<p> The goal of this thesis is the development of a computationally-efficient coded system that enables communication over the non-coherent Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) fiat-fading wireless channel at high data rates. The proposed signalling technique applies the principles of Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation (BICM) with Iterative Demapping and Decoding (IDD) to non-coherent MIMO communication systems. </p> <p> The principle of BICM is applied to a constellation that mimics the non-coherent capacity achieving distribution at high signal to noise ratios. The capacity achieving distribution is in the form of isotropically distributed unitary matrices, and the constellation can be represented by points on a Grassmannian manifold. A mapping technique that exploits the Grassmannian geometry is proposed. This mapping technique is based on the partitioning of the constellation into two subsets. The Grassmannian geometry also gives rise to an efficient list-based demapping algorithm that substantially reduces the computational complexity of the receiver while incurring some degradation in performance. For example, at a bit error rate (BER) of 10-4 the signal to noise ratio (SNR) performance degradation with respect to full constellation demapping is approximately 1. 75 dB. A technique by which the decoder can augment the demapping list is proposed, and it is shown that the performance degradation of the efficient algorithm can be rendered insignificant (approximately 0.2 dB at a BER of 10-4). </p> <p> Finally, the performance of the proposed BICM-IDD using the Grassmannian constellation will be compared to that of a corresponding training-based BICM-IDD scheme. These simulations show that the proposed scheme can provide better performance at high data rates; e.g., for a data rate of 5/3 bits per channel use, the performance gap is almost 1 dB at BER of 10^(-4). </p> / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Relays can be used in wireless communication systems to provide cell coverage extension, reduce coverage holes and increase throughput. Full duplex (FD) relays, which transmit and receive in the same time slot, can have a higher transmission rate compared with half duplex (HD) relays. However, FD relays suffer from self interference (SI) problems, which are caused by the transmitted relay signal being received by the relay receiver. This can reduce the performance of FD relays. In the literature, the SI channel is commonly nulled and removed as it simplifies the problem considerably. In practice, complete nulling is impossible due to channel estimation errors. Therefore, in this thesis, we consider the leakage of the SI from the FD relay. Our goal is to reduce the SI and increase the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the relay system. Hence, we propose different precoder and weight vector designs. These designs may increase the end to end (e2e) signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) at the destination. Here, a precoder is multiplied to a signal before transmission and a weight vector is multiplied to the received signal after reception. Initially, we consider an academic example where it uses a two path FD multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) system. The analysis of the SINR with the implementation of precoders and weight vectors shows that the SI component has the same underlying signal as the source signal when a relay processing delay is not being considered. Hence, to simulate the SI problem more realistically, we alter our relay design and focus on a one path FD MIMO relay system with a relay processing delay. For the implementation of precoders and weight vectors, choosing the optimal scheme is numerically challenging. Thus, we design the precoders and weight vectors using ad-hoc and near-optimal schemes. The ad-hoc schemes for the precoders are singular value decomposition (SVD), minimising the signal to leakage plus noise ratio (SLNR) using the Rayleigh Ritz (RR) method and zero forcing (ZF). The ad-hoc schemes for the weight vectors are SVD, minimum mean squared error (MMSE) and ZF. The near-optimal scheme uses an iterative RR method to compute the source precoder and destination weight vector and the relay precoder and weight vector are computed using the ad-hoc methods which provide the best performance. The average power and the instantaneous power normalisations are the two methods to constrain the relay precoder power. The average power normalisation method uses a novel closed form covariance matrix with an optimisation approach to constrain the relay precoder. This closed form covariance matrix is mathematically derived using matrix vectorization techniques. For the instantaneous power normalisation method, the constraint process does not require an optimisation approach. However, using this method the e2e SINR is difficult to calculate, therefore we use symbol error rate (SER) as a measure of performance. The results from the different precoder and weight vector designs suggest that reducing the SI using the relay weight vector instead of the relay precoder results in a higher e2e SINR. Consequently, to increase the e2e SINR, performing complicated processing at the relay receiver is more effective than at the relay transmitter.

