Multiband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Ultra Wideband System Research Articles

Performance Analysis of the Multiband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Ultra-Wideband Systems for Multipath Fading and Multiuser Interference Channels

This paper presents the performance analysis of the multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) ultra-wideband (UWB) systems for multipath fading and multiuser interference channels. A closed form approximation of the BER performance of the MB-OFDM UWB system with multiple interferences is proposed. Based on the derived approximation, the effects on the BER performance for the choice of the codeword constraint lengths of the convolutional encoder, the length of the cyclic prefix, and the multiuser environments of two or more interferers are thoroughly discussed. Four UWB multipath fading channels are also investigated for the BER performance of the MB-OFDM UWB system. The simulated results provide us with useful information to appropriately choose the parameters of the MB-OFDM UWB system for the sake of achieving the BER performance that conforms to requirement of the FCC standards.

Gray Coded Constellation Shifting Scheme with Low Complexity in MB-OFDM UWB Systems

Multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) with a dual carrier modulation (DCM) is a promising technique for ultra wideband (UWB) communication systems. However, it suffers from high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) at the transmitter because of the fundamental feature of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In this paper, we propose a new shifting scheme of a gray coded 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation in the DCM mapping process that considerably reduces the PAPR. The PAPR reduction performance and computational complexity of the proposed scheme are compared to the existing PAPR reduction scheme. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the PAPR and computational complexity effectively.

Iterative Sampling Frequency Offset Estimation for MB-OFDM UWB Systems With Long Transmission Packet

A multiband orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) system, which is one of the effective modulation techniques that have been adopted for high-speed ultrawideband (UWB) systems, is very sensitive to sampling frequency offset (SFO) due to the mismatch between local oscillators at the transmitter and the receiver. In this paper, we propose an iterative SFO estimation method for a high-data-rate MB-OFDM UWB system to improve its SFO estimation accuracy in the case of a long transmission packet. The proposed method is an iterative process of 2-D SFO estimation across pilot subcarriers and consecutive OFDM symbols, together with joint channel estimation. Furthermore, we derive the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the proposed SFO estimation method. This CRLB can be used as a guide for algorithm design and to explore the theoretical limit. Our performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed iterative SFO estimation method is both practical and effective.

Channel estimation in ECMA-368-based UWB systems with unknown interference

Ultra-wideband (UWB) is one of the fledging paradigms that the next generation of wireless personal area network (WPAN) is developing towards. With its appealing dimensions, UWB communication comes with a set of challenges of which channel estimation is prominent. In this article, we explore the problem of channel estimation in ECMA-368-based multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) UWB system affected by unknown narrowband interference (NBI). We analytically show that the unknown NBI causes larger variance of a channel estimator. Thus, MB-OFDM UWB systems are supposed to experience significant performance degradation. To reduce this effect, we follow a new preamble-based channel estimation approach, where the interference power on each subcarrier is treated as a nuisance parameter which is averaged out from the corresponding likelihood function. The later is then optimized in an iterative manner according to the quasi-Newton algorithm. Furthermore, we address highly-accurate channel estimation in a time-variant channel and propose an iterative interpolation method. Simulation results indicate that our proposed approaches provide more precise estimation performances than those offered by conventional channel estimation methods.

Blind frequency-offset tracking scheme for multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing using time-domain spreading

A blind scheme for estimating the residual carrier-frequency offset of multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM)-based ultra-wideband (UWB) systems is proposed. In the MB-OFDM UWB system, time-domain spreading (TDS) is used by transmitting the same information across two adjacent OFDM symbols. By using the TDS structure, the proposed frequency estimation scheme does not require the use of pilot symbols. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed estimator, analytical expression of the mean square error is derived and the performance is compared with a conventional pilot-assisted estimator.

Zero padded suffix aided subspace-based narrowband interference detected adaptive channel estimation for MB-OFDM UWB systems

