Information Theory and Reliable Communication

In this paper we review the most peculiar and interesting information-theoretic and communications features of fading channels. We first describe the statistical models of fading channels which are frequently used in the analysis and design of communication systems. Next, we focus on the information theory of fading channels, by emphasizing capacity as the most important performance measure. Both single-user and multiuser transmission are examined. Further, we describe how the structure of fading channels impacts code design, and finally overview equalization of fading multipath channels.

/pdf/fading-channels-information-theoretic-and-communications-2ipqbail97.pdf

Fading channels: information-theoretic and communications aspects

It is now well known that employing channel adaptive signaling in wireless communication systems can yield large improvements in almost any performance metric. Unfortunately, many kinds of channel adaptive techniques have been deemed impractical in the past because of the problem of obtaining channel knowledge at the transmitter. The transmitter in many systems (such as those using frequency division duplexing) can not leverage techniques such as training to obtain channel state information. Over the last few years, research has repeatedly shown that allowing the receiver to send a small number of information bits about the channel conditions to the transmitter can allow near optimal channel adaptation. These practical systems, which are commonly referred to as limited or finite-rate feedback systems, supply benefits nearly identical to unrealizable perfect transmitter channel knowledge systems when they are judiciously designed. In this tutorial, we provide a broad look at the field of limited feedback wireless communications. We review work in systems using various combinations of single antenna, multiple antenna, narrowband, broadband, single-user, and multiuser technology. We also provide a synopsis of the role of limited feedback in the standardization of next generation wireless systems.

/pdf/an-overview-of-limited-feedback-in-wireless-communication-1njp2bb1kz.pdf

An overview of limited feedback in wireless communication systems

“Multivalued Analysis” is the theory of set-valued maps (called multifonctions) and has important applications in many different areas. Multivalued analysis is a remarkable mixture of many different parts of mathematics such as point-set topology, measure theory and nonlinear functional analysis. It is also closely related to “Nonsmooth Analysis” (Chapter 5) and in fact one of the main motivations behind the development of the theory, was in order to provide necessary analytical tools for the study of problems in nonsmooth analysis. It is not a coincidence that the development of the two fields coincide chronologically and follow parallel paths. Today multivalued analysis is a mature mathematical field with its own methods, techniques and applications that range from social and economic sciences to biological sciences and engineering. There is no doubt that a modern treatise on “Nonlinear Functional Analysis” can not afford the luxury of ignoring multivalued analysis. The omission of the theory of multifunctions will drastically limit the possible applications.

SET-Valued Analysis

We study a multiple-antenna system where the transmitter is equipped with quantized information about instantaneous channel realizations. Assuming that the transmitter uses the quantized information for beamforming, we derive a universal lower bound on the outage probability for any finite set of beamformers. The universal lower bound provides a concise characterization of the gain with each additional bit of feedback information regarding the channel. Using the bound, it is shown that finite information systems approach the perfect information case as (t-1)2/sup -B/t-1/, where B is the number of feedback bits and t is the number of transmit antennas. The geometrical bounding technique, used in the proof of the lower bound, also leads to a design criterion for good beamformers, whose outage performance approaches the lower bound. The design criterion minimizes the maximum inner product between any two beamforming vectors in the beamformer codebook, and is equivalent to the problem of designing unitary space-time codes under certain conditions. Finally, we show that good beamformers are good packings of two-dimensional subspaces in a 2t-dimensional real Grassmannian manifold with chordal distance as the metric.

On beamforming with finite rate feedback in multiple-antenna systems

Multiple antenna transmission and reception have been shown to significantly increase the achievable data rates of wireless systems. However, most of the existing analysis assumes perfect or no channel information at the receiver and transmitter. The performance gap between these extreme channel assumptions is large and most practical systems lie in between. Therefore, it is important to analyze multiple antenna systems in the presence of partial channel information. We upper bound the outage probability performance of multiple antenna systems with preamble-based channel estimation and quantized feedback. We design causal feedback and power control schemes to minimize this upper bound on outage probability. We consider the following practical issues in our analysis and design: (1) the channel information is imperfect both at the receiver and at the transmitter and (2) part of the total available resources for the system need to be used for estimation and feedback. Our results demonstrate that for block fading channels, sending a periodic preamble and causally receiving channel state information via a feedback channel can lead to substantial gains in the outage performance over any nonfeedback scheme. Most of the gains achieved by perfect feedback can be achieved by very few bits of feedback. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that these outage probability gains can be translated into improvements in frame error rate performance of systems using space-time codes. Thus, implementing a power control, even at the cost of reduced spectral resources for the forward channel is beneficial for block fading channels.