Global mobile data traffic has more than doubled in the past four years, and will only increase throughout the upcoming years. Modern cellular systems are striving to enable communications at high data rates over wide geographical areas to meet the surge in data demand. This requires advanced technologies to mitigate fundamental effects of wireless communications like path-loss, shadowing, small-scale fading, and interference. Two of such technologies are: i) deploying multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver, and ii) employing an extra radio, called the relay, to forward messages from the transmitter to the receiver. The advantages of both technologies can be leveraged by using multiple antennas at the relay, transmitter, and receiver. Multiple-antenna relay-assisted communication is emerging as one promising technique for expanding the overall capacity of cellular networks. Taking full advantage of multiple-antenna relay-assisted cellular systems requires transmission strategies for jointly configuring the transmitters and receivers based on knowledge of the wireless propagation medium. This dissertation proposes such transmission strategies for wireless multiple-antenna relay-assisted systems. Two popular types of relays are considered: i) amplify-and-forward relays (the relays simply apply linear signal processing to their observed signals before retransmitting) and ii) decode-and-forward relays (the relays decode their observed signals and then re-encode before retransmitting). The first part of this dissertation considers the three-node multiple-antenna amplify-and-forward relay channel. Algorithms for adaptively selecting the number of data streams and subsets of transmit antennas at the transmitter and relay to provide reliable transmission at a guaranteed rate are proposed. Expressions for extracting spatial characteristics of the end-to-end multiple-antenna relay channel are derived. The second part of the dissertation presents interference management strategies that are developed specifically for two models of multiple-antenna relay interference channels where a number of relays assist multiple transmitters to communicate with multiple receivers. One model uses amplify-and-forward relays while the other uses decode-and-forward relays. Based on the idea of interference alignment, these strategies aim at maximizing the sum of achievable end-to-end rates. Simulation results show that the proposed transmission strategies with multiple-antenna relays achieve higher capacity and reliability than both those without relays and those with single-antenna relays. / text

Next generation wireless systems will use multiple antenna technologies, also known as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), to provide high data rates and robustness against fading. MIMO communication strategies for single user communication systems and their practical application in wireless networks are by now well known. MIMO communication systems, however, can benefit from multiuser processing by coordinating the transmissions to multiple users simultaneously. For numerous reasons, work on the theory of multiuser MIMO communication has yet to see broad adoption in wireless communication standards. For example, global knowledge of channel state information is often required. Such an unrealistic assumption, however, makes it difficult in practice to implement precoding techniques. Furthermore, the achievable rates of the conventional multiuser MIMO techniques are far from the theoretical performance bounds. These and other factors motivate research on practical multiuser communication strategies for the MIMO broadcast channel (point to multi-point communication) and the analysis of those strategies. The primary contributions of this dissertation are i) the development of four novel low complexity coordinated MIMO transceiver design techniques to approach the theoretical performance bound and ii) the investigation of the optimality of the proposed coordinated wireless MIMO networks. Several coordinated beamforming algorithms are proposed, where each mobile station uses quantized combining vectors or each base station uses limited feedback from the MS. The asymptotic optimality of the proposed coordinated beamforming system for the MIMO Gaussian broadcast channel is next investigated. For multi-stream transmission, a novel block diagonalized vector perturbation is proposed and the achievable sum rate upper bound of the proposed system is derived. Finally, for multi-cell environments, linear and non-linear network CBF algorithms supporting multiple cell-boundary users are proposed. The optimality of network coordinated beamforming in terms of the number of receive antennas is also investigated. / text

Cooperative diversity exploits the broadcast nature of wireless channels and uses relays to improve link reliability. Most cooperative communication protocols are assumed to be synchronous in nature, which is not always possible in wireless communication. Also the relay nodes are assumed to be half duplex which in turn reduces the spectral efficiency. In this thesis, we first present a novel asynchronous cooperative communication protocol exploiting polarization diversity, which does not require synchronization at the relay node. Dual polarized antennas are employed at the relay node to achieve full duplex amplify-and-forward (ANF) communication. Hence the transmission duration is reduced which results into an increased throughput rate. Capacity analysis of the proposed scheme ascertains the high data rate as compared to conventional ANF. Bit error rate (BER) simulation also shows that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms both the non-cooperative single-input single-output and the conventional ANF schemes. Considering channel path loss, the proposed scheme consume less total transmission energy as compared to ANF and non-cooperative scheme in more practical distance range. Thus the proposed scheme is suitable for high rate and energy efficient relay-enabled communication. In addition to that, we also present a novel power allocation scheme for multiple relay nodes that results in efficient cooperative multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication. Considering channel path loss, the total transmission energy is distributed between the source and the relay nodes. The energy distribution ratio between the relay and direct link is optimized such that the quality of received signal is maintained with minimum total transmission energy consumption. We calculate the energy distribution ratio analytically and verified it through computer simulation. With the new power allocation scheme, the system also obtains an increased channel capacity as compared to cooperative scheme with conventional equal power allocation and non-cooperative scheme. Optimal relay positioning with proposed energy allocation scheme is also explored to maximize the capacity.

