POLITECNICO DI TORINO

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS

College of Electronic Engineering, Telecommunications and Physics (ETF)

Master of Science in Telecommunication Engineering

Masters Degree Thesis

Advanced receivers for LTE/LTE-A systems

with interference cancellation capabilities

Supervisor
Prof. Marina Mondin
Ing. Bruno Melis
Candidate
Federico Pacifici

March 2014

INDEX
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: From LTE to LTE-Advanced - PHY Overview

1.1 Main concepts

1.2 Multi antenna techniques

1.3 Transmission modes and transmission schemes

10

1.4 Modulation and multiple access technique

13

1.5 Downlink signals

14

1.6 Downlink multi-antenna transmission

17

1.6.1 Layer mapping

18

1.6.2 Transmit diversity

19

1.7 User Equipment categories

20

1.8 A limiting factor of spectrum efficiency

22

1.9 Inter cell Interference modeling: DIP values

23

1.10 Channel profiles

25

CHAPTER 2: ACTIVITIES IN 3GPP ON ADVANCED RECEIVERS

27

2.1 feICIC

28

2.2 CRS-IM

29

2.3 NAICS

30

2.3.1 MMSE

31

2.3.2 MMSE-IRC

31

2.3.3 E-MMSE-IRC

33

2.3.4

34

Symbol level SIC

2.3.5

Bit level hard SIC

35

2.3.6

Soft Turbo SIC

36

2.3.7

ML receiver

36

2.3.8

R-ML

38

CHAPTER 3: MMSE-IRC RECEIVER IN REAL SCENARIOS

3.1 Overview

40

3.1 General Architecture of the MIMO OFDMA simulator

41

3.1.1 Data region Mapping/Demapping

43

3.1.2 Subcarrier Mapping/Demapping

45

3.1.3 IFFT/FFT calculation and cyclic prefix insertion/removal

46

3.1.4 Pilots compensation

47

3.1.5 Channel Estimation

48

3.1.6 Space-time Encoder/Decoder

50

3.2 Modeling MMSE-IRC

51

3.2.1 MMSE-IRC for SFBC transmit diversity

51

3.2.2 Building the MMSE-IRC receiver

58

3.3 Performance of MMSE-IRC receiver

61

3.3.1 Interfering signal modeled as Gaussian noise

61

3.3.2 Real Interference signal Colliding pilot case

63

3.3.3 Real Interference signal No Colliding pilot case

67

CHAPTER 4: SUCCESSIVE INTERFERENCE CANCELLATION RECEIVERS

39

69

4.1 Introduction and comparison

69

4.2 SLIC implementation

71

4.3 BLIC implementation

76

4.4 SLIC and BLIC performance analysis

79

CONCLUSION

85

BIBLIOGRAPHY

86

INTRODUCTION
The Master Thesis was written after an internship period at Telecom Italia S.p.A
(Wireless Access Innovation group). The objective of this Master Thesis is analyzing
and simulating advanced receiver schemes with interference rejection capabilities that
represent one of the next innovative step in the physical layer of LTE/LTE-A systems
providing higher throughput especially at the cell edge. Several receiver schemes are
analyzed and some of them are simulated to obtain performance results in terms of
Throughput and Raw BER. The selected receivers are chosen considering the trade-off
between complexity and expected gains.
A low complexity version of the MMSE-IRC receiver has been implemented in a link
level simulator specific for the LTE system, so performance results have been obtained
showing interesting features and using a low complexity technique for the estimation
of the interference covariance matrix. MMSE-IRC has been implemented as an
independent block to simplify the development of innovative receivers that use it as
elementary building block. The MMSE-IRC receiver outperforms the classical detection
schemes that treat the inter-cell interference as Gaussian noise, especially in case of
no colliding pilots between the serving and interfering cells. MMSE-IRC is also a
fundamental block of successive interference cancellation receivers operating at
symbol level (SLIC, Symbol Level Interference Cancellation) and bit level (BLIC, Bit Level
Interference Cancellation). In a second step of the analysis SLIC and BLIC receivers have
been implemented in a simplified link level simulator based on MATLAB and the
simulated performances are compared with the other considered receivers.

The

analysis showed that, even if the SLIC receiver complexity is higher than MMSE-IRC
one, it provides some gain especially in the low SINR region, while for higher SINR, the
successive interference cancellation functionality must be switched off to avoid the
error propagation effect. BLIC is more powerful, but its complexity is very high because
it performs the channel decoding also for the interfering signals. The Master Thesis is
structured into four chapters. In the first chapter, a Physical Layer overview of LTE and
LTE-Advanced systems is provided, focusing on the aspects that have been considered

for the receiver implementations. Chapter two gives an overview of the activity carried
out by 3GPP on advanced receivers. The third chapter shows the algorithm and the
implementation of the MMSE-IRC receiver in the LTE link level simulator, discussing
also the performance results. The last chapter describes the SLIC and BLIC receivers,
showing simulation performance in terms of throughput and Raw BER.

CHAPTER 1: From LTE to LTE-Advanced - PHY Overview

1.1 Main concepts
Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a mobile telecommunication system designed to drive
the evolution from 3G to 4G wireless communication technologies. These
developments include all the newest techniques that can provide new services to
many users in complex scenarios ensuring the growing users expectation. Many
technical aspects are standardized and there are a lot of research groups and
companies that invest in these fields, moreover the evolution tracking and the
dominant standards are the result of many partnerships inside 3GPP. In the last years,
there was a strong evolution in terms of competition between mobile operators, new
frequencies allocation, new advanced technologies, creating an innovative and
revolutionary market.
In this context, the natural development of mobile communication was driven by the
necessity to enable internet connectivity for mobile users, creating the mobile
broadband. This is the major driver for the evolution of LTE that provide internet
protocol services. Packet switched services and IP are guidelines for a radio interface
that support new design parameters such as: high data rate (close to Gbit/s), low
latency and high capacity. Note that, from the mobile system operator perspective, it
is not only important the peak data rate to end users, but also the total data rate that
can be provided on average from each deployed base station and per hertz of licensed
spectrum, so the spectral efficiency. Another important constrain that has to be
satisfied is the Quality of Service for the end users.
All of these design parameters influenced the development of LTE, moreover there is
an increasing demand for more spectrum resources, so innovative mobile systems
need to operate in different frequency bands with spectrum allocation of different size
and fragmentation.
One main target for the evolution of mobile communication is to provide the
possibility for higher user data rates compared to what is achievable with 3G

standards. Another important target is to provide higher data rates over the entire cell
area, including users at the cell edge. Theoretically, the maximum rate is limited by the
channel capacity that depends on the channel bandwidth and on the signal to noise
ratio, in presence of AWGN noise. This is a noise limited scenario, in which, the data
rates are always limited by the available received power or by the received signal
power to noise power ratio. When the bandwidth utilization is low, so the data rate is
lower than the available bandwidth, increasing the data rate requires a higher received
power, so an increase in the available bandwidth does not substantially impact what
received signal power is required for a certain data rate. On the other hand, in the case
of high bandwidth utilization, when the data rates is equal or higher than the available
bandwidth, an increase of data rate requires a much larger increase in the received
signal power, so an increase in the bandwidth will reduce the received signal power
required for a certain data rate. In conclusion, the transmission bandwidth should at
least be of the same order as the data rates to be provided.
Fixing a transmit power, to increase the received one, it is possible reduce the
attenuations, decreasing the distance, planning small cells and increasing the number
of cells. At the receiver side, another useful technique to provide high data rates is
using additional antennas, known as receive antenna diversity. Even at transmit side it
is possible to use multiple antennas, so combining signals received at the different
antennas the signal to noise ratio can be increased in proportion to the number of
antennas, allowing higher data rates. Multiple transmit or receive antennas techniques
are efficient up to a certain level beyond which there is only a marginal increase in the
data rates. This limit can be avoided using multiple antennas at both the transmitter
and the receiver side, using the spatial multiplexing or MIMO. There are also other
techniques, for examples focusing the total transmit power in the direction of the
receiver or reducing the noise power density improving the receiver design.
In the previous cases, the AWGN noise is the main negative contribution, but in real
scenarios, especially in mobile communication fields, the interference from
transmissions in neighboring cells, called inter cell interference, is the dominant source
of radio link impairment that usually occurs with a high traffic load. In addition to inter

cell interference, there could be another kind of interference, called intra cell
interference in which the useful signal is interfered by other signals within the current
cell. In this case, the maximum data rate that can be achieved in a given bandwidth is
limited by the SINR (Signal power to Interference and Noise Ratio).
One important difference between interference and noise is that interference, in
contrast to noise, typically has a certain structure which makes it, at least to some
extent, predictable and thus possible to further suppress or even remove completely.
More advanced topics about interference cancellation will be addressed carefully in
the next chapters, emphasizing some aspects that are the main job of this Master
Thesis, focusing on the implementations and performances of advanced receivers able
to cancel interferences in various scenarios.
From the operator point of view, bandwidth is a scarce and expensive resource, so
telecom operator would like to provide very high data rates within a limited
bandwidth. One way to increase the data rate is to use higher order modulations. In
3G systems (i.e. WCDMA) is used the QPSK modulation, nowadays high order
modulations such as 16QAM or 64QAM are used in HSPA to improve the bandwidth
utilization, providing higher data rates within a given bandwidth at the cost of reduced
robustness to noise and interference. Higher order modulation are normally combined
with channel coding giving more efficiency, paying attention that an additional channel
coding applied by using a higher order modulation scheme such as 16QAM may lead to
an overall gain in power efficiency compared to the use of QPSK. Setting a SINR there is
an optimal choice of modulation and channel coding to obtain the highest bandwidth
utilization.
Wider band transmissions are subjected to frequency channel selectivity that corrupt
the frequency domain structure of the signal, leading to higher error rates for a given
SINR. It is necessary to design a transmission scheme that avoids frequency channel
selectivity with low complexity. This goal can be reached by OFDM. This scheme
provides a lot of other benefits such as robustness against Intersymbol Interference
(ISI) through cyclic prefix insertion, IFFT/FFT digital processing, user multiplexing, multi
access etc.

Using an OFDM scheme, it is possible to estimate the frequency-domain channel taps

directly inserting known reference symbols or pilot symbols at regular intervals within
the OFDM time-frequency grid. Knowing the reference symbols, the receiver can
estimate the channel coefficients around the location of the reference symbols. The
reference symbols are mapped in time and frequency domain in a grid with a high
density to combat high frequency and time selectivity. In the next chapters an
advanced channel estimation algorithm will be explained.

