Single-carrier Transmission Research Articles

Low complexity and finer granularity quantization scheme for perturbation-based fiber nonlinearity compensation in coherent optical communication systems

In the efficient implementation of perturbation theory-based nonlinearity compensation method for reliable fiber-optic coherent communication systems, different quantization schemes have been proposed to reduce the required computational and implementation complexity. For example, the k-means clustering algorithm focused on reducing the number of perturbation coefficients to alleviate the burden of calculating the perturbation terms. In this paper, from the bit-level architectures of multipliers, we propose a multi-segment mixed-word-length quantization scheme that assigns different word lengths for the quantized perturbative coefficients to save computational resources, where Bayesian optimization is employed to derive the optimal hyperparameters involved in this scheme. The proposed scheme was evaluated by numerical simulations of single-channel and multi-channel optical fiber communication systems with dual-polarization 16-QAM modulation. The comprehensive numerical simulation results show that our proposed scheme demonstrates a complexity reduction of more than 65% without performance degradation compared with the traditional uniform quantization method with fixed-word-length, and was robust to the fiber length and baud-rate. We also carried out an experiment of single-carrier transmission over 18 × 100 km standard single-mode fiber with 20 Gbaud single-polarization 16-QAM signal. Similar to the numerical results, the hardware complexity can be reduced by 70.7% with negligible performance deterioration over the uniform quantization scheme. The proposed scheme shows great potential in real-world applications.

Unrepeatered transmission of single-carrier 800 Gb/s over 447.96 km with simplified third-order ROPA system

Abstract To achieve the longest distance of 800 Gb/s unrepeatered transmission, we use commercial 800 Gb/s transceivers with soft-decision FEC, optimized high-order Raman pumps, and enhanced bidirectional ROPA with third-order Raman pumping in this experiment to optimize system performance. Two types of G.654E fibers are also fully characterized and used as span fibers. The improvement of transmission distance is mainly due to the remote pump power for RGU can be increased by nearly 4 dB in G.654E fiber by the third-order Raman pumping. At last, a single 800 Gb/s channel is transmitted over 447.96 km with a span loss of 73.16 dB. As far as we know, this is the longest 800 Gb/s unrepeatered transmission distance ever reported.

Reduced-Complexity Intelligent Reflecting Surface Optimization for Single-Carrier Transmission in Frequency-Selective Fading Channel

Reduced-Complexity Intelligent Reflecting Surface Optimization for Single-Carrier Transmission in Frequency-Selective Fading Channel

Dual high-order QAM-modulated mm-wave signal transmission in the Q-band enabled by simple IM/DD architecture and bandpass delta-sigma modulation.

The intensity-modulation (IM)/direct-detection (DD) systems have been proven effective and low-cost due to their simple system architecture. However, the Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) of the IM/DD systems only reserves its driving signal intensity. Therefore, the IM/DD systems are generally unable to transmit vector signals and have a restricted spectrum efficiency and channel capacity. Similarly, the radio-over-fiber (RoF) transmission systems based on IM/DD are limited by their simple architecture and generally cannot transmit high-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals, which hinders the improvement of their spectrum efficiency. To address the challenges, we propose a novel, to the best of our knowledge, scheme to simultaneously transmit the dual independent high-order QAM-modulated millimeter-wave (mm-wave) signals in the RoF system with a simple IM/DD architecture, enabled by precoding-based optical carrier suppression (OCS) modulation and bandpass delta-sigma modulation (BP-DSM). The dual independent signals can carry different information, which increases channel capacity and improves spectrum efficiency and system flexibility. Based on our proposed scheme, we experimentally demonstrate the dual 512-QAM mm-wave signal transmission in the Q-band (33-50 GHz) under three different scenarios: 1) dual single-carrier (SC) signal transmission, 2) dual orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) signal transmission, and 3) hybrid SC and OFDM signal transmission. We achieve high-fidelity transmission of dual 512-QAM vector signals over a 5 km single-mode fiber (SMF) and a 1-m single-input single-output (SISO) wireless link operating in the Q-band, with the bit error rates (BERs) of all three scenarios below the hard decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) threshold of 3.8 × 10-3. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time dual high-order QAM-modulated mm-wave signal transmission has been achieved in a RoF system with a simple IM/DD architecture.

