Alireza Tarighat

Network-based wireless location: challenges faced in developing techniques for accurate wireless location information

Wireless location refers to the geographic coordinates of a mobile subscriber in cellular or wireless local area network (WLAN) environments. Wireless location finding has emerged as an essential public safety feature of cellular systems in response to an order issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1996. The FCC mandate aims to solve a serious public safety problem caused by the fact that, at present, a large proportion of all 911 calls originate from mobile phones, the location of which cannot be determined with the existing technology. However, many difficulties intrinsic to the wireless environment make meeting the FCC objective challenging. These challenges include channel fading, low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), multiuser interference, and multipath conditions. In addition to emergency services, there are many other applications for wireless location technology, including monitoring and tracking for security reasons, location sensitive billing, fraud protection, asset tracking, fleet management, intelligent transportation systems, mobile yellow pages, and even cellular system design and management. This article provides an overview of wireless location challenges and techniques with a special focus on network-based technologies and applications.

A Leakage-Based Precoding Scheme for Downlink Multi-User MIMO Channels

In multiuser MIMO downlink communications, it is necessary to design precoding schemes that are able to suppress co-channel interference. This paper proposes designing precoders by maximizing the so-called signal-to-leakage-and-noise ratio (SLNR) for all users simultaneously. The presentation considers communications with both single- and multi-stream cases, as well as MIMO systems that employ Alamouti coding. The effect of channel estimation errors on system performance is also studied. Compared with zero-forcing solutions, the proposed method does not impose a condition on the relation between the number of transmit and receive antennas, and it also avoids noise enhancement. Simulations illustrate the performance of the scheme

Compensation schemes and performance analysis of IQ imbalances in OFDM receivers

The implementation of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based physical layers suffers from the effect of In-phase and Quadrature-phase (IQ) imbalances in the front-end analog processing. The IQ imbalances can severely limit the achievable operating signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver and, consequently, the supported constellation sizes and data rates. In this paper, the effect of IQ imbalances on OFDM receivers is studied, and system-level algorithms to compensate for the distortions are proposed. The algorithms include post-fast Fourier transform (FFT) least-squares and least mean squares (LMS) equalization, as well as pre-FFT correction using adaptive channel/distortion estimation and special pilot tones to enable accurate and fast training. Bounds on the achievable performance of the compensation algorithms are derived and evaluated as a function of the physical distortion parameters. A motivation is included for the physical causes of IQ imbalances and for the implications of the approach presented in this paper on designing and implementing wireless transceivers.

Active Antenna Selection in Multiuser MIMO Communications

The paper develops a dynamic antenna scheduling strategy for downlink MIMO communications, where a subset of the receive antennas at certain users is selectively disabled. The proposed method improves the signal-to-leakage-plus-noise (SLNR) ratio performance of the system and it relaxes the condition on the number of transmit-receive antennas in comparison to traditional zero-forcing and time-scheduling strategies. The largest value that the SLNR can achieve is shown to be equal to the maximum eigenvalue of a certain random matrix combination, and the probability distribution of this eigenvalue is characterized in terms of a Whittaker function. The result shows that increasing the number of antennas at some users can degrade the SLNR performance at other users. This fact is used to propose an antenna scheduling scheme that leads to improvement in terms of SINR outage probabilities