1.2 Multi antenna techniques

Transmission with multiple transmit and receive antennas (MIMO) is supported in the
downlink with two or four transmit antennas and two or four receive antennas, which
allow for multi-layer transmissions with up to four layers. Both Single User MIMO (SUMIMO) and Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) are supported in the 3GPP specifications. In
the case of SU-MIMO, the transmission resources over the different antennas are
allocated to one user only, while in case of MU-MIMO the transmission resources are
allocated to different users. The SU-MIMO is then used in order to increase the user
peak data rate (or coverage), while MU-MIMO is used to increase the average data
rate per sector.
In particular the following multi-antenna transmission techniques are supported in the
LTE Release 8 downlink standard: Transmit Diversity (SFBC), Spatial Multiplexing with a
single use (SU-MIMO), Spatial Multiplexing with two users (MU-MIMO), CDD
(superimposed to open loop spatial multiplexing), Linear Precoding (both for single
layer or multiple layer transmission), single layer Beamforming.
Transmit diversity is based on the so called Space-Frequency Block Coding (SFBC),
complemented with Frequency Shift Transmit Diversity (FSTD) in case of four transmit
antennas (MIMO 4 x n). Transmit diversity is used by common downlink control
channels to provide additional diversity, as for these channels dynamic scheduling and
H-ARQ are not applicable. However, transmit diversity is also applied to user-data

transmission, in particular for cell edge users that experience low Signal to
Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) values.
In case of spatial multiplexing, up to four antennas at both the transmitter (base
station) and the receiver (terminal) side are used to provide simultaneous transmission
of multiple parallel data streams, also known as layers, over a single radio link, thereby
significantly increasing the peak data rates that can be provided over the radio link. As
an example, with four base-station transmit antennas, and a corresponding set of (at
least) four receive antennas at the terminal side, up to four layers can be transmitted
in parallel over the same radio link, effectively quadrupling the peak data rate with
respect to a single antenna system (i.e. SISO).

1.3 Transmission modes and transmission schemes

In LTE Release 8 and LTE Release 10 (i.e. LTE Advanced), nine transmission modes are
defined and two different transmission schemes are allowed in each transmission
mode. The reference transmission scheme is what is intended for the transmission
mode and the other is for fallback operation.
In 3GPP specifications the term antenna port is often used instead of antenna since, by
means of antenna virtualization, two/multiple physical antennas can transmit the
same information and hence make one antenna port. An antenna port is defined by its
associated Reference Signal (RS) pattern. The following antenna ports are defined in
Release 10:

Cell specific RS (antenna ports 0,1,2,3);

Multicast/Broadcast over Single Frequency Network (MBSFN) RS (antenna

ports 4);

10

UE-specific RS for single layer beamforming (antenna ports 5);

Positioning RS (antenna ports 6);

UE-specific RS for multi-layer beamforming (antenna port 7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14)

Channel state Information RS (CSI-RS) (antenna port 15,16,17,18,19,20,21,21);

Table 1 summarizes the transmissions schemes corresponding to each transmission

mode.

Downlink

Reference Transmission Scheme

Fallback

Transmission

Transmission

Mode

Scheme

Mode 1

Single antenna port

Mode 2

Notes

LTE Rel.8

Transmit diversity

Single antenna
port
Transmit diversity

Mode 3

Open-loop spatial multiplexing

Transmit diversity

LTE Rel.8

Mode 4

Closed-loop spatial multiplexing

Transmit diversity

LTE Rel.8

Mode 5

Multi-user MIMO

Transmit diversity

LTE Rel.8

Mode 6

Closed-loop rank=1 precoding

Transmit diversity

LTE Rel.8

Mode 7

Single-antenna port; port 5

LTE Rel.8

Mode 8

Dual layer transmission or single layer

Transmit diversity
or single-antenna
port
Transmit diversity

Mode 9

Up to 8 layer transmission

Transmit diversity

LTE Rel.10

LTE Rel.8

LTE Rel.9

Table 1: Downlink Transmission Mode

Among the transmission modes defined in the 3GPP standard, Transmit Diversity
(Mode 2) and Open Loop Spatial Multiplexing (Mode 3) are supported in the first
equipment and terminal implementations and thus are of importance for the initial
roll-out of the LTE network. Switching between these two modes is decided by the
network as a function of the channel conditions, which is known to the eNode B
through the channel state information reported by the UE (CQI and RI). The accuracy
of RI reporting, which indicates the estimated number of simultaneous layers that can
be received by the UE, is a critical information for the optimal usage of TxD and SM in a
real LTE network.

11

This figure shows how is convenient to switch in a transmit diversity mode when SINR
is low.

Figure 1: Transmit Diversity and Spatial Multiplexing modes

The LTE physical layer offers data transport services to higher layers. The access to
these services is through the use of a transport channel via the MAC sub-layer. The
physical layer is designed to perform the following functions:

Error detection through CRC and indication to higher layers

FEC encoding/decoding of the transport channel

Rate matching

Hybrid ARQ (with soft-combining at the receiver)

Power weighting of physical channels

Modulation and demodulation of physical channels

Mapping onto physical channels

Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna processing

RF processing

Figura 2: LTE Physical Layer

12

1.4 Modulation and multiple access technique

The LTE radio interface adopts the S-OFDMA (Scalable OFDMA) as modulation and
multiple access technique with fixed subcarrier spacing f equal to 15 KHz. The total
number of subcarriers (i.e. the FFT size NFFT) is proportional to the channel
bandwidth. For example, in case of a channel bandwidth BW=10 MHz the FFT size is
1024. In this case the number of subcarriers used for transmission (e.g. data, pilots or
control) is equal to 600, while the remaining subcarriers are left unused, for the DC
subcarrier and for the guard subcarriers positioned at the edges of the transmission
spectrum. Table 2 summarizes the LTE numerology for different channel bandwidths.

Table 2: LTE numerology

An important characteristic of the LTE radio interface is that the frame duration and
Transmission Time Interval (TTI) are harmonized with those of UMTS/HSDPA system. In
particular the frame duration is equal to 10 ms while the subframe period, which
corresponds to the Transmission Time Interval (TTI), is equal to 1 ms (compared to the
2 ms of HSPA). Each subframe is divided in two slots, where each slot has a duration of
0.5 ms. Also the sampling frequency of the baseband (BB) signals are harmonized: for
UMTS/HSPA the baseband signal is sampled at 3.84 MHz, while for LTE the baseband
sampling frequency is equal to m/n3.84 MHz, where m and n are integer factors that

13

depend on the LTE channel bandwidth. These features reduce the complexity and the
cost of dual mode terminals that will support both radio interfaces.

1.5 Downlink signals

A downlink signal corresponds to a set of resource elements used by the physical layer
but does not carry information originating from higher layers.
The following downlink physical signals are defined in the standard: Reference signal
and Synchronization signal.
Three types of downlink reference signals (RS) are defined: Cell-specific reference
signals (CRS), MBSFN reference signals, associated with MBSFN transmission, UEspecific reference signals.
The cell specific downlink reference signals (CRS) consist of known reference symbols
inserted in the first and third last OFDM symbol of each slot in the case of Normal CP.

Figure 3: Pilot pattern for a SISO system

There is one reference signal transmitted per downlink antenna port. The number of
downlink antenna ports P equals 1, 2, or 4. The RS of different antenna ports are
orthogonal among each other because resource elements used for RS transmission of
one antenna port are not used for any transmission by the other antennas (i.e. are set
to zero power for the other antennas).

14

Figure 3, Figure 4 and Figure 5, respectively show, the pilot pattern for a SISO case
when a normal or an Extended prefix cyclic is used, the CRS signals for two transmit
antennas (MIMO 2x2) and finally CRS signals for four transmit antenna (MIMO 4x4).
The cell specific RS sequence is a PN (pseudo random) sequence defined by a length-31
Gold sequence. The pseudo-random sequence generator is initialised with a value that
depends on the cell identity (cell-ID) so that different PN sequences are associated to
different cells. In this way the RSs of different cells have low values of cross-correlation
and thus the interference from neighboring cells can be reduced by proper averaging
on frequency adjacent reference symbols received at the UE.

Figure 4: MIMO 2x2 CRS pattern

Frequency hopping (FH) can be applied to the cell-specific reference signals. The
frequency hopping pattern has a period of one frame (10 ms). Each frequency hopping
pattern corresponds to one cell identity group.
The LTE standard foresees also UE-specific reference signals, also denoted in the
technical documents as DeModulation Reference Signals (DM-RS). The DM-RSs are
introduced for the support of beamforming techniques. The eNode B can semistatically configure a UE to use the dedicated reference signal as the phase reference
for data demodulation of a single codeword.
DL control signalling is located in the first n OFDM symbols (n 3) of a subframe and
consists of:

Number n of control OFDM symbols per subframe (PCFICH);

15

Transport format, resource allocation and hybrid-ARQ information (PDCCH);

Uplink scheduling grant (PDCCH)

ACK/NACK in response to uplink transmission (PHICH)

Note that there is not mixing of control signaling and shared data in an OFDM symbol.
Figure 6 shows the mapping between Control and Data symbols.

Figure 5: MIMO 4x4 CRS pattern

Control channels are formed by aggregation of control channel elements (CCE), each
control channel element consisting of a set of resource elements. The modulation used
for all control channels is QPSK.

16

Multiple physical downlink control channels are supported and a UE monitors a set of
control channels.

Figure 6: Control and Data REs

1.6 Downlink multi-antenna transmission

Spatial multiplexing (SM) of multiple symbol streams to a single UE using the same
time frequency resources, also referred to as Single-User MIMO (SU-MIMO) is
supported in the LTE standard. Spatial multiplexing of multiple symbol streams to
different UEs using the same time frequency resources, also referred to as MU-MIMO,
is also supported. In general SU-MIMO is beneficial for increasing user throughput or
coverage, whilst MU-MIMO is exploited for increasing the aggregate cell throughput.
In addition to SU-MIMO and MU-MIMO, the following spatial processing techniques
are also supported in the LTE Release 8 standard: Codebook based precoding, Transmit
antenna diversity based on SFBC (Space-Frequency Block Coding), Single layer
Beamforming and Cyclic Delay Diversity (CDD).
In the following a short description of these multi-antenna transmission techniques is
provided.

17

1.6.1 Layer mapping

Multi-antenna transmission with 2 and 4 transmit antennas is supported. The

maximum number of codeword is two, irrespective to the number of antennas, with
fixed mapping of codewords to layers. In the MIMO terminology one codeword
represents one data stream that is independently encoded and modulated under the
control of the AMC (Adaptive Modulation and Coding) procedure.
The mapping of the codewords to the layers depends on the rank of the channel and is
performed by a specific block denoted as layer mapping.
The layer mapping operation is depicted in Figure 7, where CW1 and CW2 are the first
and the second codeword respectively and the layer mapping block is represented by
the dotted box in blue colour. The output of the layer mapping operation (e.g. the
layers) is provided to the block that performs the precoding.

Figure7: Layer mapping for two transmit antennas

The Figure 8 shows the layer mapping operation for the case of four transmit
antennas.