Analysis of Carrier Aggregation as a Diversity Technique for Improved Spectral Efficiency and Secrecy Performance in Mobile Communications

Carrier aggregation (CA) was introduced in mobile communication systems in response to the demand for higher network capacity. CA was conceived as a technique to achieve higher data rates by aggregating multiple blocks of spectrum from the same or different frequency bands. This work explores a different point of view, where CA is employed not as a way to increase capacity through using more bandwidth, but as a diversity technique in order to increase the spectral efficiency of the existing spectrum, and therefore, achieve higher capacity without needing additional spectrum. A mathematical model and set of closed-form expressions are provided, which can be used to characterise the performance of CA as a diversity technique (in terms of both ergodic capacity and secrecy capacity) and determine the impact of various relevant configuration parameters. The numerical results obtained by evaluating the mathematical expressions derived in this work are in line with our previous simulation studies and demonstrate that CA can be effectively exploited as a diversity technique to improve the capacity and performance of mobile communication systems compared to the case of single-carrier transmission over the same amount of bandwidth.

SC and OFDM hybrid coherent optical transmission scheme based on 1-bit bandpass delta-sigma modulation.

High-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) can effectively improve the capacity and spectral efficiency of coherent optical transmission systems. However, as the modulation order increases, the signal becomes less tolerant to noise and nonlinear effects during transmission, and the implementation cost also increases. We propose a single carrier (SC) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) hybrid coherent optical transmission scheme based on a 1-bit bandpass (BP) delta-sigma modulation (DSM). The driving I-channel and Q-channel signals for the optical in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) modulator carry SC-modulated and OFDM-modulated transmitter data, respectively. Optical quadrature-phase-shift-keying (QPSK) modulation is realized by the 1-bit DSM quantizer and I/Q modulator, which can effectively suppress quantization noise and reduce the complexity of digital signal processing (DSP) and the performance requirements of optoelectronic devices. In addition, the hybrid transmission of SC and OFDM can balance the advantages of both to meet the variable channel conditions and complex application scenarios. High-fidelity transmission of SC 512QAM and OFDM 512QAM hybrid signals, in the form of a 60 Gbaud optical QPSK signal, over 60 km single-mode fiber-28 (SMF-28) is verified by offline experiments, and the bit error rates (BERs) of both SC 512QAM and OFDM 512QAM are below the hard-decision forward-error correction (HD-FEC) threshold of 3.8e-3.

Integrated Sensing and Communication With Delay Alignment Modulation: Performance Analysis and Beamforming Optimization

Delay alignment modulation (DAM) has been recently proposed to enable manipulable channel delay spread for efficient single- or multi-carrier communications. In particular, with perfect delay alignment, inter-symbol interference (ISI) can be eliminated even with single-carrier (SC) transmission, without relying on sophisticated channel equalization. The key ideas of DAM are <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">delay pre-compensation</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">path-based beamforming</i> , so that all multi-path signal components may arrive at the receiver simultaneously and be superimposed constructively, rather than causing the detrimental ISI. Compared to the classic orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission, DAM-enabled SC communication has several appealing advantages, including low peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) and high tolerance for Doppler frequency shift, which renders DAM also appealing for radar sensing. Therefore, in this paper, DAM is investigated for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. We first study the output signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) for ISI-free SC communication and radar sensing, respectively, and then derive the closed-form expressions for DAM-based sensing in terms of the ambiguity function (AF) and integrated sidelobe ratio (ISR). Furthermore, we study the beamforming design problem for DAM-based ISAC to maximize the communication SNR while guaranteeing the sensing performance in terms of the sensing SNR and ISR. Finally, we provide performance comparison between DAM and OFDM for ISAC, and it is revealed that DAM signal may achieve better communication and sensing performance, thanks to its low PAPR, reduced guard interval overhead, as well as higher tolerance for Doppler frequency shift. Simulation results are provided to show the great potential of DAM for ISAC.