Dans les télécommunications, le débit-fiabilité et la complexité de l’encodage et du décodage (opération à virgule flottante-flops) sont largement reconnus comme représentant des facteurs limitant interdépendants. Pour cette raison, tout tentative de réduire la complexité peut venir au prix d’une dégradation substantielle du taux d’erreurs. Cette thèse traite de l’établissement d’un compromis limite fondamental entre la fiabilité et la complexité dans des systèmes de communications « outage »-limités à entrées et sorties multiples (MIMO), et ses scénarios point-à-point, utilisateurs multiple, bidirectionnels, et aidés de feedback. Nous explorons un large sous-ensemble de la famille des méthodes d’encodage linéaire Lattice, et nous considérons deux familles principales de décodeurs : les décodeurs à maximum de vraisemblance (ML) et les décodeurs Lattice. L‘analyse algorithmique est concentrée sur l’implémentation de ces décodeurs ayant comme limitation une recherche bornée, ce qui inclue une large famille de sphère-décodeurs. En particulier, le travail présenté fournit une analyse à haut rapport Signal-à-Bruit (SNR) de la complexité minimum (flops ou taille de puce électronique) qui permet d’atteindre a) une certaine performance vis-à-vis du compromis diversité-gain de multiplexage et b) une différence tendant vers zéro avec le non-interrompu (optimale) ML décodeur, ou une différence tendant vers zéro comparé à l’implémentation exacte du décodeur (régularisé) Lattice. L’exposant de complexité obtenu décrit la vitesse asymptotique d’accroissement de la complexité, qui est exponentielle en terme du nombre de bits encodés. / In telecommunications, rate-reliability and encoding-decoding computational complexity (floating point operations - flops), are widely considered to be limiting and interrelated bottlenecks. For this reason, any attempt to significantly reduce complexity may be at the expense of a substantial degradation in error-performance. Establishing this intertwined relationship constitutes an important research topic of substantial practical interest. This dissertation deals with the question of establishing fundamental rate, reliability and complexity limits in general outage-limited multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications, and its related point-to-point, multiuser, cooperative, two-directional, and feedback-aided scenarios. We explore a large subset of the family of linear lattice encoding methods, and we consider the two main families of decoders; maximum likelihood (ML) based and lattice-based decoding. Algorithmic analysis focuses on the efficient bounded-search implementations of these decoders, including a large family of sphere decoders. Specifically, the presented work provides high signal-to-noise (SNR) analysis of the minimum computational reserves (flops or chip size) that allow for a) a certain performance with respect to the diversity-multiplexing gain tradeoff (DMT) and for b) a vanishing gap to the uninterrupted (optimal) ML decoder or a vanishing gap to the exact implementation of (regularized) lattice decoding. The derived complexity exponent describes the asymptotic rate of exponential increase of complexity, exponential in the number of codeword bits.

Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO) processing techniques for wireless communication are of interest for next-generation systems because of their potential to dramatically improve capacity in some propagation environments. When used in applications such as wireless LAN and cellular telephony, the MIMO processing methods must be adapted for the situation where a base station is communicating with many users simultaneously. This dissertation focuses on the downlink of such a channel, where the base station and all of the users have antenna arrays. If the transmitter has advance knowledge of the users' channel transfer functions, it can use that information to minimize the interuser interference due to the signals that are simultaneously transmitted to other users. If the transmitter assumes that all receivers treat the interference as noise, finding a solution that optimizes the use of resources is very difficult. This work proposes two classes of solutions to this problem. First, by forcing some or all of the interference to zero, it is possible to achieve a sub-optimal solution in closed-form. Second, a class of iterative solutions can be derived by extending optimal algorithms for multi-user downlink beamforming to accommodate receivers with multiple antennas. The closed-form solutions generally require less computation, but the iterative solutions offer improved performance are more robust to channel estimation errors, and thus may be more useful in practical applications. The performance of these algorithms were tested under realistic channel conditions by testing them on channels derived from both measurement data and a statistical model of an indoor propagation environment. These tests demonstrated both the ability of the channel to support multiple users, and the expected amount of channel estimation error due to movement of the users, with promising results. The success of any multi-user MIMO processing algorithm is ultimately dependent on the degree of correlation between the users' channels. If a base station is required to support a large number of users, one way to ensure minimal correlation between users' channels is to select groups of users whose channels are most compatible. The globally optimal solution to this problem is not possible without an exhaustive search, so a channel allocation algorithm is proposed that attempts to intelligently select groups of users at a more reasonable computational cost.

<p> A multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system has the potential to provide reliable transmissions at high data rates. However, the computational cost of achieving this promising performance can be quite substantial. With an emphasis on practical implementations, the MIMO systems employing the low cost linear receivers are studied in this thesis. The optimum space-time block codes (STBC) that enable a linear receiver to achieve its best possible performance are proposed for various MIMO systems. These codes satisfy an intra and inter orthogonality property, and are called unitary trace-orthogonal codes. In addition, several novel transmission schemes are specially designed for linear receivers with the use of the proposed code structure. The applications of the unitary trace-orthogonal code are not restricted to systems employing linear receivers. The proposed code structure can be also applied to the systems employing other types of receivers where several originally intractable code design problems are successfully solved.</p> <p>The communication schemes presented in this thesis are outlined as follows: •For a MIMO system with N ≥ M, where M and N are the number of transmitter and receiver antennas, respectively, the optimal full rate linear STBC for linear receivers is proposed and named unitary trace-orthogonal code. The proposed code structure is proved to be necessary and sufficient to achieve the minimum detection error probability for the system. • When applied to a multiple input single output (MISO) communication system, a special linear unitary trace-orthogonal code, named the Toeplitz STBC, is proposed. The code enables a linear receiver to provide full diversity and to achieve the optimal tradeoff between the detection error and the data transmission rate. This is, thus far, the first code that possesses such properties for an arbitrary MISO system that employs a linear receiver. • In MIMO systems in which N ≥ M and the signals are transmitted at full symbol rate, the highest diversity gain achievable by linear receivers is analyzed and shown to be N - M + 1. To improve the performance of a linear receiver, a multi-block transmission scheme is proposed, in which signals are coded so that they span multiple independent channel realizations. An optimal full rate linear STBC for this system that minimizes the detection error probability is presented. The code is named multi-block unitary trace-orthogonal code. The resulting system has an improved diversity gain. Furthermore, by relaxing the code from the full symbol rate constraint, a special multi-block transmission scheme is proposed. This scheme achieves a much improved diversity gain than those with full symbol rate. • The unitary trace-orthogonal code can also be applied to a system that employs a maximum-likelihood (ML) receiver rather than the simple linear receiver. For such a system, a systematic design of full diversity unitary trace-orthogonal code is presented for an arbitrary data transmission rate. </p> <p>In summary, when a simple linear receiver is employed, unitary trace-orthogonal codes and their optimality properties are exploited for various multiple antenna communication systems. Some members from this code family can also enable an optimal performance of ML detection. </P> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>This thesis considers wireless multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communication systems in block flat-fading environments. It develops novel designs of transmission and reception schemes for single-user and multi-user systems. The designs are developed under different models for the information about the communication channel that is available at the transmitter.