Figure 8: Layer mapping for four transmit antennas

18

1.6.2 Transmit diversity

Transmit antenna diversity (TxD) is designed to improve transmission reliability and

coverage and is typically used for cell edge users that experience low values of SINR
and for which it is not advantageous the use of spatial multiplexing.
The LTE standard includes two different techniques based on SFBC (Space Frequency
Block Coding) for the case of two and four transmit antennas respectively: SFBC for 2Tx antennas, SFBC combined with FSTD for 4-Tx antennas.
In case of two transmit antennas the SFBC technique is basically the Alamouti code
applied in the frequency domain over two adjacent OFDM subcarriers. The Figure 9
shows the principle of SFBC encoding where S1 and S2 are the modulated symbols
coming from the layer mapping block. It must be noted that only one codeword is
transmitted when the TxD technique is used.

Figure 9: SFBC technique for two transmit antennas

An important feature of the Alamouti code is that only simple linear operations are
needed at the receiver for decoding.
In case of four transmit antennas the LTE standard adopts a combination of the
Alamouti code and the Frequency Switching Transmit Diversity (FSTD) technique. The
Figure 10 shows the principle of SFBC+FSTD encoding where S1,,S4 are the
modulated symbols coming from the layer mapping block. Notice that also in this case
only one codeword is transmitted.
Basically the SFBC + FSTD technique consists in the application of the Alamouti code
over pair of antennas.

19

Figure 10: SFBC+FSTF technique for four transmit antennas

The Alamouti code is applied over the antennas 1 and 3 for symbols S1 and S2, while
for symbols S3 and S4 the code is applied over the antennas 2 and 4. The antenna
pairing (1,3) and (2,4) is done in order to balance the different pilot density that is
lower for antenna 3 and antenna 4 compared to antenna 1 and antenna 2.

1.7 User Equipment categories

From the release 8 to the release 10 user terminals support different features having
different physical layer capabilities. In LTE release 8/9, for example, the low-end
category 1 does not support spatial multiplexing, while the category 5 supports the full
set of features in the release 8/9 physical layer specifications. In LTE release 10, more
useful interesting techniques are used (i.e. carrier aggregation), providing higher
performance.

20

In Table 3 are showed the eight categories from 1-5 (LTE Release 8/9/10) to 6-8 (LTEAdvanced Release 10).

Table 3: UE Category

In more detail, for categories from 1 to 5, it is showed a Table 4 containing the

downlink physical layer parameters for each category. The second column in Table 4
defines the maximum number of DL-SCH transport blocks bits that the UE is capable of
receiving within a DL-SCH TTI of 1 ms. In case of spatial multiplexing, this is the sum of
the number of bits delivered in each of the two transport blocks. The third column
represents the maximum number of DL-SCH transport block bits that the UE is capable
of receiving in a single transport block within a DL-SCH TTI. The fourth column
represents the total number of soft channel bits available for H-ARQ processing while
the last column gives the maximum number of supported layers for spatial
multiplexing per UE.

21

Table 4: Downlink Physical Layer parameters

It is possible to notice that a Category 3 user equipment is capable of supporting a

downlink peak throughput of about 102 Mbit/s (i.e. 102048 received bits in one 1 ms)
and that it can support spatial multiplexing with a maximum of two layers. The highend terminals correspondent to the category 5 can support a peak throughput of
about 300 Mbit/s with spatial multiplexing over four layers (these terminals thus need
to be equipped with four receive antennas).

1.8 A limiting factor of spectrum efficiency

The ever increasing user density in cellular systems coupled with the unitary frequency
reuse factor selected for the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard have made
interference (both inter-cell and intra-cell) the main limiting factor of spectrum
efficiency in LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) system, and Interference Cancellation (IC) one
possible solution that need to be addressed in LTE-A receivers. In this Master Thesis I
focus my attention to Multiple Input Multiple Output Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) schemes and Space Frequency Block Code (SFBC) encoded
schemes, and I will describe the corresponding receiver structures.
As far as the interference is concerned, depending on the transmission conditions and
the constraints imposed by the transmission standard, a receiver affected by
interference may have different degrees of knowledge of the interference signals, and

22

as a consequence different IC strategies will be possible. In general, the more complete

the knowledge of the characteristics of the interfering signals, the more elaborate the
IC strategies that can be implemented, the better the achievable performances.
I am dealing with a multi-antenna scheme, with typically 2 antennas at the user
terminal and 2 or 4 antennas at the base station. The availability of multiple
transmission antennas will be typically used to improve throughput and capacity,
transmitting multiple information streams that will be received overlapped at the
receiving antennas. For this reason the considered receivers will have, as a first step, to
be able to perform what we will denote as MIMO equalization, i.e. to separate the
individual information streams, cancelling the mutual interference (this scenario exists
also in absence of any intra-cell or inter-cell interference), and generating an initial
estimate of the transmitted symbols, that will then be fed to the subsequent softdemapper.
In presence of prohibitive transmission conditions, like at the cell boundary, the
presence of multiple antennas may also be used to improve performances by
introducing redundancy on the space and frequency (or time) dimensions, using a so
called Space Frequency Block Code (SFBC). In presence of a SFBC, the inter-stream
interference is typically null or minimal, and, as a consequence, non-iterative receivers
are often employed.

1.9 Inter cell Interference modeling: DIP values

Network interference statistics are computed using geometry factor G, defined as:

Ior1

I oc

Ior1
N BS

I
j 2

orj

where Iorj is the average received power from the j-th strongest base station implies (
Ior1 is the serving cell average received power), 2 is the thermal noise power over the

23

received bandwidth, and NBS is the total number of base stations considered including
the serving cell.
In addition to geometry, another measure, referred to as the Dominant Interferer
Proportion (DIP) ratio, was agreed as a key parameter for defining the interference
profiles. DIP was defined as the ratio of the power of a given interfering cell over the
total other cell interference power.
DIP of synchronized, and asynchronized interference, DIPi s , DIPi a is expressed as
follows:

DIPi s

Iors (i1)

DIPi a

I oc

Iora i
I oc

where the total inter-cell interference plus noise is given by:

Ns

Na

j 2

j 1

a
I oc Iors j Ior
j N
and NBS = NS + Na is the total number of eNodeBs considered including the serving cell.
DIP ratio statistics have been derived obtaining both unconditional DIP CDFs and
conditional median DIP values, the latter conditioned on various geometry values. An
interference profile was defined on the basis of averaging unconditional median DIP
values submitted by the different companies. DIP values conditioned to the geometry
values have also been submitted by the different companies. Starting from these
values, the interference profiles that have been defined as part of the 3GPP feasibility
study to assess link level performance of MMSE-IRC receivers, are showed in Table 5.

24

Profile
Based on conditional
median values

Geometry
0 dB geometry
-3 dB geometry

Synchronized NW
DIP1
DIP2
-3.1
-5.4
-2.8

-7.3

Asynchronized NW
DIP
-3.1
-2.8

-2.5 dB geometry

Table 5: Conditional DIP values

1.10 Channel profiles

Three channel profiles have been defined in 3GPP for UE and BS conformance testing.
These profiles are also used in the link level simulations. The delay profiles are selected
to be representative of low, medium and high delay spread environments. The
frequency selectivity of the channel is proportional to the delay spread.

Table 6: 3GPP Channels

The link level simulations have been done for the Extended Pedestrian A (EPA) channel
profile defined by the 3GPP.

Table 7: EPA Channel

25

Table 8: EVA channel

The channel is assumed constant in each TTI (Transmission Time Interval of 1 ms).
The correlation of the fading processes is set according to the three cases defined in
3GPP for the conformance tests (TS 36.101 and TS 36.104) of the equipments (low,
medium and high correlation):

Table 9: Correlaton of fading processes

The and correlation values are, respectively, the correlation coefficient at the
transmitter and the correlation coefficient at the receiver.
The fading correlation is mainly determined by two factors: antenna characteristics
(e.g. distance, polarization) and propagation environment (e.g. number and position of
the scatterers, presence of LoS, angle of arrival and angle spread of the
electromagnetic waves).
The transmission schemes of LTE are differently affected by the correlation. In
particular transmit diversity (TxD) appears rather robust whilst Spatial Multiplexing
(SM) suffers a severe performance degradation as the correlation increases.

26

CHAPTER 2: ACTIVITIES IN 3GPP ON ADVANCED RECEIVERS

This chapter provides an overview of activities carried out in 3GPP on the topic of
advanced receivers with interference cancellation/mitigation capabilities.
The activities have been carried out mainly in the RAN4 group under the framework of
four study/work items: IR, feICIC, CRS-IM, NAICS.

Study Item
IR (Rel.11)

Description
Interference Rejection

Focus
Focus on receiver structures targeting spatial
domain

interference

mitigation.

IRC

considered as a starting point.

feICIC

Further enhanced ICIC

(Rel. 11)

Heterogeneous network scenarios where the

interference is mainly caused by the CRS and
Control Channels of the macro cell on the UEs
connected to the small cells

CRS-IM

CRS Interference Mitigation

Analyses the cancellation of the interference

(Rel. 12)

(RP-130393)

caused by CRS in synchronized homogenous

network scenarios

NAICS

Network Assisted

NAICS is similar to the approach of CRS-IM.

(Rel. 12)

Interference Cancellation

The major difference for NAICS is that the

Suppression

interference mitigation is now targeted not

(RP-130404)

only for interfering CRS but also for

interfering PDSCH considering also possible
improvements

deriving

from

network

assistance

27

2.1 feICIC
In the feICIC case the focus is on the heterogeneous network scenarios where the
interference is mainly caused by the CRS and Control Channels of the macro cell on the
UEs connected to the small cells.
The main IC candidate techniques for the implementation at the UE side include:

Interference cancellation: signal regeneration and subtraction applicable to

CRS, PBCH, PSS/SSS;

Puncturing; receiver that punctures REs of the wanted signal of the serving cell
that are interfered by CRS REs received from one or more dominant interfering
cells.

In the case of CRS interference cancellation, the procedure requires: the channel
estimation from the interfering cells, regeneration of all the interfering cells CRS
signals and subtraction.
Puncturing is not applicable in several scenarios, e.g. with colliding CRS in non-MBSFN
ABS because CRE REs of the serving cell cannot be punctured. For SFBC and SFBC-FSTD,
two REs used should be punctured simultaneously when one of them was
contaminated. In the other cases, it sets the LLR of bits of REs undergoing strong
interference as zero.
The results show the better and robust performance and versatility of the CRS
cancelling receiver over the CRS puncturing receivers. Also for PDSCH demodulation
the CRS cancelling receiver outperforms the CRS puncturing receivers. CRS puncturing
receiver performs reasonably for single non colliding interferer, but for the other
scenarios it does not perform well. The relatively poor performance of the CRS RE
puncturing receiver for transmission mode 2 is because strong interference on one RE
affects demodulation of the two symbols that are transmitted through the affected RE
via SFBC encoding.