Channel Estimation and Multipath Diversity Reception for RIS-Empowered Broadband Wireless Systems Based on Cyclic-Prefixed Single-Carrier Transmission

In this paper, a cyclic-prefixed single-carrier (CPSC) transmission scheme with phase shift keying (PSK) signaling is presented for broadband wireless communications systems empowered by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). In the proposed CPSC-RIS, the RIS is configured according to the transmitted PSK symbols such that different cyclically delayed versions of the incident signal are created by the RIS to achieve multipath diversity. A practical and efficient channel estimator is developed for CPSC-RIS and the mean square error of the channel estimation is expressed in closed-form. We analyze the bit error rate (BER) performance of CPSC-RIS over frequency-selective Nakagami- <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">m</i> fading channels. An upper bound on the BER is derived by assuming maximum-likelihood detection. Furthermore, by applying the concept of index modulation (IM), we propose an extension of CPSC-RIS, termed CPSC-RIS-IM, which enhances the spectral efficiency. In addition to conventional constellation information of PSK symbols, CPSC-RIS-IM uses the full permutations of cyclic delays caused by the RIS to carry information. A sub-optimal receiver is designed for CPSC-RIS-IM to aim at low computational complexity. Our simulation results in terms of BER corroborate the performance analysis and the superiority of CPSC-RIS(-IM) over the conventional CPSC without an RIS and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with an RIS.

A 39 GHz spatial division multiplex MU-MIMO using 256 element hybrid AAS for IAB application

AbstractThis paper describes the design and implementation of a 39 GHz 256-element hybrid active phased array antenna system with 16 individual digital transceivers, and its wireless multi-user, multi-input, multi-output verification. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2021 51st European Microwave Conference and was published in its Proceedings [1]. Using the prototype device, a single carrier transmission test assuming a mobile backhaul link and a MU-MIMO transmission test using a zero-forced orthogonal multi-beam based on channel reciprocity assuming an access link was performed. As a result, an EIRP of 43 dBm and a data rate of 5.5 Gbps in 1 GHz bandwidth single carrier 128QAM operation and an estimated total throughput of 2.4 Gbps by 3GPP TS38.214 [2] in 100 MHz bandwidth OFDM 8 MU-MIMO operation were achieved, respectively. As far as the author knows, this is the first demonstration for integrated access and backhaul (IAB) application that uses the 39 GHz band.

Photonic-aided W-band dual-vector RF signal generation and detection enabled by bandpass delta-sigma modulation and heterodyne detection.

We propose a photonic-aided dual-vector radio-frequency (RF) signal generation and detection scheme enabled by bandpass delta-sigma modulation and heterodyne detection. With the aid of the bandpass delta-sigma modulation, our proposed scheme is transparent to the modulation format of the dual-vector RF signals and can support the generation, wireless transmission, and detection of both single-carrier (SC) and orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) vector RF signals with high-level quadrature-amplitude-modulation (QAM) modulation. With the aid of the heterodyne detection, our proposed scheme can support up to W-band (75-110 GHz) dual-vector RF signal generation and detection. For the validation of our proposed scheme, we experimentally demonstrate the simultaneous generation of a SC-64QAM signal at 94.5 GHz and a SC-128QAM signal at 93.5 GHz and their error-free high-fidelity transmission over a 20-km single-mode fiber 28 (SMF-28) and a 1-m single-input single-output (SISO) wireless link at the W-band. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that delta-sigma modulation has been introduced into a W-band photonic-aided fiber-wireless integration system to achieve flexible and high-fidelity dual-vector RF signal generation and detection.

Multi-carrier based positional modulation design with discrete phase values for metasurface elements

Positional modulation (PM) as an extension of directional modulation (DM) can transmit information to the desired position(s) with known constellation mappings, but with scrambled ones in other areas. In this paper, a multi-carrier based PM design is proposed with practical discrete phase values for the employed reconfigurable metasurface, where multiple signals can be transmitted to the desired position(s) at multiple frequencies over a single channel simultaneously, and the traditional narrowband single-carrier transmission can be considered as a special case. Design examples for both the single-carrier and multi-carrier cases are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed design.

Equalization Techniques for SC-FDMA Systems Under Radio Imbalances at Both Transmitter and Receiver

Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is a multi-carrier, multiple access (MA) technique, which is widely adopted in contemporary wireless standards. Single carrier-frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) is a modified version of OFDMA which employs single carrier transmission by pre-coding the data symbols using discrete Fourier transform (DFT). However, these systems are highly vulnerable to the adverse effects arising in the channel, carrier frequency offset (CFO) and in-phase/quadrature phase (I/Q) imbalances. In the uplink communication scenario, the signal received at base station is the superposition of signals from all the active users. Even though the adverse effects caused by the communication channel and CFOs are addressed in the related literature extensively, the effect of I/Q-imbalances at the transmitter and the receiver is rarely considered. The effect of I/Q-imbalances will make the equalization process at the base station more complex. It is because the overall effective channel with radio impairments must be included in the system modelling. Hence the receiver processing should contain the equalization for effect of the channel, CFOs and I/Q imbalances. In this paper, we propose a novel technique based on the oblique projection (OP) technique for equalizing the channel, radio imbalances and synchronization errors caused by both transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) for OFDMA/SC-FDMA uplink systems. We also propose an equalization technique with reduced computational complexity to overcome the adverse effects caused by I/Q imbalances and CFOs. The results of the simulation studies illustrate that the proposed techniques can compensate all the above-mentioned effects and they offer very good performance under both TX and RX I/Q imbalances.

