Bruno Clerckx

Coordinated multipoint transmission and reception in LTE-advanced: deployment scenarios and operational challenges

3GPP has completed a study on coordinated multipoint transmission and reception techniques to facilitate cooperative communications across multiple transmission and reception points (e.g., cells) for the LTE-Advanced system. In CoMP operation, multiple points coordinate with each other in such a way that the transmission signals from/to other points do not incur serious interference or even can be exploited as a meaningful signal. The goal of the study is to evaluate the potential performance benefits of CoMP techniques and the implementation aspects including the complexity of the standards support for CoMP. This article discusses some of the deployment scenarios in which CoMP techniques will likely be most beneficial and provides an overview of CoMP schemes that might be supported in LTE-Advanced given the modern silicon/DSP technologies and backhaul designs available today. In addition, practical implementation and operational challenges are discussed. We also assess the performance benefits of CoMP in these deployment scenarios with traffic varying from low to high load.

MIMO techniques in WiMAX and LTE: a feature overview

IEEE 802.16m and 3GPP LTE-Advanced are the two evolving standards targeting 4G wireless systems. In both standards, multiple-input multiple-output antenna technologies play an essential role in meeting the 4G requirements. The application of MIMO technologies is one of the most crucial distinctions between 3G and 4G. It not only enhances the conventional point-to-point link, but also enables new types of links such as downlink multiuser MIMO. A large family of MIMO techniques has been developed for various links and with various amounts of available channel state information in both IEEE 802.16e/m and 3GPP LTE/LTE-Advanced. In this article we provide a survey of the MIMO techniques in the two standards. The MIMO features of the two are compared, and the engineering considerations are depicted.

Joint Wireless Information and Energy Transfer in a Two-User MIMO Interference Channel

Recently, joint wireless information and energy transfer (JWIET) methods have been proposed to relieve the battery limitation of wireless devices. However, the JWIET in a general K-user MIMO interference channel (IFC) has been unexplored so far. In this paper, we investigate for the first time the JWIET in K-user MIMO IFC, in which receivers either decode the incoming information data (information decoding, ID) or harvest the RF energy (energy harvesting, EH). In the K-user IFC, we consider three different scenarios according to the receiver mode: i) multiple EH receivers and a single ID receiver, ii) multiple IDs and a single EH, and iii) multiple IDs and multiple EHs. For all scenarios, we have found a common necessary condition of the optimal transmission strategy and, accordingly, developed the transmission strategy that satisfies the common necessary condition, in which all the transmitters transferring energy exploit a rank-one energy beamforming. Furthermore, we have also proposed an iterative algorithm to optimize the covariance matrices of the transmitters that transfer information and the powers of the energy beamforming transmitters simultaneously, and identified the corresponding achievable rate-energy tradeoff region. Finally, we have shown that by selecting EH receivers according to their signal-to-leakage-and-harvested energy-ratio (SLER), we can improve the achievable rate-energy region further.

Dual-polarized wireless communications: from propagation models to system performance evaluation

In this paper, we address the potential benefits of dual-polarized arrays in multi-antenna wireless systems. After an extensive literature overview of experimental data, we present a new and simple analytical framework to model dual-polarized Rayleigh and Ricean fading channels for arbitrary array sizes. The model relies on a limited number of physical parameters, such as the channel spatial correlations, the channel co-polar and the cross-polar ratios and the antenna cross-polar discrimination. Then, we investigate the multiplexing advantage of dual-polarized transmissions through the evaluation of the ergodic mutual information, for both TITO and MIMO systems. Finally, the performance of two space-time coding schemes (Alamouti OSTBC and uncoded spatial multiplexing) is evaluated via a detailed analysis of the pairwise error probability.

Recent trend of multiuser MIMO in LTE-advanced

Recently, the mobile communication industry is moving rapidly toward Long Term Evolution, or LTE, systems. The leading carriers and vendors are committed to launching LTE service in the near future; in fact, a number of major operators such as Verizon have initiated LTE service already. LTE aims to provide improved service quality over 3G systems in terms of throughput, spectral efficiency, latency, and peak data rate, and the MIMO technique is one of the key enablers of the LTE system for achieving these diverse goals. Among several operational modes of MIMO, multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO), in which the base station transmits multiple streams to multiple users, has received much attention as a way of achieving improvement in performance. From the initial release (Rel. 8) to the recent release (Rel. 10), so called LTE-Advanced, MUMIMO techniques have evolved from their premature form to a more elaborate version. In this article, we provide an overview of design challenges and the specific solutions for MU-MIMO systems developed in the LTE-Advanced standard.

Multiple-antenna techniques in LTE-advanced

In this article we discuss the different multiple antenna techniques introduced in LTE-Advanced. Rather than describing the technical details of the adopted solutions, we approach the problem starting from the design targets and the antenna deployments prioritized by the operators. Then we present the main enabling solutions introduced for downlink and uplink transmissions, and subsequently assess the performance of these solutions in different scenarios. Finally, we discuss some possible future developments.

Impact of Antenna Coupling on 2

The impact of mutual coupling induced by two closely spaced minimum scattering antennas at the subscriber unit on 2 times 2 multiple-input multiple-output channels and communications is investigated. Both (de)correlation effects and variations of antenna gain resulting from coupling mechanisms are considered. Relationships between coupling and correlations/channel Frobenius norm are discussed, pointing out the role of the interelement spacing, the array orientation, and the richness of scattering. The analysis also yields useful insight into the influence of mutual coupling on capacity and system performance

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The channel capacity and the performance of MIMO systems in the presence of fading correlation and antenna coupling are investigated. Simulation results demonstrate that mutual coupling can improve the performance depending on the inter-element spacing and the richness of scattering. It is shown the bit error rate performance of spatial multiplexing is particularly influenced by the decorrelation/correlation effect caused by mutual coupling. On the other hand, the bit error rate performance of transmit diversity is mainly affected by the resulting modification of antenna gain and received power.

2 MIMO Communications

Accurate channel direction information is essential to achieve considerable capacity gains in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems. Limited feedback using a polar-cap differential codebook which utilizes the temporal correlation in multiple-input single-output (MISO) channels is presented in this paper. We first describe the general properties of the polar-cap differential codebook and then explain the design methodology of the size of the polar-cap given the temporal correlation coefficient. We also propose an enhancement of the polar-cap differential codebook which is suitable for a spatially correlated channel. We compare the polar-cap differential codebook with a rotation-based differential codebook in terms of the chordal distance to demonstrate the superiority of the polar-cap differential codebook. Monte Carlo simulation results show that the polar-cap differential codebook facilitates a significant performance gain in both temporally and spatially correlated channels.

Mutual coupling effects on the channel capacity and the space-time processing of MIMO communication systems

Radiative wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising technology to provide cost-effective and real-time power supplies to wireless devices. Although radiative WPT shares many similar characteristics with the extensively studied wireless information transfer or communication, they also differ significantly in terms of design objectives, transmitter/receiver architectures and hardware constraints, and so on. In this paper, we first give an overview on the various WPT technologies, the historical development of the radiative WPT technology and the main challenges in designing contemporary radiative WPT systems. Then, we focus on the state-of-the-art communication and signal processing techniques that can be applied to tackle these challenges. Topics discussed include energy harvester modeling, energy beamforming for WPT, channel acquisition, power region characterization in multi-user WPT, waveform design with linear and non-linear energy receiver model, safety and health issues of WPT, massive multiple-input multiple-output and millimeter wave enabled WPT, wireless charging control, and wireless power and communication systems co-design. We also point out directions that are promising for future research.