28

2.2 CRS-IM
Interference Mitigation (IM) of Cell-Specific Reference Signals (CRS) has been studied
in the Rel-11 Work Item on feICIC, where interference from CRS is dominant assuming
data RE muting in ABS subframes. A new study item has been started in 3GPP on CRS
interference mitigation (IM) in homogeneous network deployments.
The main objectives of this Study Item are:

identify the partial traffic loading levels, other realistic system level parameters
(e.g. traffic and interference models, time and frequency offset between cells)
and performance metrics for studying the feasibility of CRS-IM in a
synchronized homogenous network;

identify the baseline receiver which can be used for evaluating the gain of CRS IM in a synchronized homogenous network considering the reuse of CRS-IM
receiver assumed for Release 11 feICIC and the reuse of MMSE-IRC receiver as
the baseline receiver;

evaluate the system level and link level gains of CRS-IM with respect to the
baseline MMSE-IRC receiver in a synchronized homogenous network
deployment under the various loading levels identified (e.g. gains of CRS-IM
from 1 and 2 aggressor cells CRS shall be evaluated and compared).

The objectives of the study item explicitly indicate that only Release 11 CRS assistance
information should be assumed to be available. It can be seen that the CRS assistance
information consists of a list of cells which are to be considered as candidates for CRS
interference mitigation. Therefore, for each cell the information related to the CRS
transmission (i.e. the physical cell ID, antenna port count and MBSFN configuration)
are provided to the UE.
A way forward on CRS-IM performance evaluation has been agreed. The first proposal
is the reuse of CRS-IM receiver assumed for Release 11 feICIC to mitigate CRS
interference of up to two cells. The second solution is the reuse of MMSE-IRC based
receiver with interference covariance matrix estimation, here the receiver does not
differentiate CRS or data interference when suppressing them.

29

The proposed receiver scheme for the execution of the link level simulations is the
MMSE-IRC with/without CRS-IM. Concerning the CRS-IM part of the receiver, basically
it consists in the regeneration and subtraction of the CRS signal from only the 1 st or
both the 1st and 2nd strongest interfering cell. A possible receiver implementation is
depicted below. A possible work item on this activity can follow.

Figure 1: MMSE-IRC with CRS-IM

2.3 NAICS
NAICS is similar to the approach of CRS-IM. The major difference for NAICS is that the
interference mitigation is now targeted not only for interfering CRS but also for
interfering PDSCH.
Objectives of this Study Item for RAN4 are:

Identify reference IS/IC receivers with and without network assistance, and
evaluate

their

performance/complexity

trade-off

and

implementation

feasibility;

Analyze complexity and feasibility of basic receiver structures: based on linear

MMSE-IRC, successive interference cancellation, and maximal likelihood
detection are considered as a starting point for reference IS/IC receivers;

Based on the RAN1 scenarios agree on co-channel inter and intra-cell

interference models for link-level simulation;

Evaluate the link-level gain over baseline Rel-11 linear MMSE-IRC receivers and
Rel-11 non-linear receivers required for feICIC;

30

Indicate (to RAN1) assumptions on the network assistance information for the
evaluated receivers under possible network coordination.

In the following part of this chapter, it will be shown a brief description of the main
advanced receivers with interference cancellation/mitigation capabilities.

2.3.1 MMSE

The Rel-8/Rel-9 baseline receiver, MMSE receiver, ignores the fact that interfering
signals are spatially colored signal. MMSE receivers treat interference as white noise.
Along with the channel matrix H for the desired signal, only interference-plus-noise
power I2 n needs to be estimated by the MMSE receiver. The MMSE receiver can be
expressed as:
s H H HH H I2n I x
1

The complexity of the Rel-8/Rel-9 MMSE receiver is given by: the channel estimation
and the matrix inversion.

2.3.2 MMSE-IRC

Using a proper spatially colored interference model, an MMSE interference

rejection/combining receiver (MMSE-IRC) is expected to outperform the MMSE
receiver in strong interference scenarios.
In Rel-11 advanced receiver SID, RAN4 studied two approaches of the MMSE-IRC
receiver realization. One approach is to use data REs to estimate overall signal-plusinterference-plus-noise covariance matrix Rs I n . In this case, The MMSE-IRC receiver
has the form of:
1
s H H Rs I n x

31

A second approach to realize the MMSE-IRC receiver is using the CRS or DMRS from
the serving transmitter to estimate the channel matrix H of the desired signal, and
using the differences of the received reference signal and the re-constructed reference
signal with the estimated desired channel on the CRS or DMRS REs to estimate
interference-plus-noise covariance matrix RI n :
s H H HH H RI n x
1

RI n

k ,lRS

k ,l

H xk ,l yk ,l H xk ,l

The RAN4 Rel-11 advanced receiver study shows that CRS or DMRS-based MMSE-IRC
receiver outperforms data RE-based MMSE-IRC receiver. The above MMSE-IRC
approaches can be applied to intra-cell interference suppression in MU-MIMO
scenarios as well as to inter-cell interference suppression.
For the Rel-12 NAICS SID, it would be a logical extension to study the possible
performance gain of an MMSE-IRC receiver when the system assists UEs in performing
better channel state information estimation, for both desired and interference signals.
For example:

In case of dominant interference cell exists e.g. in HetNet case, UE may

explicitly estimate the channel of dominant interference cell. Thus, the
covariance matrix RI n of inter-cell interference could be calculated based on
the channel estimation of dominant interference cell;

the accuracy of covariance matrix may also be improved by allowing averaging

across multiple RBs, so the estimated received symbol is:
1

s H HH H H i H iH I2 I x
i 1

32

2.3.3 E-MMSE-IRC

Enhanced MMSE-IRC is an MMSE-IRC that considers different interferer channel

estimates and new interference knowledge from network signaling or trough blind
techniques. E-MMSE-IRC could achieve significant throughput gain over MMSE-IRC
receiver for both CRS-based and DMRS-based transmissions, given the assistance for
UE to perform channel estimation on interference signals and knowing the number of
layers.
A disadvantage of this receiver is the performance gain since it is lower than others
receivers (ML, SLIC, CWIC) when SINR is low. In contrast, there are several advantages
using E-MMSE-IRC:

limited complexity;

throughput gain is significant for high SINR;

other receivers require more additional assistance information, introducing

more complexity and less robustness (e.g. ML and SLIC receiver need
modulation of interference signals trough blind detection or DCI/RRC signaling).

In this context, the received signal is given by the superposition of one useful signal
and N-1 interferer signals with different precoding matrix and different amplitudes:

N 1

yk

H
i

i , k Pi xi , k

nk

i 0

where, i is the amplitude of the signal transmitted from i-th cell, H i ,k is the channel
matrix of the i-th cell on the k-th tone / resource element (RE), xi ,k is the symbol
transmitted by the i-th cell in the k-th tone and

Pi is

the spatial precoding matrix used

by the i-th cell and K is the total number of observed tones. The number of cells in this
case is N with one serving cell and N 1 interferers.

The operations can be subdivided in core receiver processing (Channel estimation,

CRS-IC, Detection, Decoding) and parameter extraction.

33

Core receiver processing includes symbol level detection of the desired cells signals
and Turbo decoding. At the detector stage, Rel-11 MMSE-IRC receivers suppress the
transmission from interfering cells before detecting the desired symbols. The nulling
operation is performed by a front end MMSE filter, W, and Wy is the linear estimate of
the transmitted symbols. For Rel-11 MMSE IRC receivers, W is constructed using: the
channel estimation of serving cell and the total interference and noise estimated using
CRS or DMRS. In contrast, even if E-MMSE-IRC receiver perform some similar
functions, there are some key differences:

the interfering signals are modelled using the estimated channels of the
interferers, using CRS-IC;

for each signal the precoded matrix is needed and it is obtained using UE-side
blind estimation or network signaling;

the interferer signal strength is extracted from network signaling or blind

detection at the UE.

In the E-MMSE-IRC receiver the complexity is calculated considering the channel

estimation complexity (CCE), the MMSE-IRC detection complexity (CFE), the FEC
decoding complexity (CBE) for the core receiver and the parameter extraction. The
complexity is N(CCE) + CFE + CBE , while the complexity of MMSE-IRC is CCE + CFE + CBE. The
MMSE-IRC complexity is lower than the E-MMSE-IRC one, since the channel estimation
is made without CRS-IC, while in E-MMSE-IRC the channel estimation with CRS-IC
scales linearly with the number of interferers. To completion, CFE is the detection and
interference cancellation complexity and CBE is the FEC decoding and turbo decoding.

2.3.4 Symbol level SIC

There are two types of successive interference cancellation (SIC) receivers: in the first
one only symbol demodulation is involved in the SIC process and in the other one the
FEC decoding is involved. It can be expected that, if the FEC decoding is involved in the
SIC process, the performance will be improved compared to the one only using symbol
demodulation. However, FEC decoding will require that all detailed coding information

34

and resource allocation information of the interference signal be available to the UE

receiver, this requires a lot of system coordination and signalling overhead.
The symbol level SIC receiver can be expressed as:

P
1

s H H HH H n2 I y H i ~
si
i 1

where ~
si is the quantized estimation of the interference signal.
The symbol level SIC receiver needs to know the modulation order of the interference
signal, power offset and (an estimate of) the channel matrix of the interferers as well.
This requires system assistance in providing the interference modulation order and
providing means to estimate the interference channel matrix. It is a general
understanding that an SIC receiver can perform well in case that the interference
signal is much stronger than the desired signal. Therefore, SIC receivers are well suited
for some inter-cell interference scenarios (like range extension in HetNet, or intra-cell
interference in some MU-MIMO cases). However, for inter-cell interference in
homogeneous networks, the interference signal can generally be expected to be
weaker or not much stronger than the desired signal. In this case, the performance
advantage of SIC receiver over MMSE-IRC receiver may be questionable.

2.3.5 Bit level hard SIC

The receiver attempts to detect and decode one by one the interferers of interest, also
in case of MU-MIMO and/or inter-cell interference cancellation. The decoded
interferers are subtracted step-by-step to the overall signal, obtaining at the end the
decoded useful signal.
This receiver takes advantage of the CRC attached to each transport block before
channel coding: if CRC check is successful, the block has been correctly decoded and
the interfering signal can be reconstructed (minor the channel estimation errors). The

35

bit level hard SIC to be efficient needs to find at least one interferer that can be
decoded without error (in order to subtract its interference from the useful signal).
As a result, the situations where the interference power is much higher than the useful
signal power and/or when the interference has a robust MCS are favourable situations
where it brings significant gains. In case the interference and useful signal have similar
powers, the Hard SIC imposes the constraint that the MCS used by the first interferer
be more robust than the MCS used for the signal of interest, as it will need to be
decoded under the interference of the latter.

