Advanced receivers for space-time block-coded single-carrier transmissions over frequency-selective fading channels

• Main Author: Wavegedara, Kapila Chandika B.
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2008
• Subjects: Wireless communications; Channel equalization; Space-time coding; Turbo detection
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/620

In recent years, space-time block coding (STBC) has emerged as an effective transmit-diversity technique to combat the detrimental effects of channel fading. In addition to STBC, high-order modulation schemes will be used in future wireless communication systems aiming to provide ubiquitous-broadband wireless access. Hence, advanced receiver schemes are necessary to achieve high performance. In this thesis, advanced and computationally-efficient receiver schemes are investigated and developed for single-carrier space-time (ST) block-coded transmissions over frequency-selective fading (FSF) channels. First, we develop an MMSE-based turbo equalization scheme for Alamouti ST block-coded systems. A semi-analytical method to estimate the bit error rate (BER) is devised. Our results show that the proposed turbo equalization scheme offers significant performance improvements over one-pass equalization. Second, we analyze the convergence behavior of the proposed turbo equalization scheme for Alamouti ST block-coded systems using the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT)-band chart technique. Third, burst-wise (BW)-STBC is applied for uplink transmission over FSF channels in block-spread-CDMA systems with multiuser interference-free reception. The performances of different decision feedback sequence estimation (DFSE) schemes are investigated. A new scheme combining frequency-domain (FD) linear equalization and modified unwhitened-DFSE is proposed. The proposed scheme is very promising as the error-floor behavior observed in the existing unwhitened DFSE schemes is eliminated. Fourth, we develop a FD-MMSE-based turbo equalization scheme for the downlink of ST block-coded CDMA systems. We adopt BW-STBC instead of Alamouti symbol-wise (SW)-STBC considered for WCDMA systems and demonstrate its superior performance in FSF channels. Block spreading is shown to be more desirable than conventional spreading to improve performance using turbo equalization. We also devise approximate implementations (AprxImpls) that offer better trade-offs between performance and complexity. Semi-analytical upper bounds on the BER are derived. Fifth, turbo multicode detection is investigated for ST block-coded downlink transmission in DS-CDMA systems. We propose symbol-by-symbol and chip-by-chip FD-MMSE-based multicode detectors. An iterative channel estimation scheme is also proposed. The proposed turbo multicode detection scheme offers significant performance improvements compared with non-iterative multicode detection. Finally, the impact of channel estimation errors on the performance of MMSE-based turbo equalization in ST block-coded CDMA systems is investigated.