Wireless broadband single-carrier systems with MMSE turbo equalization receivers

Abstract

<div lang="en" class="abs"><p class="abs_header">Abstract</p><p>Broadband single-carrier modulated signals experience severe multipath distortion when propagating through the physical medium. Correcting the distortion with channel equalization is the foremost task of the detector. Prior information about the transmitted signals in the form of channel decoder feedback can significantly enhance equalization accuracy. An algorithm that iteratively performs channel decoding and equalization with prior information is generally denoted a turbo equalizer. This thesis focuses on turbo equalization with prior information using the principle of interference cancellation followed by minimum mean squared error (MMSE) filtering. Receiver algorithms, receiver convergence, and coding and modulation in the context of MMSE turbo equalization are studied.</p><p>Computationally efficient versions of the receiver algorithm through approximate time-average filtering, matched filtering, square-root time-variant filtering and frequency-domain filtering are studied. The frequency-domain turbo equalizer (FDTE) is found to exhibit both superior convergence and low computational complexity among the compared equalizer algorithms.</p><p>Multi-dimensional extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts are introduced for the purpose of tracking the convergence of the turbo equalization of layered MIMO transmissions. Generic properties of the equalizer EXIT functions defining the equalizer convergence are analyzed. The principles for detector ordering, maximum sum-rate code design and maximum rate symmetric design are derived from the properties of the multidimensional EXIT functions. </p><p>Semi-analytical EXIT charts are developed for the convergence analysis of the FDTE. The effects of channel parameters and the channel code are analyzed with semi-analytical methods. A new approach for the design of irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes using a convergence outage principle is proposed. A performance gain is demonstrated in a single-input multiple output (SIMO) channel over non-optimized regular LDPC codes and irregular LDPC codes optimized for the AWGN channel. The outage convergence based design, which takes advantage of the semi-analytical convergence analysis method, is also extended to layered MIMO transmissions.</p><p>Quadrature amplitude modulation using multilevel bit-interleaved coded modulation (MLBICM) is studied as an alternative to regular bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) for highly bandwidth-efficient transmission in MMSE turbo equalized systems. A linear bit-to-symbol mapping is introduced that enables the use of a computationally efficient MMSE turbo equalizer at the receiver. The proposed coded modulation is compared with BICM in channel measurement data based simulations and found to exhibit superior robustness against changes in spatial channel parameters. An automatic repeat request (ARQ) configuration using one ARQ controller for each equally performing group of code levels is proposed. The configuration takes advantage of the unequal error protection (UEP) property of the coded modulation. The semi-analytical convergence analysis is extended to the multilevel modulated case and applied in a channel measurement based convergence evaluation. The construction of the MLBICM is found to have an inherently better convergence behavior than BICM. Finally, the outage convergence based channel code design is extended to the layered MIMO multilevel signalling case.</p></div>