2.3.6 Soft Turbo SIC

This receiver scheme performs the soft detection and the Turbo decoding of the UE
signals which are repeatedly subtracted from the received signal.
An important parameter of these receivers is the number of Turbo-code iterations for
each detection and decoding step. In the case of Turbo-SIC receivers (also in the Hard
SIC), the victim UE needs to know the following transmission parameters of the
interferers:

PRB assignments;

MCS;

RNTI;

DMRS sequence (if demodulation is based on DMRS);

Precoding information (if demodulation is based on CRS).

Up to Release 11, a UE cannot access any of these pieces of information related to

another UE. Some mechanisms (e.g. a new signalling) then need to be introduced into
the standard in order to provide this information to the victim UE.

2.3.7 ML receiver

This receiver treats the interference as un-known deterministic QAM signal. ML

receivers can jointly estimate the desired signal and the interference signals. It is

36

generally understood that ML receivers provide an optimal performance compared to

other receiver structure. SIC receivers can be viewed as sub-optimal realizations of ML
receivers with less computational complexity but some performance degradation as
compared to ML receivers.
The ML receiver, like the SIC receiver, requires information of the modulation order
and channel matrix of the interference signals. The ML receiver can be expressed as:

s, s1, s2 ,..., sP arg s,s ,min

x Hs H i si
s ,..,s
1

i 1

where, is the set of constellation points of the used modulations.

It can be expected that the ML receiver would provide good performance in both intracell and inter-cell interference mitigation. However, when the number of layers of the
desired signal plus interference signals is large and when the modulation orders are
high, the full ML receiver is very computationally complex and may not be feasible to
implement. For example, a total of NS=4 layers with M=64 constellation size will
require about MNs=644=16 million hypotheses. This is a very large number of possible
combinations for a UE receiver to check them. Some performance-complexity tradeoff has to be taken for this high order modulation and large number of layers. Some
well-known sub-optimal ML-type receivers, for example, sphere detectors, could be
considered as candidate.
ML receiver can be easily extended to joint detection on desired and interfering signals
with limited Network Assistance (NA) information. For example if the channel
knowledge and modulation order of the interference is available, interfering signals
could be treated as desired signals and joint detected by ML receiver. There is no
difference in ML receiver processing procedure.
Assuming UE has the ML detection capability up to 2 layers receptions, when UE is in
cell centre area (high SNR region), ML receiver can be used to detect the scheduled
Rank 2 transmission. When UE move to cell edge area (low SNR region) and scheduled

37

with Rank 1 transmission, the dominant interfering signals could be jointly detected
with limited additional NA information.

2.3.8 R-ML

This advanced receiver is a reduced complexity maximum likelihood receiver. It is

based on the joint detection of useful and interference modulation symbols in
accordance to the ML criterion (e.g. sphere decoding, QR-MLD, MLM, etc.).
.
Assuming that there is only one strong interferer, the received signal is:
y H1W1x1 H2 W2 x2 n

where,

is the useful channel matrix and

is the interferer channel matrix.

The ML can be expressed as:

H
H

y Hx R1 y Hx
y Hx R1 y Hx
LLR(bi ) log e

log
e

x0 ( bi )

x1 ( bi )

where k (bi ) denotes the set of transmit vectors with bi k, k 0 ,1 , and R is the
noise covariance matrix.
Using a Rel.11 MMSE-IRC receiver, the interferer term (the second one inserted in the
received signal) can be used to calculate the interferer plus noise covariance matrix R
in this way:
R H2 W2 W2H H 2H E nn H .

Finally, about the R-ML, LLRs can be also represented by max-log approximation:

LLR bi min y Hx
x0 ( bi )

38

R1 y Hx min y Hx
x1( bi )

R 1 y Hx

where H H1W1 H2 W2 , x x1 x2 , R is the interferer plus noise covariance

T

matrix, y is the received symbols 2x1 matrix and k (bi ) denotes the set of transmit
vectors with bi k, k 0 ,1 .
R-ML is a reduced complexity version of ML, but it is more complex than the previous
receiver schemes, even if it provide sub-optimal performance.

CHAPTER 3: MMSE-IRC RECEIVER IN REAL SCENARIOS

39

3.1 Overview
This chapter provides a detailed vision of all the aspects that led to a low complexity
implementation of the MMSE-IRC receiver in real scenarios. Moreover, performance
results are showed and explained carefully, taking care to select relevant results that
best show the behavior of the receiver.
At the starting point, a brief analysis of the simulation platform is provided, focusing
on some key blocks that are the core of a MIMO OFDMA link level simulator and that
are useful to understand the MMSE-IRC implementation inside it. It is not possible to
describe the overall architecture, since this simulator is composed by a very large
number of blocks. The link level simulator is designed for the simulation of MIMOOFDM based wireless communication systems like LTE/LTE-A and represents an
effective tool for the research and development of innovative physical layer system
components.
Simulations are obtained adding an independent block, the MMSE-IRC receiver, into
the physical layer simulator, developed using CoCentric System Studio. MMSE-IRC
block is intentionally implemented as a unique block, putting inside the corresponding
functionalities, with the objective to have an interferer cancellation receiver that can
be accessible and modifiable quickly. The designed MMSE-IRC is a unique simulation
block implemented in C language.
The main implementation constraint for our MMSE-IRC is the low complexity. Some
techniques are used to reduce the computation burden: reducing the complexity of
the matrix inversion, averaging and weighting coefficients computation.
Interfering scenarios are selected, first of all, to test the MMSE-IRC code and after to
visualize the performance in terms of Raw BER, BLER and Throughput in presence of
single or double interfering cells selecting different spatial correlations and DIPs.
Performance results are compared with the baseline receiver based on the Alamouti
detection scheme [ref. paper di Alamouti], using ideal implementations developed in
MATLAB and also with the more realistic simulator based on CoCentric System

40

Studio, showing how in the most cases MMSE-IRC provides a performance gain with
respect to Alamouti.
In the next chapter are also shown two other advanced receiver schemes that exploit
the MMSE-IRC algorithm and are based on the symbol level interferer cancellation
(SLIC) and bit level interferer cancellation (BLIC) concept, comparing them and showing
interesting features in order to develop an adaptive receiver that is able to switch or
adapt the interference cancellation algorithm as a function of the channel and
interference conditions.

3.1 General Architecture of the MIMO OFDMA simulator

The general architecture of an MIMO OFDMA based system like LTE/LTE-A is described
by the block diagrams in the figure below.
The models (blocks) described in this document are highlighted in green color. The
corresponding input data files (data sets) that allow them to be configured according
to a specific standard are also shown, with the relation they have with each block. The
same data set can be used by different functional blocks; this was intended in order to
reduce as much as possible the number of data sets.
The design of the reconfigurable simulation models was done with the aim of having
blocks as flexible as possible and the source code in the CoCentric simulation platform
as simple as possible, based on the use of the provided input data files (data sets). In
this sense, the complexity of the functions performed by these blocks is implicit in
the data sets.

41

Figure 2: MIMO OFDMA system architecture

42

3.1.1 Data region Mapping/Demapping

The explanation will be concentrated in the mapping block. The demapping block
basically performs the inverse operations, so just the most important differences will
be pointed out.

Figure 3: Data regions mapping block

The basic resource unit is a structure constituted by logical subcarriers, with

rectangular
dimensions defined by the parameters BRU_freq_size and BRU_time_size, given in
number of subcarriers and OFDMA symbols, respectively. The numbering of the
subcarriers inside the BRU is shown in the Figure 3. Not necessarily all the subcarriers
are filled with data, being possible to reserve some subcarriers for other purposes. For

43

example, in the LTE system, the BRU (in this case called Resource Elements) has some
positions reserved for the pilot subcarriers. For this reason, to describe the
internal structure of the BRU, it is defined a data set containing the indexes of the
subcarriers that can be used for data transmission. By means of this data set, it is also
determined the filling order of the structure, such as frequency-first, time-first or any
other order, depending on the order the subcarriers indexes are listed.

Figure 4: Basic Resource Unit (BRU) structure

The generic resource grid (GRG) represents all the allocable resources within a
time/frequency zone, being constituted by BRUs. It is important to remark that all
BRUs within a GRG must have the same structure and filling order, as previously
explained. The GRG has rectangular dimensions defined by the parameters
GRG_freq_size and GRG_time_size, given in number of BRUs in frequency and in time,
respectively. The numbering of the BRUs inside the GRG is shown in Figure 4.
Regarding the implementation of the block, it is also useful to view the GRG in terms of
subcarriers, with the correspondent dimensions and numbering shown in Figure 5.

44

Figure 5: Generic Resources Grid (GRG)

The BRUs inside the GRG are allocated by the specification of GDRs, as will be
explained in the following. BRUs not allocated have all their subcarriers filled with
zeroes.

Figure 6: Resources Grid

3.1.2 Subcarrier Mapping/Demapping

The purpose of the mapping block is to map the symbols of different types (data,
pilots, other signals) that arrive organized in a logical manner (logically indexed), into
theirs correspondent physical resources, given a mapping rule. A physical resource is
defined as a physical subcarrier (i.e., a given position in the IFFT/FFT) at a given time (in
terms of OFDMA symbol offset). The physical resources are positioned over a grid with

45

dimensions NFFT x Nsymb. NFFT is the IFFT/FFT size and Nsymb corresponds to the
maximum between the pilots pattern repetition period and the extension in time
where the mapping rule applies (i.e., the maximum offset in time between a logical
index and its correspondent physical index). The numbering of the physical resources
in the grid is done as shown in the Figure 6.
In general, a logically indexed subcarrier at the input can be mapped into any physical
resource in the grid.

Figure 7: Physical resources grid for subcarrier mapping

Besides NFFT and Nsymb, other additional parameters shall be provided to the model:

Ndata: total number of data subcarriers in the grid, also equivalent to the rate
of the data input port;

Npilot: total number of pilot subcarriers in the grid, also equivalent to the rate
of the pilots input port;

Nnull: total number of null subcarriers in the grid, including guard, DC, and
other null subcarriers (when using MIMO, for example);

Nother: total number of subcarriers in the grid dedicated to other signals, such
as synchronization signals or control channels in LTE.

3.1.3 IFFT/FFT calculation and cyclic prefix insertion/removal

In transmission, the Generic IFFT & Cyclic Prefix Insertion model, as its name already
states, performs the IFFT calculation of the spectrum defined by the input subcarriers.

46

The FFT size depends on the channel bandwidth being considered. In sequence, the
cyclic prefix is inserted taking a copy of a given number of samples (Cyclic Prefix
length) at the end of the useful OFDM symbol (just after the IFFT calculation) and
inserting them before it.