The ECMA-368 standard specifies multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) as the definitive technology for high rate ultra-wideband (UWB) communications. Like other wireless systems, the performance of a correct data signals detection and decoding in MB-OFDM UWB is reduced by narrowband interference (NBI). A more specific problem of severity arises when interferences are present during the channel estimation process, since this eventually results to severe degradation in the performance of signal reconstruction in the whole packet layer convergence protocol (PLCP) and service data unit (PSDU). In this article, we propose an improved channel estimation technique for OFDM-based UWB systems in presence of NBI. Several steps have been carried out to achieve this purpose. First, the location of center frequency of NBI is found out through zero padded suffix (ZPS) aided subspace-based method. Secondly, we propose an adaptive band select and replace (ABSR) scheme to eliminate NBI based on frequency-domain redundancy (FR) property we introduce into preamble symbols during transmission. Thirdly, we perform least-square (LS) channel estimation on NBI-free received preamble symbols to get the estimated channel at each subcarrier. Fourthly, low rank least square minimum mean squared error (LMMSE) channel estimation is performed using this LS channel estimation. Lastly, Blackman windowing is applied on low rank LMMSE channel to reduce the spectral leakage and thus to increase the channel estimation accuracy. Link level simulation (LLS) urges that our proposed technique has improved performances. Key words: Ultra-wideband (UWB), channel estimation, multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM), narrowband interference (NBI), ECMA-368, wireless personal area network (WPAN).

Research on SLM Algorithm for PAPR reduction in MB-OFDM UWB Systems

Abstract Multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) is one of the key techniques of ultra wideband (UWB) systems. A major drawback of MB-OFDM technique is the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the transmit signal. In this paper, a novel phase sequence of selected mapping algorithm which makes the side information not needed is designed to lower the PAPR of MB-OFDM UWB signals. It is also shown that comparable PAPR reduction performance with the original SLM algorithm can be achieved with a small increase in signal power. Simulation results show that there must be equilibriums between SLM computational complexity and PAPR performance. The objective of the new algorithm is to lower PAPR close to ordinary SLM technique with reduced computational complexity with little performance degradation and achieves better system resource utilization.

A Comprehensive Study of Channel Estimation for WBAN-based Healthcare Systems: Feasibility of Using Multiband UWB

Wireless personal area network (WPAN) is an emerging in wireless technology for short range indoor and outdoor communication applications. A more specific category of WPAN is the wireless body area network (WBAN) used for health monitoring. On the other hand, multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) ultra-wideband (UWB) comes with a number of desirable features at the physical layer for wireless communications, for example, very high data rate. One big challenge in adoption of multiband UWB in WBAN is the fact that channel estimation becomes difficult under the constraint of extremely low transmission power. Moreover, the heterogeneous environment of WBAN causes a dense multipath wireless channel. Therefore, effective channel estimation is required in the receiver of WBAN-based healthcare system that uses multiband UWB. In this paper, we first outline the MB-OFDM UWB system. Then, we present an overview of channel estimation techniques proposed/investigated for multiband UWB communications with emphasis on their strengths and weaknesses. Useful suggestions are given to overcome the weaknesses so that these methods can be particularly useful for WBAN channels. Also, we analyze the comparative performances of the techniques using computer simulation in order to find the energy-efficient channel estimation methods for WBAN-based healthcare systems.

An Efficient Packet Detection Method with a Verification Mode in MB-OFDM UWB Systems

In this paper, we propose a novel packet detection method using a cross-correlation scheme with a verification mode in ultra wide-band (UWB) systems adopting multi-band OFDM (MB-OFDM) techniques. In the packet detection process, a cross-correlation scheme has the advantage of performing the acquisition of transmitted time-frequency code (TFC) for frequency hopping as well as packet detection with low hardware costs; however, it suffers from performance degradation caused by an imperfect decision process using a threshold value compared with an auto-correlation method. By using a verification mode, the proposed method improves detection performance of a cross-correlation technique considerably. This is because the verification mode can reduce a false alarm probability on packet detection by reconfirming whether or not the desired signal is received and can effectively reject temporal small correlation peaks due to the noise or sub-path signals having smaller energies. For the verification of proposed algorithm, we employ CM1 and CM4 channel models given in IEEE802.15.3a and compare the detection performance between conventional algorithms as well as the proposed one by using computer simulations. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can reduce a packet detection error probability (PDER) to about 10?3 in CM1 channel and about 10?2 in CM4 channel at SNR = 9 dB compared with conventional methods having more than 10?1 PDER. From the experimental results, we can find that the proposed algorithm can compensate for performance degradation under high SNR condition caused by using a fixed single threshold value. We also estimate the power consumption of algorithms by utilizing both the total number of multiplications and additions employed in the algorithms and the consuming power of hardware elements under 0.13 um CMOS technology. Next, we discover that the proposed method can reduce computational complexity by a minimum of 24.5% compared with conventional cross-correlation algorithms. From the experimental and power estimation results, we can see that the proposed method is very useful for packet detection in UWB MB-OFDM systems, in which low-power implementation is an important issue.