QR Decomposition-Based Cyclic Prefixed Single-Carrier Transmissions for Cooperative Communications: Concepts and Research Landscape

As an alternative transmission scheme to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), cyclic prefixed single-carrier (CP-SC) transmissions have been widely adopted to overcome the shortcomings of OFDM. How to exploit the achievable full diversity in frequency selective fading channels is the key question in applying CP-SC-based transmissions. Thus, in this tutorial, we focus on recent research in the areas related to CP-SC transmissions for cooperative wireless systems. After explaining the basic concept and operation of CP-SC transmissions, we introduce various types of diversity that are achievable by CP-SC transmissions. To achieve these types of diversity, it is necessary to employ QR decomposition (QRD)-M-based data detection in the receiver. To verify the benefits of CP-SC transmissions in terms of diversity gain, we exemplify various wireless systems for relaying, spectrum sharing, physical layer security, and distributed cyclic delay diversity, and provide link-level simulations. Especially, as alternative metrics of reliability, which is one of the key features of 5G and beyond 5G (B5G) systems, we evaluate the average symbol error rate and outage probability. Finally, we discuss potential research directions involving CP-SC transmissions in emerging wireless communication systems.

Anchor-Aided Channel Estimation for RIS-Assisted Multiuser Broadband Communications

Due to the passive nature of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and a large number of users, it is very challenging to estimate the cascaded base station (BS)-RIS-user channel directly, especially for multiuser broadband communication systems. In this letter, we propose a novel two-phase method to estimate multiuser broadband cascaded channels with the assistance of two anchor nodes. Specifically, in the first phase, the cascaded channel from the two anchors to the BS and that between two anchors are estimated to acquire the BS-RIS channel state information (CSI) with sign ambiguities. It is accomplished based on cyclic-prefixed single-carrier transmission and phase configuration at the RIS, which creates multiple cyclic delayed versions of transmitted signals for isolating all broadband channel taps. In the second phase, the RIS-user channel and subsequently the cascaded BS-RIS-user channel are estimated in the frequency domain using the knowledge of the partial BS-RIS CSI. Simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed scheme over the state-of-the-art methods in terms of estimation overhead, normalized mean-squared error and bit error rate.

Single-carrier transmission scheme for extracting characteristic parameters of 32-Point 6PolSK-QPSK

Six polarization-shift keying quadrature phase shift keying (6PolSK-QPSK) signal modulation format is formed by different representations of QPSK. A variety of satisfactory single-carrier transmission schemes have been implemented in 24-Point 6PolSK-QPSK. As an extension of 24-Point 6PolSK-QPSK, it has been confirmed that 32-Point 6PolSK-QPSK has higher spectral efficiency (SE). Based on the method of extracting 24-Point 6PolSK-QPSK feature parameters, a 32-Point 6PolSK-QPSK signal transmission scheme is proposed and verified in 100 km single-mode fiber (SMF) with an aggregate transmission rate of 108-Gbps. Simulation results show that the original data could be recovered effectively with the proposed scheme, and the system bit error ratio (BER) could meet the requirement of the forward error correction (FEC) threshold of 3.8e − 3.

