Adaptive Transmission With Single-Carrier Multilevel BICM

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce adaptive link control techniques for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with broadband single-carrier signaling. Soft cancellation and minimum mean squared error turbo equalization is assumed, where matching between coding and equalization plays crucial roles to achieve high throughput. This paper uses multilevel coded bit-interleaved coded modulation (ML-BICM) with linear mapping as a core part of the transmission, on top of which this paper applies automatic repeat request (ARQ) with adaptive coding (AC) for link control. The reason behind the use of the linear mapping ML-BICM is the separability between the layers in the modulation format: This should bring us a significant benefit in designing the link control strategies because each layer has its own reliability, and the adaptive link control should be optimized based on the each layer's reliabilities. For ARQ with ML-BICM, we introduce layer-by-layer retransmission control, where turbo equalization and retransmission control can be performed independently over the layers because of the layer-separability. The layer-by-layer concept is then applied to AC with ML-BICM, where the code parameters such as code rate and generator polynomials are chosen so that after several iterations the mutual information between the transmitted and the soft-input soft-output decoder output information can reach a value very close to one while minimizing the rate loss due to the mismatch between the equalization and decoder. Extrinsic information transfer analysis is performed for the MIMO channel realization being given. The transmitter is notified of the selected codes for the each layer via the feedback channel, and uses the selected codes for the following transmission, assuming that the channel state information (CSI) stays the same at least over two consecutive frames. Finally, this paper evaluates the throughput performances of the ML-BICM ARQ and AC techniques using multidimensional field measurement data. The performance tendencies are correlated with propagation properties, obtained as results of the high-resolution channel analysis, such as spatial spreads at the transmitter and receiver sides.