tables

Blog post to AEA365, a blog sponsored by the American Evaluation Association (AEA) dedicated to highlighting Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources, and Lessons Learned for evaluators. The American Evaluation Association is an international professional association of evaluators devoted to the application and exploration of program evaluation, personnel evaluation, technology, and many other forms of evaluation. Evaluation involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products, and organizations to improve their effectiveness