Impact of WiMAX interference on MB-OFDM UWB systems: analysis and mitigation

This paper presents an analysis of the performance of the multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) system for ultra wideband (UWB) communication in the presence of interference from IEEE 802.16 WiMAX systems operating in the 3.5 GHz band. We present an exact analysis of the uncoded bit error rate (BER) of the MB-OFDM system, based on Laplace transform techniques. We also present a simple Gaussian approximation for the WiMAX interference, and establish its relative accuracy and usefulness by means of comparison with the exact analysis and simulations. Such a Gaussian approximation is especially useful for simplified performance analysis, as well as for the design of interference mitigation techniques. Motivated by the Gaussian approximation, we propose a simple two-stage interference mitigation technique for coded MB-OFDM transmissions, consisting of interference spectrum estimation during silent periods followed by appropriate bit metric weighting during Viterbi decoding. We compare parametric and non-parametric spectrum estimation techniques for various scenarios of interest. In the presence of WiMAX interference, the two-stage interference mitigation provides substantial gains in performance in return for modest increases in complexity and without requiring any modifications to the MB-OFDM transmitter or signal structure.

Performance of BICM-OFDM systems in UWB interference

In this paper, we develop an analytical framework for performance analysis of generic bit-interleaved coded modulation orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (BICMOFDM) systems impaired by ultra-wideband (UWB) interference. For practical relevance we consider multi-band OFDM (MB-OFDM), direct-sequence UWB (DS-UWB), and impulseradio UWB (IR-UWB) interference formats following recent IEEE/ECMA standards or standard proposals. Besides the exact analysis we calculate the bit error rate (BER) for the case when the UWB interference is modeled as additional Gaussian noise. Our results show that in general the BER of the BICM-OFDM system strongly depends on the UWB format and the OFDM sub-carrier spacing. While the Gaussian approximation is very accurate for DS-UWB, it may severely overor underestimate the true BER for MB-OFDM and IR-UWB interference. Our analysis is applicable to e.g. IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs), IEEE 802.16 wireless access systems (WiMAX), and 4th generation mobile communication systems. Furthermore, since the ECMA MB-OFDM standard is also based on the BICM-OFDM concept, our analysis can also be used to evaluate the impact of other UWB signals on ECMA MB-OFDM UWB systems.

Hardware Implementation of a Genetic Algorithm Based Canonical Singed Digit Multiplierless Fast Fourier Transform Processor for Multiband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Ultra Wideband Applications

Problem statement: Ultra Wide Band (UWB) technology has attracted many researchers' attention due to its advantages and its great potential for future applications. The physical layer standard of Multi-band Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) UWB system is defined by ECMA International. In this standard, the data sampling rate from the analog-to-digital converter to the physical layer is up to 528 M sample sec-1. Therefore, it is a challenge to realize the physical layer especially the components with high computational complexity in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) implementation. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) block which plays an important role in MB-OFDM system is one of these components. Furthermore, the execution time of this module is only 312.5 ns. Therefore, if employing the traditional approach, high power consumption and hardware cost of the processor will be needed to meet the strict specifications of the UWB system. The objective of this study was to design an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) FFT processor for this system. The specification was defined from the system analysis and literature research. Approach: Based on the algorithm and architecture analysis, a novel Genetic Algorithm (GA) based Canonical Signed Digit (CSD) Multiplier less 128-point FFT processor and its inverse (IFFT) for MB-OFDM UWB systems had been proposed. The proposed pipelined architecture was based on the modified Radix-22 algorithm that had same number of multipliers as that of the conventional Radix-22. However, the multiplication complexity and the ROM memory needed for storing twiddle factors coefficients could be eliminated by replacing the conventional complex multipliers with a newly proposed GA optimized CSD constant multipliers. The design had been coded in Verilog HDL and targeted Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA series. It was fully implemented and tested on real hardware using Virtex-II FG456 prototype board and logic analyzer. Results: From the synthesis reports, the proposed GA optimized CSD constant complex multiplier achieved 79 and 50% equivalent gates and latency efficiency when compared to the conventional complex multiplier. Conclusion: As a conclusion, we successfully implemented 128-points FFT/IFFT processor with the proposed architecture that can meet the requirement of MB-OFDM UWB system with higher throughput and less area compared to conventional architecture.