Figure 8: IFFT and Cyclic Prefix insertion block

In reception, considering that the system is ideally synchronized and that time
windowing is not performed over the OFDMA symbol, the Generic FFT & Cyclic Prefix
Removal model performs the inverse operations done in transmission. First, it removes
the beginning of the OFDMA symbol corresponding to the cyclic prefix. Finally, it
performs the FFT calculation of the useful OFDM symbol.

Figure 9: FFT and Cyclic Prefix removal block

3.1.4 Pilots compensation

The purpose of the generic pilots compensation model is to compensate the received
pilots to remove the power boost and the specific pilot sequence, based on the
knowledge of the transmitted (reference) pilot sequence. After doing that, the value of
each pilot symbol represents an estimate of the channel seen by the pilot subcarrier
itself.

47

The block operates over the same grid of the subcarriers mapping (see the Figure 3),
therefore using the same parameters and data sets (just the necessary ones) to know
the location of the pilots subcarriers.

3.1.5 Channel Estimation

The purpose of the generic channel estimation block is to estimate the channel
coefficients correspondent to the received data symbols. These estimated values are
used in the subsequent blocks of the chain to perform some data processing over the
data symbols. The channel estimation is based on the received pilot subcarriers that
should be already compensated prior to enter in the block to remove power boost and
the specific pilot sequence.
The estimation of the channel coefficients is performed using linear interpolation,
linear
extrapolation and the hold operation (which is indeed a particular case of linear
extrapolation).

Figure 10: Channel estimation block

48

First of all, it is defined an interpolation grid, with frequency length equal to the
IFFT/FFT size and time duration Nsymb, equal to the periodicity of the interpolation
rules. The parameter Nsymb is not necessarily the same defined in the generic
subcarriers mapping model. The contents of the grid are the channel estimates of the
correspondent subcarriers. An interpolation rule is a linear operation involving 3 points
in the grid, where the channel estimate of a destination subcarrier is obtained from
the known estimates of the two source subcarriers, considering the 3 points are
positioned over a straight line.
Therefore, it is possible to calculate the channel estimate related to a given subcarrier
(destination), providing the channel estimates of the two source subcarriers and the
proper weights. The weights are a function of the subcarriers indexes and can be precalculated for every defined interpolation rule. This information is then provided to the
block by the data sets shown in the Figure 9, which contain all the interpolation rules
(meaning first operand indexes and weights, second operand indexes and weights, and
destination indexes) to be performed in the grid. The channel estimation is done in
steps, starting from the step 0, where at the beginning just the received pilot symbols
are known. The pilots are assumed to be already compensated to remove
sequence and power boost. A step includes all the interpolation rules that can be
defined using all channel estimates known at the end of the previous step. New steps
should be included until all the required channel estimates are obtained.

49

Figure 11: Interpolation rules

3.1.6 Space-time Encoder/Decoder

The purpose of using the technique of space-time coding and decoding is to support
Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna systems in order to also exploit the
spatial dimension. As consequence, an improvement in the capacity (throughput) or in
the reliability (coverage range) of a wireless communication system can be obtained.

Figure 12: Space-time encoder (MIMO 2x2)

Two possible transmission modes of MIMO systems, the spatial multiplexing (SM) and
the space-frequency block coding (SFBC). The spatial multiplexing is based on the
transmission of different data streams across the different transmitting antennas with

50

the goal of increasing the overall throughput, while the space-frequency coding
techniques transmit redundant data streams over the multiple antennas for increasing
the link reliability and extending the coverage range.

3.2 Modeling MMSE-IRC

Before implementing a simulation model in C code and creating a block in CoCentric
with the associated ports, it is very important to provide a mathematical explanation
of the MMSE-IRC receiver. It is useful to realize how complexity can be managed and
the importance of adapting our mathematical model to a real implementation.

3.2.1 MMSE-IRC for SFBC transmit diversity

MMSE-IRC receiver is based on the MMSE criteria, but the interference rejection
combining require highly accurate channel estimation and covariance matrix
estimation that includes inter cell interference. In this scheme, the covariance matrix is
used in a modified version that provides lower complexity, avoiding the 4x4 matrix
inversion (MIMO 2x2 SFBC), leading to a trivial 2x2 matrix inversion.
Lets consider a scenario where there is an UE and some interfering cells, the received
signal by UE antennas is:

where, considering a MIMO 2x2 SFBC transmit diversity, Y is the 4x1 matrix containing
the received signals by UE,

is the channel response in frequency domain 4x2 matrix

between the serving cell and the UE,

is the transmitted useful signals 2x1 matrix, I is

the total interference received 4x1 matrix, N is the 4x1 noise matrix.
In a real context, the UE receives the summation of many signals plus noise composed
by the useful signal (from the serving cell) and interferences (from interfering cells):

51

where:
UE,

is the 4x2 channel frequency response matrix between the c-th cell and the
is the 2x1 transmitted signal matrix and

serving cell and the other

is the 4x1 noise matrix,

is the

cells are interferer cells.

This matrix formulation can be extended, considering the SFBC transmit diversity in a
2x2 MIMO fashion. When SFBC is enabled, considering two antennas in transmission
and two in reception (2x2 MIMO), the transmitted symbols are Alamouti coded
exploiting two adjacent subcarriers and the two antennas, sending for each time
instant four symbols mapped in subcarrier k (even) and k+1 (odd). So, the previous
matrix equation can be expanded as:

=
[

] [

]
[

The UE, implementing the MMSE-IRC, estimates the useful signal, in particular the 2x1
matrix composed by two estimated serving cell symbols transmitted by the two
antennas:

Where,

is the estimated received symbol at the antenna 1 port and

inverted and conjugated estimated received symbol at the antenna 2 port.

The vector is obtained applying this relation:

52

is the sign

where,

is the 2x4 receiver weight matrix calculated considering both

code and spatial domains. This matrix is generated considering the estimated channel
matrix of the useful signal and the interferers plus noise covariance matrix.
can be calculated using one of the two following methods:

1th Method

where,

is the estimated useful channel matrix and

is the estimated

interferences plus noise covariance matrix. From simulation tests, using this method it
was noted that the estimate received symbol have to be normalized through the
following normalizing
symbol the matrix element

function, considering for the antenna 1 port received

and for the antenna 2 port received symbol

so,

and

53

2nd Method

In this case, the normalization process is not necessary as the estimated symbols are
already normalized (i.e. the amplitude is correctly scaled for the subsequent symbol to
bit demapping operation).
Both methods provide the same result; the first one is a reduced complexity method
because the matrix inversion is done considering only one operand (

with

eventually a splitting zero-adding operation. The second method can be used when
does not contain zero values.
The covariance matrix

include the interferences and noise components, in

general, it is defined as:

where I is the total interference received by the UE. It can be expressed neglecting the
received useful signal (

At the UE receiver, the total interference received by the UE on the subcarriers k and
k+1 can be expressed as:

54

where

is the total received interference at antenna 1 port for the k-subcarrier,

is the total received interference at antenna 2 port for the (k+1)-subcarrier.

Expanding

:
|

|
|

|
|

|
|

the main diagonal represents the received interferer powers at antenna port 1 and
port 2,
the other expectation terms are the correlation functions between the interfering
signals at antenna port 1 and port 2, the null terms are the auto-correlation function of
the interference calculated over two adjacent subcarriers that can be assumed equal
to zero.
Besides, also the terms

],

are statistically zero and thus it is possible to avoid their estimation,

so leading to the final matrix:
|

|
|

|
|

|
|

Obviously, the complexity is much lower in terms of matrix inversion, but the price to
pay is a very small performance degradation.
For simplicity, expectations can be expressed as:

55

The last matrix can be rewritten as:

Considering that the interference characteristic changes slowly in time and frequency
domains, it possible to write:

So,
[

This is an important approximation, because to calculate

knowing

and its transpose. Now, calculating

, it is only needful
is a simpler operation,

moreover in presence of zero matrix elements, the

4x4 matrix can viewed as the

composition of two 2x2 matrix.

In this case:

The matrix inversion of

is simply:

In the following, the relative sub-carrier indexes k and k+1 are omitted, considering:

56

Calculating the inverse matrix, it is possible to show the low complexity procedures:

and,

where

Using, the first method for MMSE-IRC:

][

]
[

Imposing that

, the estimated received symbol at the UE antenna 1 port

is:

The coefficients a, b, c and d are:

57

Moreover, the estimate received symbol at the UE antenna 2 port (

It is important to note that, the above values are complex symbols, so they must be
divided in real parts and imaginary parts, doing complex operations. Extending above
formulas, considering complex values, there are not important simplifications, so it is
not convenient splitting real part and imaginary part, but sometimes it is the only way
to proceed. Fortunately, CoCentric is able to treat complex values and operations using
a specific complex data format. So, in the following all the implemented variables are
treated as complex values.

3.2.2 Building the MMSE-IRC receiver

As already mentioned, the description of the main employed simulator blocks and the
math procedure, is fundamental to build an independent block that accurately
represents the MMSE-IRC receiver.
The math description appears very simple, because the approximations and calculus
are simple to understand and to realize on paper, but a real realization into a real
LTE/LTE-A simulator or in a real LTE/LTE-A chipset has to be done opportunely, solving
several implementation problems, engineering some calculus to respect the LTE/LTE-A
standard and the simulator software context.
Choosing to implement all the operations inside the MMSE-IRC receiver (e.g.
covariance matrix estimation), the input and output ports are:

58

INPUT PORT

OUTPUT PORT

float symbols_in1_I;

float symbols_out_I;

float symbols_in1_Q;

float symbols_out_Q;

float symbols_in2_I;

float reliability;

float symbols_in2_Q;
float reference_pilots_in1_I;
float reference_pilots_in1_Q;
float reference_pilots_in2_I;
float reference_pilots_in2_Q;
float h11_I;
float h11_Q;
float h12_I;
float h12_Q;
float h21_I;
float h21_Q;
float h22_I;
float h22_Q;
Table 10: Input/Output MMSE-IRC block data

Moreover some data set files have to be loaded to know the position of useful data
(e.g. pilot subcarrier indexes). In order to estimate the covariance matrix, it is very
important know exactly the CRS positions, so mapping CRS indexes in a data file it is
possible to extract the interested data from a PRB.
So, to estimate the covariance matrix

, it is considered that the estimation of

the total received interferer is obtained subtracting the estimated received signal to
the total received signal, for each OFDM symbol and subcarrier that belong to the CRS
resource elements:

where,

is the 2x2 estimated covariance matrix,

the serving cell at k-th subcarrier and l-th OFDM symbol,

is the CRS sequence of

is the received symbol

59

by UE at k-th subcarrier and l-th OFDM symbol, is the estimate channel response of
the serving cell,

is the number of averaged samples.