/pdf/feedback-gain-in-multiple-antenna-systems-4yssabq7pi.pdf

Feedback gain in multiple antenna systems

This paper investigates subcarrier and power allocation in multiuser OFDM. The aim is to maximize the overall rate while achieving proportional fairness amongst users under a total power constraint. Achieving the optimal solution is computationally demanding thereby necessitating the use of sub-optimal techniques. Existing sub-optimal techniques either use fixed power allocation and perform only subcarrier allocation or handle subcarrier and power allocation separately. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that performs joint subcarrier and power allocation. Simulation results are shown to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with that of existing algorithms.

/pdf/a-sub-optimal-joint-subcarrier-and-power-allocation-4bzv5uzkje.pdf

A sub-optimal joint subcarrier and power allocation algorithm for multiuser OFDM

In an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) downlink scenario, we propose joint subcarrier and power allocation for channel-aware queue-aware scheduling while allowing multiple users to share a single OFDM symbol. Our approach is to combine subcarrier and power allocation by optimizing a user's power allocation immediately after the user has been allocated a subcarrier. Simulation results show that joint subcarrier and power allocation yields a significant performance improvement compared to other existing schemes which perform subcarrier allocation with a fixed (uniform) power allocation assumption. Joint subcarrier and power allocation is also extended to band-wise allocation of subcarriers in order to help reduce signaling overhead in time varying channels. We examine the trade-off between increasing the sub-band size and the corresponding degradation in system performance for different values of the channel multipath delay spread.

/pdf/joint-subcarrier-and-power-allocation-in-channel-aware-queue-4y19ytz0gu.pdf

Joint Subcarrier and Power Allocation in Channel-Aware Queue-Aware Scheduling for Multiuser OFDM

Channel estimation techniques for code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems need to combat multiple access interference (MAI) effectively. Most existing estimation techniques are designed for CDMA systems with short repetitive spreading codes. However, current and next-generation wireless systems use long spreading codes whose periods are much larger than the symbol duration. We derive the maximum-likelihood channel estimate for long-code CDMA systems over multipath channels using training sequences and approximate it using an iterative algorithm to reduce the computational complexity in each symbol duration. The iterative channel estimate is also shown to be asymptotically unbiased. The effectiveness of the iterative channel estimator is demonstrated in terms of squared error in estimation as well as the bit error rate performance of a multistage detector based on the channel estimates. The effect of error in decision feedback from the multistage detector (used in the absence of training sequences) is also shown to be negligible for reasonable feedback error rates using simulations. The proposed iterative channel estimation technique is also extended to track slowly varying multipath fading channels using decision feedback. Thus, an MAI-resistant multiuser channel estimation and tracking scheme with reasonable computational complexity is derived for long-code CDMA systems over multipath fading channels.

/pdf/multiuser-channel-estimation-and-tracking-for-long-code-cdma-v7uwzh9t1e.pdf

Multiuser channel estimation and tracking for long-code CDMA systems

We propose a new subcarrier allocation algo- rithm for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) that gives fair allocation of capacity to multiple users with different channel and traffic characteristics. This is achieved by utilizing buffer state information and mea- sured traffic statistics in addition to channel state feedback. Multiuser diversity gains are achieved in the proposed al- gorithm by scheduling across both time (buffering) and fre- quency (subcarriers). Simulation results are shown to illus- trate (a) improved capacity allocation and throughput, and (b) larger admissible traffic when compared to the existing algorithms.

/pdf/a-subcarrier-allocation-algorithm-for-ofdma-using-buffer-and-1irsmongo8.pdf

Srikrishna Bhashyam

Papers

Feedback gain in multiple antenna systems

A sub-optimal joint subcarrier and power allocation algorithm for multiuser OFDM

Joint Subcarrier and Power Allocation in Channel-Aware Queue-Aware Scheduling for Multiuser OFDM

Multiuser channel estimation and tracking for long-code CDMA systems

A subcarrier allocation algorithm for OFDMA using buffer and channel state information