Space-Time-Frequency Code implementation in MB-OFDM UWB communications: Design criteria and performance

This paper proposes a general framework of space-time-frequency codes (STFCs) for multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) ultra-wide band (UWB) communications systems. A great similarity between the STFC MB-OFDM UWB systems and conventional wireless complex orthogonal space-time block code (CO STBC) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is discovered. This allows us to quantify the pairwise error probability (PEP) of the proposed system and derive the general decoding method for the implemented STFCs. Based on the theoretical analysis results of PEP, we can further quantify the diversity order and coding gain of MB-OFDM UWB systems, and derive the design criteria for STFCs, namely diversity gain criterion and coding gain criterion. The maximum achievable diversity order is found to be the product of the number of transmit antennas, the number of receive antennas, and the FFT size. We also show that all STFCs constructed based on the conventional CO STBCs can satisfy the diversity gain criterion. Various baseband simulation results are shown for the Alamouti code and a code of order 8. Simulation results indicate the significant improvement achieved in the proposed STFC MB-OFDM UWB systems, compared to the conventional MB-OFDM UWB ones.

A Study on Performance Enhancement of Packet Detection in MB-OFDM UWB Systems

This paper presents a high performance and hardware efficient packet detection structure, which employs a cross correlator for the M-sample time delayed correlation operation and a signal power calculator using the received input samples less than or equal to a zero-padded suffix of length M. We investigate the detailed characteristics of the proposed packet detector. In this paper, the performance of a class of packet detection algorithms in the ultra-wideband (UWB) channel environments is also studied. The best packet detection algorithm for the multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) UWB transmission is determined through analysis and extensive simulations. The results of analysis show that the proposed packet detection structure has advantages in the hardware complexity as well as performance when compared with the existing packet detection structures. In order to effectively conduct the packet detection before the automatic gain control (AGC) mode, we investigate the effects of both a frequency offset and the initial gain level of a variable gain amplifier (VGA) on the performance of the packet detection. We also suggest a VGA gain control technique to enhance the performance of packet detection.

Ultra wideband technologies coexistence in Nakagami-m fading channels

The wide spectrum of ultra wideband (UWB) communications makes it inevitable to consider strategies for avoiding and mitigating interference from narrowband wireless systems such as GPS, UMTS, and WLAN, or other UWB wireless technologies. In this paper, we provide a performance analysis of multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) UWB in the presence of binary phase-shift keying time-hopping (BPSK-TH) UWB or BPSK-DS UWB interfering transmissions under Nakagami-m fading. In the bit-error rate (BER) analysis, several UWB interferers are considered to affect the MB-OFDM signal. A Gaussian approximation is considered for the UWB interferers and used in the analysis of the BER performance of the MB-OFDM UWB system. The Nakagami-m distribution is applied to characterise the amplitude of the fading channels for both the reference signal and the interference signals. Furthermore, a waveforming technique is considered for mitigating the effect of interference and its efficiency is illustrated in terms of BER improvement. Numerical and simulation results are provided and compared for different coexistence scenarios.

Frequency Dependence of Fading Statistics for Ultrawideband Systems

The variation of channel fading and dispersion statistics between the ultrawideband (UWB) channel subbands is characterized experimentally. Within the FCC-allocated UWB frequency range (3.1-10.6 GHz), the multipath characteristics in various subbands are found to be highly dissimilar. It is demonstrated that the higher subbands suffer greater attenuation, and the rms delay spread varies significantly with the center frequency. The impact of this variation on multiband-OFDM UWB system performance is evaluated, and a large performance variation across the band is reported

On the PAR reduction of MB-OFDM ultra-wideband signals

The Peak to Average power Ratio (PAR) of a Multi-Band Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) signals can be substantially larger than that of single carrier or carrier-less ultra-wideband signals. In this letter, a novel PAR reduction scheme for the MB-OFDM UWB system based on spreading and interleaving is proposed. By spreading the coded bits over each subcarrier in corresponding band and interleaving the spread symbols across all bands, the PAR statistics of the MB-OFDM signals can be improved and the PAR is reduced obviously. In the PAR reduction scheme, there is no loss in transmission data rate or Bit Error Rate (BER) performance decreasing. Since the spreading and interleaving operation are implemented by unitary Hadamard sequences and used for an approach to provide the robustness of the UWB system to narrowband interference, there is no additional implementation burden. Simulation results show that the investigated scheme gives the PAR reduction of 3dB compared with that of the original MB-OFDM signals.