The average operation can be done considering a sliding windows to select the number
of PRB and so the number of CRS inside the sliding windows. The parameter K
establishes the size of the sliding window: for example, if K=1 the estimated covariance
matrix, the interferer power at the UE antenna 1 and the interferer power at the UE
antenna 2 are calculated for each PRB.
The following C-code shows the implementation of the sliding window and the
estimations of covariance matrix and interferer powers at the UE antenna 1 and 2:
for(i = 0; i < Nsymb*NFFT; i++)
{
for(i = 1; i <=Nprb-K+1; i++)
{
idx_low = G_LEFT + (i-1)*12;
/* First index within SW */
idx_high = G_LEFT + (i-1)*12 + Nrew_f-1; /* Last index */
if(idx_low >= DC_POSITION) idx_low++;
/* Skip DC */
if(idx_high >= DC_POSITION) idx_high++;
/* Vector with the pilot indexes within the sliding window */
m = 0;
x = 0;
for(n=0; n<Npilot; n++)
{
j = pilot_subcarriers_indexes_1[n] % NFFT;
f = pilot_subcarriers_indexes_2[n] % NFFT;
if(j >= idx_low && j <= idx_high)
{
p_idx_w1[m] = n;
m++;
}
if(f >= idx_low && f <= idx_high)
{
p_idx_w2[x] = n;
x++;
}
}
for(n=0;
{
l
x
j
f

n<Npw; n++)
=
=
=
=

p_idx_w1[n];
p_idx_w2[n];
pilot_subcarriers_indexes_1[l];
pilot_subcarriers_indexes_2[x];

/* Power of the interference on antenna 1 */

z11 = sig1[j] - (c11[j] * p1[l]);
z12 = sig1[f] - (c12[f] * p2[x]);
pz_1 += z11*conj(z11) + z12*conj(z12);

60

/* Power of the interference on antenna 2 */

z21 = sig2[j] - (c21[j] * p1[l]);
z22 = sig2[f] - (c22[f] * p2[x]);
pz_2 += z21*conj(z21) + z22*conj(z22);
/* Correlation of the interference between antenna 1 and 2 */
corrz += (z21)*conj(z11) + (z22)*conj(z12); // r21
}
r11[(i-1)+(K-1)/2] = pz_1/(2*Npw);
r22[(i-1)+(K-1)/2] = pz_2/(2*Npw);
r21[(i-1)+(K-1)/2] = corrz/(2*Npw);
}
}

3.3 Performance of MMSE-IRC receiver

Performance analysis are performed comparing throughput and Raw BER results
between the MMSE-IRC and the Alamouti detection scheme. Several schematics are
created, considering Gaussian interference and real interference. The selected
simulation scenario includes the following parameters: number of interferences, DIP
values, IMCS, useful and interferers signal correlations, Angle of Arrivals (AoA),
colliding or not colliding pilots, modulation, channel types (EPA,EVA) etc.

3.3.1 Interfering signal modeled as Gaussian noise

As starting point, to test the MMSE-IRC block, it is possible to consider a Gaussian

Interference, some useful simulation parameters are:

Extended Pedestrian Channel A (v = 3 km/h);

DL control channel mapping (n=2);

IMCS 7;

QPSK modulation;

Allocated PRB (50 for a 10 MHz bandwidth);

TBS=6200 bits;

2D-MMSE channel estimation;

Medium Correlation useful signal (

);

61

Interfering signal modelled as Gaussian noise (correlation=0.7);

Pilot boost = +3dB;

The simulated results are shown in the following table:

ALAMOUTI
SINR [dB]
-12

MMSE-IRC

THR [Kbit/s]
3

THR [Kbit/s]
Gain [%]
5,4304 74,99919

-8
147,397
259,884 76,31566
-4
1582,582
1975,125 24,80396
0
3673,298
4321,846 17,65574
4
5765,565
5964,164 3,444571
8
6187,587
6186,036 -0,02507
12
6200
6200
0
Table 11: MMSE-IRC and Alamouti THR

MMSE-IRC, in presence of a Gaussian interferer, provides a significant gain in the low

SINR region, that is when the interference level is very high as happen when the UE is
at cell edge. The following figure shows graphically the MMSE-IRC gain respect to
Alamouti receiver, the relevant gains happen in the SINR region from -7dB to +3dB:

MMSE-IRC MIMO 2x2 performance - Med. correlation

7 000
Throughput [kbit/s

6 000
5 000
4 000
3 000

ALAMOUTI

2 000

MMSE-IRC

1 000
0
ALAMOUTI

-12
3

-8

-4

12

147.397 1582.58 3673.3 5765.57 6187.59 6200

MMSE-IRC 5.4304 259.884 1975.13 4321.85 5964.16 6186.04 6200

SNR [dB]
Figure 13: THR comparison (Gaussian Interference)

62

A script matlab is created to verify if the C code implementation in Cocentric is correct,

the throughput results show the same trend and match the expectations. For
completeness, the next figure shows the Raw BER obtained through a MATLAB script
that represent an ideal implementation of the realistic MMSE-IRC algorithm
implemented in Concentric, comparing the ideal channel and interference estimation
with the real one:

Figure 14: Raw BER comparison (Gaussian Interference)

3.3.2 Real Interference signal Colliding pilot case

After having done the preliminary simulations, the real simulator is extended adding
two transmission chains to insert real interference cells. The simulator schematic is
showed in the next figure. In the case of one interferer signal, DIP1=-0.1dB and DIP2=0.001, so the first interferer power is very high and the second one is about zero.
Moreover, several simulations are performed changing the angle of arrival (AoA) of the
interferer, from 0 degree (worst case) to 45 degree (best case). Fixing the AoA of the
useful signal at 0 degree, if the AoA of interferer is 0 degree, the interferer signal is
perfectly aligned to the useful signal so the spatial filtering of the interference is very
difficult. In contrast, if the AoA of the interferer is 45 degree and AoA of the useful

63

signal is 0 degree, the spatial filtering can provide some interference rejection. In
general, it is very important knowing performances in different network scenarios (i.e.
physical layer simulations for different IMCS), also to optimize the network planning.
Adjacent cells can use the same pilot pattern in their transmitted frames or a planning
can be done selecting different pilot positions for each cell.

64

Figure 15: CoCentric MMSE-IRC Double Interferer schematic

Moreover, several simulations are performed changing the angle of arrival (AoA) of the
interferer, from 0 degree (worst case) to 45 degree (best case). Fixing the AoA of the

65

useful signal at 0 degree, if the AoA of interferer is 0 degree, the interferer signal is
perfectly aligned to the useful signal so the spatial filtering of the interference is very
difficult. In contrast, if the AoA of the interferer is 45 degree and AoA of the useful
signal is 0 degree, the spatial filtering can provide some interference rejection. In
general, it is very important knowing performances in different network scenarios (i.e.
physical layer simulations for different IMCS), also to optimize the network planning.
Adjacent cells can use the same pilot pattern in their transmitted frames or a planning
can be done selecting different pilot positions for each cell. Obviously, the UEs,
subjected to a reception of interferer signals, in the first case receives interfered pilots
(colliding pilots case), in the second case receives non interfered pilots (no colliding
pilots case). Both the cases are simulated, showing interesting results.
Lets start with the colliding single interferer case, the simulation parameters are:

Extended Pedestrian Channel A (v = 3 km/h);

DL control channel mapping (n=2);

IMCS 7;

QPSK modulation;

Allocated PRB (50 for a 10 MHz bandwidth);

TBS=6200 bits;

2D-MMSE channel estimation;

Medium Correlation useful signal (

Real Interfering signal, specific correlation matrix as a function of the

);

considered AoA

66

DIP1=-0.1dB and DIP2=-0.001;

AoA1=0, 10, 30, 45;

Angle spread = 10;

Array elements = 2;

Normalized array element distance =

Pilot boost = +3dB;

Colliding pilots between useful and interfering signals.

The comprehensive simulated throughput figure is:

7 000

LTE MIMO 2x2 - Alamouti vs. MMSE-IRC receiver

IMCS 7 - EPA channel - Single interfering cell - Colliding pilots
AoA useful = 0 - AoA interf = variabile - AS = 10

Alamouti (AoA interf=45)

Alamouti (AoA interf=30)

Throughput [kbit/s]

6 000

Alamouti (AoA interf=10)

5 000
4 000

Alamouti (AoA interf=0)

3 000

MMSE-IRC (AoA interf=45)

2 000

MMSE-IRC (AoA interf=30)

1 000

MMSE-IRC (AoA interf=10)

0
-10 -8 -6 -4 -2

10 12 14

MMSE-IRC (AoA interf=0)

SINR [dB]
Figure 16: THR comparison (Real Interference) - Colliding pilots

The above figure shows that the MMSE-IRC receiver provides a gain of 6-7 dB at about
3.5 Mbit/s when the interferer AoA is 45 degree. The gain decreases when the
direction of the interference is close to the useful signal one and becomes negative
when the interferer is perfectly aligned to the useful signal.

3.3.3 Real Interference signal No Colliding pilot case

The simulation scenario is about the same, changing only the pilot pattern for the
interferer signals, modifying appropriately the CRS position inside the resource blocks
(i.e. a pilot pattern shift is applied to the interfering signal). Since pilot are not
colliding, channel estimation is more accurate than in the colliding case, so a better
estimation of interfering signal permits to estimate the interferer covariance matrix
with higher accuracy. This facts are reflected by the simulation results, in fact,
comparing the colliding case with the no colliding case, when AoA of the interferer
signal is 45 degree, the gain of no colliding case is about 6 dB at 5 Mbit/s. For different
interferer AoA the gain and throughput are always consistent.