MIMO OFDM receivers for Systems with IQ imbalances

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a widely recognized modulation scheme for high data rate communications. However, the implementation of OFDM-based systems suffers from in-phase and quadrature-phase (IQ) imbalances in the front-end analog processing. Such imbalances are caused by the analog processing of the received radio frequency (RF) signal, and they cannot be efficiently or entirely eliminated in the analog domain. The resulting IQ distortion limits the achievable operating SNR at the receiver and, consequently, the achievable data rates. The issue of IQ imbalances is even more severe at higher SNR and higher carrier frequencies. In this paper, the effect of IQ imbalances on multi-input multioutput (MIMO) OFDM systems is studied, and a framework for combating such distortions through digital signal processing is developed. An input-output relation governing MIMO OFDM systems is derived. The framework is used to design receiver algorithms with compensation for IQ imbalances. It is shown that the complexity of the system at the receiver grows from dimension (n/sub R//spl times/n/sub T/) for ideal IQ branches to (2n/sub R//spl times/2n/sub T/) in the presence of IQ imbalances. However, by exploiting the structure of space-time block codes along with the distortion models, one can obtain efficient receivers that are robust to IQ imbalances. Simulation results show significant improvement in the achievable BER of the proposed MIMO receivers for space-time block-coded OFDM systems in the presence of IQ imbalances.

Coherent optical MIMO (COMIMO)

We present a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) optical link based on coherent optics and its ability to exploit the inherent information capacity of multimode fiber. A coherent implementation differs from previous work in optical MIMO by allowing the system to tolerate smaller modal delay spreads, because of a much larger carrier frequency, and yet maintain the necessary diversity needed for MIMO operation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of MIMO adaptive equalization to mitigate intersymbol interference when exceeding the bandwidth-length product of the link. The impact of phase noise is studied with numerical simulation.

A multi user beamforming scheme for downlink MIMO channels based on maximizing signal-to-leakage ratios

Multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) wireless systems can provide a substantial gain in network downlink throughput by allowing multiple users to communicate in the same frequency and time slots. The challenge is to design transmit beamforming vectors for every user while limiting the co-channel interference (CCI) from other users. One approach is to perfectly cancel the CCI at every user, which requires a relatively large number of transmit antennas. In this paper, we consider an alternative approach based on maximizing the signal-to-leakage ratio (SLR) for designing transmit beamforming vectors in a multi-user system. One advantage of the proposed scheme is that it does not impose a restriction on the number of available transmit antennas; it also outperforms the conventional beamforming scheme.

Joint compensation of transmitter and receiver impairments in OFDM systems

The implementation of OFDM-based systems suffers from impairments such as in-phase and quadrature-phase (IQ) imbalances in the front-end analog processing. Such imbalances are caused by the analog processing of the radio frequency (RF) signal and can be present at both the transmitter and receiver. The resulting IQ distortion limits the achievable operating SNR at the receiver and the achievable data rates. In this paper, the effect of both the transmitter and receiver IQ imbalances in an OFDM system is studied and algorithms are developed to compensate for such distortions in the digital domain. The algorithms include post-FFT least-squares and adaptive equalization, as well as a pre-distortion scheme at the transmitter and a pre-FFT correction at the receiver

Compensation of Phase Noise in OFDM Wireless Systems

Phase noise causes significant degradation in the performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based wireless communication systems. The presence of phase noise can reduce the effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver, and consequently, limit the bit error rate (BER) and data rate. In this paper, the effect of phase noise on OFDM wireless systems is studied, and a compensation scheme is proposed to mitigate the common phase error and intercarrier interference (ICI) caused by phase noise. In the proposed scheme, the communication between the transmitter and receiver blocks consists of two stages. In the first stage, block-type pilot symbols are transmitted and the channel coefficients are jointly estimated with the phase noise in the time domain. In the second stage, comb-type OFDM symbols are transmitted such that the receiver can jointly estimate the data symbols and the phase noise. It is shown both by theory and computer simulations that the proposed scheme can effectively mitigate the ICI caused by phase noise and improve the BER of OFDM systems. Another benefit of the proposed scheme is that the sensitivity of OFDM receivers to phase noise can be significantly lowered, which helps simplify the oscillator and circuitry design in terms of implementation cost and power consumption.

Fundamentals and challenges of optical multiple-input multiple-output multimode fiber links [Topics in Optical Communications]

In this article we discuss the application of MIMO processing to multimode fiber links. MIMO processing is shown to increase the information capacity of communication links linearly as the minimum number of transmitters/receivers increases. The fundamentals of optical MIMO fiber links are presented, and the promises and challenges of such systems are elaborated