STBC Recognition for OFDM Transmissions: Channel Decoder Aided Algorithm

Recently, the process of space-time block coding (STBC) recognition has found applications in a wide range of wireless transmissions. Numerous investigations on this topic have been developed for single-carrier transmissions and a few studies have been introduced for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmissions. The previous research work in the literature has focused on exploiting the space-time redundancy to blindly estimate the type of STBC signal. In this work, we propose a new approach to design a STBC recognizer for OFDM transmissions by taking benefits from the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">a posteriori</i> probabilities provided by a channel decoder. The mathematical treatments have shown that the exact maximum-likelihood (ML) solution to this problem is computationally demanding in the absence of a closed form. Therefore, we settle for the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm as a low-complexity procedure to perform STBC recognition. In addition, we develop a channel estimation algorithm to be integrated into the proposed recognition algorithm. Simulation results are presented to confirm the theoretical analysis, with exhibiting superior recognition performance over the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Successive Interference Cancellation on Frequency-Selective Channels With Mode-Dependent Gain

In ultra-long-haul optical communication systems, polarization-dependent gain from single-mode semiconductor optical amplifiers or mode-dependent gain from multi-mode erbium-doped fiber amplifiers causes a channel’s achievable information rate (AIR) using linear minimum-mean-square error (MMSE) detection to become substantially lower than the capacity of optimal maximum likelihood detection owing to loss of orthogonality between modes. However, such capacity loss can be mitigated using techniques that retain reasonable complexity, such as successive interference cancellation (SIC). In wireless systems, multicarrier transmission with many subcarriers transforms the frequency-selective channel into a set of uncoupled memoryless subchannels, and it is possible to obtain good performance using SIC on each subchannel independently. Multicarrier transmission in optical fibers, however, is susceptible to performance loss caused by Kerr nonlinearity. Therefore, we study methods for applying SIC on frequency-selective optical fiber channels using single-carrier transmission. We compare the theoretical performance of MMSE and SIC equalizers on frequency-selective optical fiber channels operating at 64 Gbaud with transmission distances up to 15,000 km and evaluate the penalties of SIC implementation. We consider single-mode fiber links with random artificial polarization-mode dispersion inserted along the link to enhance frequency diversity, as well as multi-core fiber links supporting 14 spatial and polarization modes. We show that SIC can increase outage capacity by 19%, but the AIR increase is reduced by almost half if error correction coding is not performed across modes. We confirm that SIC can adapt to fast channel perturbations with only a 3% decrease in AIR.

Adaptation of Code-Domain NOMA to SC-FDE Based Overloaded mmWave Hybrid Massive MIMO

In this letter, we provide a practical framework to resolve whether code-domain NOMA (CD-NOMA) is beneficial when integrated with massive MIMO systems. In order to realize this integration, first, we develop a novel code-beamspace wideband signal model for uplink CD-NOMA in mmWave hybrid massive MIMO systems employing single-carrier (SC) transmission. Then, we apply a state-of-the-art SC frequency domain equalization (SC-FDE) based iterative receiver where the number of radio frequency (RF) chains is limited. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed architecture in overloaded scenarios. Furthermore, we show that CD-NOMA can enhance the performance of mmWave hybrid beamforming based massive MIMO systems by effectively decreasing the correlation between closely separated user channels in joint code-beamspace.

Training Deep Filters for Physical-Layer Frame Synchronization

In this paper we demonstrate the application of Fully Convolutional Neural Network (FCN) for Frame Synchronization (FS) in bursty single carrier transmissions, commonly used in wireless sensor networks and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Our approach shows greatly improved performance compared to noncoherent correlation-based methods under carrier phase and frequency offsets, especially for shorter preambles. Using a fully convolutional architecture allows the training of a deep filter, which we believe is more suited to signal processing tasks than more commonly used deep learning architectures with fully connected layers. In terms of deployment within a wider communications system, it could be treated similarly to a typical signal processing filter, which means it can be deployed to inputs of arbitrary length. Additionally, because the proposed model is composed only of convolutional layers, the entire model benefits from the weight sharing property of convolutional filters, and results in a greatly reduced memory footprint compared to that of similar models containing fully connected layers.

Hardware-efficient blind frequency offset estimation for digital subcarrier multiplexing signals.

Since the frequency offset estimation (FOE) must be implemented before the subcarrier de-multiplexing and chromatic dispersion compensation (CDC) for digital subcarrier multiplexing (DSM) signals, traditional FOE algorithms for single carrier transmission is no longer suitable. Here, we propose a hardware-efficient blind FOE solution for the DSM signals by monitoring spectral dips in the frequency domain. With the use of a smoothing filter, the estimation accuracy of FOE can be significantly increased. Moreover, we identify that the proposed FOE method is robust to various transmission impairments, including amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise, optical filtering, and fiber nonlinearity. The effective function of the proposed FOE method is numerically and experimentally verified under scenarios of both back-to-back (B2B) and the 2560 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) transmission, leading to a FOE error less than 100 MHz with a FFT size of 1024.