</p> <p>For single-user systems, the thesis studies the class of non-linear MIMO transceivers that implement sequential interference (pre-) subtraction, namely transceivers with Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP) and transceivers with decision feedback equalization (DFE). For these transceivers a novel design framework is developed to unify the design of these two dual systems when channel state information (CSI) is available at both the transmitter and the receiver. The framework encompasses a broad range of performance criteria, and generates closed-form expressions for the optimal designs under these criteria. The framework reveals that a single transceiver design is optimal for a large subclass of these performance criteria and shows that this unique optimal design is (strictly) superior to the corresponding optimal linear transceiver for the same performance criterion. The framework also characterizes another class of design criteria for which the optimal non-linear transceiver reduces to the optimal linear transceiver for the same criterion. This novel design framework brings the design of non-linear MIMO transceivers to a level of maturity similar to the linear counterparts, and will impact the design of practical wireless communication systems that implement these interference subtraction schemes. The framework is then generalized to the case of DFE transceivers that satisfy an additional zero-forcing (ZF) constraint and operate in a "limited feedback" regime in which CSI is available only to the receiver and there is a limited rate feedback channel between the receiver and the transmitter. The proposed limited feedback system is the first that involves a "precoded" DFE transceiver.</p> <p> The multi-user part of the thesis develops multi-user transceivers that are robust to uncertainties in the available information about the users' channels. These uncertainties are inevitable in most practical multi-user communication systems, and can result in significant performance degradation.</p> <p> The first component of the multi-user part develops robust broadcast channel transceivers with quality of service (QoS) requirements for communication scenarios with bounded channel uncertainty at the transmitter. It formulates design problems for QoS requirements that can be expressed as constraints on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) of each user, or as constraints on the mean square error (MSE) each user's received signal. For both formulations, convex and efficiently solvable design approaches are proposed. These design approaches are used to derive solutions to other related design problems, such as robust counterparts of the fair broadcasting problem.</p> <p> The second component of the multi-user part develops robust designs for multiuser transceivers that minimize different MSE criteria subject to a power constraint. The designs are obtained for different models of channel uncertainty: stochastic uncertainty models and bounded uncertainty models. For each channel uncertainty model, the robust multi-user designs are developed for both linear and non-linear MIMO transceivers, for both broadcast channels (BC) and multiple access channels (MAC).</p> <p>Simulation studies demonstrate the impact of the proposed robust designs on the performance of multi-user systems, and show that by incorporating robustness in the design one can significantly reduce the sensitivity of these systems to channel uncertainty and mitigate its deleterious effects.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p> We consider the design of the precoders for a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communication system equipped with a decision feedback equalizer (DFE) receiver. For such design problems, perfect knowledge of the channel state information (CSI) at both the transmitter and the receiver is usually required. However, in the environment of wireless communications, it is often difficult to provide sufficiently timely and accurate feedback of CSI from the receiver to the transmitter for such designs to be practically viable.</p> <p> In this thesis, we consider the optimum precoder designs for a wireless communication link having M transmitter antennas and N receiver antennas (M < N), in which the channels are assumed to be flat fading and may be correlated. We assume that full knowledge of CSI is available at the receiver. At the transmitter, however, only the first- and second-order statistics of the channels are available. Our first goal is to come up with an efficient design of the optimal precoder for such a MIMO system by minimizing the average arithmetic mean-squared error (MSE) of zero-forcing (ZF) decision feedback detection subject to a constraint on the total transmission power. Applying some of the properties of the matrix parameters, this non-convex optimization problem can be transformed into a convex geometrical programming problem which can then be efficiently solved using an interior point method. The performance of the MIMO system equipped with this optimum precoder and a ZF-DFE has also been found to be comparable, and in some cases, superior to that of V-BLAST which necessitates optimally ordered successive interference cancellation based on the largest post-detection signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In terms of trade-off between performance and implementation simplicity, the proposed system is certainly an attractive alternative.</p> <p> In addition, we also utilize these important properties of our system parameters to investigate an "inverse problem" of our first design. That is, we design another precoding matrix by minimizing the total transmission power of the MIMO communication system subject to a constraint on the average MSE. Also, a closed-form solution is derived when the channels are uncorrelated while simulation results for the minimum power precoder designs is given at the end of this thesis.</p> / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)