67

In the colliding case, if the interfering AoA is between 0 and 10 degree, the Alamouti
receiver seems to provide better performances than MMSE-IRC. Conversely, about the
no colliding CRS case, the MMSE-IRC receiver always provides a gain respect to
Alamouti receiver, as shown in the figure below:

Throughput [kbit/s]

LTE MIMO 2x2 - Alamouti vs. MMSE-IRC receiver

IMCS 7 - EPA channel - Single interfering cell - Non Colliding pilots
AoA useful = 0 - AoA interf = variabile - AS = 10

Alamouti (AoA interf=45)

7 000

Alamouti (AoA interf=30)

6 000

Alamouti (AoA interf=10)

5 000

Alamouti (AoA interf=0)

4 000
3 000

MMSE-IRC (AoA interf=45)

2 000

MMSE-IRC (AoA interf=30)

1 000

MMSE-IRC (AoA interf=10)

0
-10 -8 -6 -4 -2

0 2 4
SINR [dB]

10 12 14

MMSE-IRC (AoA interf=0)

Figure 17: THR comparison (Real Interference) - No Colliding pilots

68

CHAPTER 4: SUCCESSIVE INTERFERENCE CANCELLATION

RECEIVERS
4.1 Introduction and comparison
After having implemented and analyzed the performance of the MMSE-IRC receiver, it
is very interesting to extend the research to a class of successive interference
cancellation receivers operating at symbol level (SLIC) and at bit level (BLIC). These
receivers are expected to overcome the MMSE-IRC in terms of performance, even if
the complexity due to presence of N detecting stages is higher than MMSE-IRC
complexity, where N-1 is the number of cancelled interfering signals.
Symbol Level Interferer Cancellation receiver (SLIC) and Bit Level Interferer
Cancellation receiver (BLIC) use both non-linear IC (Interferer Cancellation) techniques
to detect/decoding serving/interfering cells. The main difference between SLIC and
BLIC is that the UE can either use detected symbols to cancel out the interference
(SLIC) or it can perform the full decoding of the signals from the i-th interfering cell.
BLIC receivers compared to SLIC receivers, require the exact encoding scheme
information and exact rate matching information (including RB allocation) of each
interferer. Such information may not be easily available unless provided by network
signaling, which may incur significant signaling overhead as well as scheduling
constraints. Moreover, BLIC introduces additional complexity to perform bit-level
decoding and re-encoding, also introducing larger latencies in the receiver chain.
Compared to the baseline MMSE-IRC receivers, the IC receiver achieves better
performance due to its ability to cancel interferers and demodulate potentially cleaner
signals when decoding the serving cell. The class of IC receivers is especially well
suited to handle strong interferers which can be accurately demodulated and
regenerated avoiding the error propagation effect. The performance gain is a function
of the amount of interference received by the the UE and thus depends on the actual
value of the Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR). For example, in order to be

69

able to detect/decode a strong interferer, the UE needs to either know or estimate

some of its transmission parameters.
The error propagation that may occur in IC receivers due to errors in each stage can
contribute to the performance loss compared to ML receivers. On the other hand, the
complexity of IC receiver is lower than ML.
The SLIC and BLIC complexities are mainly calculated as:

where,

is the channel estimation complexity;

is the detection complexity;
is the interferer cancellation complexity;
is the channel decoding complexity (i.e. Turbo decoding).

About SLIC, channel estimation, detection and interferer cancellation are performed N
times (N is the number of transmitting cells including serving plus N-1 interfering cells)
so the complexity scales linearly; the decoding procedure is perfomed only once for
the serving cell. In contrast, even the BLIC decoding is made N times, typically N turbo
decoding operations, so the BLIC complexity is much higher. Moreover, interference
parameter estimation is significantly more complex for BLIC, since the encoding
scheme and entire RB allocation information are needed for all the interferers.
Finally, SLIC receivers are a good choice for interference cancellation because their
interference cancellation capability gives a reasonable complexity that scales linearly
with the number of interferers. In contrast, the BLIC receiver complexity is higher than
SLIC one, but BLIC can give higher performance due to the turbo decoder that operates
on each interferer.
In the next paragraphs will be presented the description of SLIC and BLIC receivers,
showing implementation details and performance simulation results. The simulation

70

results are presented considering single and double interferers for different spatial
characteristics expressed in terms of Angle of Arrivals (AoAs).
The results show the SLIC gain respect to MMSE-IRC and the SINR window in which it is
possible apply the dynamic on/off switching of the interference cancellation
functionality. BLIC simulation results are compared to the others one, showing that in
terms of performance (Throughput and Raw BER), BLIC receiver is the optimal choice
to reach the highest throughput when the UE is at the cell edge.

4.2 SLIC implementation

SLIC receiver is implemented using a MATLAB simulator for LTE system that consists
of several parts that correspond to the LTE transmission chain. This simulator is
simplified compared to the one developed in CoCocentric, but includes: Turbo
encoder/decoder, multi-antenna transmission, Alamouti encoder/decorder etc. A new
block implementing the SLIC receiver is created and all the operations are done inside.
In this implementation, only two interferers are considered. The next figure shows the
block diagram of the SLIC receiver, all the main operations are showed and in the
following it is provided a mathematical description with the relevant MATLAB
instructions.
The scope of the SLIC receiver is to subtract step-by-step the regenerated interfering
signals. When a UE receives two interfering signals, two estimation steps are made to
estimate the useful signal.

The SLIC receiver, viewed as a black box, can be

represented in MATLAB as a function that returns the SFBC decoded symbols r and
their reliability:
[r,reliability] = slic(y,y1,y2,y3,Heff1,Heff2,Heff3,Nr,Nlay,Cmod);

The input values are:

y is the total received signal (useful plus interferences and AWGN noise)<
y1 is the useful signal;
y2 is the first interfering signal;
y3 in the second interfering signal;

71

72

Heff1 is the estimated channel matrix of the serving cell;

Heff2 is the estimated channel matrix of the first interfering cell;
Heff3 is the estimated channel matrix of the second interfering cell;
Nr is the number of UE receive antennas (i.e. MIMO 2x2);
Nlay is the number of layers;
Cmod is a vector of size M (cardinality of modulation) that contains the
constellation.

At the output of the first step an estimation of the first interferer is provided (the

Figure 18: SLIC receiver

73

strongest). As shown in the Figure, for the first dominant interferer estimation, the
MMSE-IRC receiver receives as input the estimated channel matrix of the second
interfering signal Heff2, the total received signal y and the estimated covariance matrix
considering the residual interference. The covariance matrix is calculated considering
the low complexity formulation treated in the chapter 3, and it is calculated
considering the residual interferer signal viewed excluding the first dominant
interferer:
y_calc1=y-y2;
P1=1/length(y)*sum(abs(y_calc1(1,:)).^2);
P2=1/length(y)*sum(abs(y_calc1(2,:)).^2);
r12=1/length(y)*sum(y_calc1(1,:).*conj(y_calc1(2,:)));
r21=conj(r12);
Ri=[P1 r12; r21 P2];
Ri is a 2x2 matrix that is provided as input to the MMSE-IRC:
[r2,reliability] = mmse_irc(y,Heff2,Nr,1,Ri);
The MMSE-IRC receiver at the first step acts on the total received signal by UE
(denoted as y), knowing the estimated channel matrix of the first interfering signal and
the covariance matrix of the residual interference signal.
The symbols r2 represent a rough estimation of the first interferer symbols. To
improve the estimation, the proposed SLIC receiver regenerates the 1th interferer
making the following operations:

Soft Demodulation (Max log-MAP algorithm)

w = soft_demodulator(r2,Nr,Nlay,Cmod,reliability);
Hard decision
w_hard = zeros(size(w));
idx = w>0;

74

w_hard(idx)=0;
idx = w<0;
w_hard(idx)=1;
Modulation (x-QAM)
r2 = modulation(1,Cmod,w_hard);
Alamouti encoding
s_2 = alamouti_enc(r2);

So, knowing the regenerated Alamouti encoded symbols s2 and the estimated channel
matrix of the first interferer, it is possible to calculate the regenerated first interferer
as:
y2_est=Heff2*s_2;
This signal, subtracted to the total received signal y, permits to calculate the received
signal without the presence of the strongest interferer.
y_2=y_1-y2_est;
This is the input of the second step, in which the second interferer is estimated. At the
second step, MMSE-IRC acts on the second interfering signal knowing its channel
matrix and the covariance matrix of the residual interferer:
y_calc2=y-y3-y2_est;
P1=1/length(y)*sum(abs(y_calc2(1,:)).^2);
P2=1/length(y)*sum(abs(y_calc2(2,:)).^2);
r12=1/length(y)*sum(y_calc2(1,:).*conj(y_calc2(2,:)));
r21=conj(r12);
Ri=[P1 r12; r21 P2];
[r3,reliability] = mmse_irc(y_2,Heff3,Nr,1,Ri);

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After MMSE-IRC, the same procedure is made: soft demodulation, hard decision,
modulation and alamouti encoding. So, the second interference can be estimated and
regenerated:
y3_est=Heff3*s_3;

Having estimated, regenerated and subtracted the first and the second interfering
signals, the remaining part is composed by the useful signal and thermal noise. So, the
useful signal plus noise, is:
y_3=y_2-y3_est;
Applying the MMSE-IRC to this signal, knowing the estimated channel matrix of the
useful signal (Heff1) and the covariance matrix calculated only for the noise, it possible
to obtain the alamouti decoded useful symbols:
y_calc3=y-y1-y2_est-y3_est;
y_3=y_2-y3_est;
P1=1/length(y)*sum(abs(y_calc3(1,:)).^2);
P2=1/length(y)*sum(abs(y_calc3(2,:)).^2);
r12=1/length(y)*sum(y_calc3(1,:).*conj(y_calc3(2,:)));
r21=conj(r12);
Ri=[P1 r12; r21 P2];
[r4,reliability] = mmse_irc(y_3,Heff1,Nr,1,Ri);
The useful symbols r4 is then soft demodulated and turbo decoded.
Finally, the performance measurements can be done, they are showed comparing
Throughput and Raw BER of BLIC, SLIC, MMSE-IRC and Alamouti receivers.

4.3 BLIC implementation

Bit level interference cancellation receiver is implemented in similar way, but for each
step the interfering signal is re-encoded using a turbo encoder.

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The method used for the SLIC receiver applied to MMSE-IRC are the same, but instead
of applying the hard decision after the soft demodulation, in the BLIC receiver the soft
demodulated bits are turbo decoded:
w = soft_demodulator(r3,Nr,Nlay,Cmod,reliability);
z = layer_demapping(w,Ncw,Nlay,M);
[soft_bits_1 soft_bits_2] =
channel_decoding(Ncw,Lp,f1,f2,n_iter,interf_power,z);
After the turbo decoder, a hard decision is done:
w_hard = zeros(size(soft_bits_2));
idx = soft_bits_2>0;
w_hard(idx)=1;
idx = soft_bits_2<0;
w_hard(idx)=0;

So, the re-generated i-th interfering transmitted symbol is turbo encoded, modulated
and SFBC encoded. Multiplying the channel matrix of the i-th interfering signal it is
possible to obtain the regenerated i-th interferer signal. For example, considering the
first step or in other word, the regeneration of the strongest interferer signal:
enc_bits_interf_2, data_bits_interf_2] =
channel_encoding_data(Ncw,Lp,rate,f1,f2,w_hard);
r3 = modulation(1,Cmod,enc_bits_interf_2);
s_3 = alamouti_enc(r3);
y3_est=Heff3*s_3;
Having regenerated the first interference signal correctly, the remaining parts are the
same, paying attention to apply the MMSE-IRC correctly as mentioned before.
In the next page is showed in detail the block diagram of the proposed BLIC receiver.

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Figure 19: BLIC receiver

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4.4 SLIC and BLIC performance analysis

The SLIC and BLIC simulations are done, considering a single interferer and double
interferer cases. Moreover, for each case, simulation results are provided varying the
AoAs, considering:

Single Interferer case: AoA=0, 10, 30, 45;

Double Interferer case: AoA1=10 and AoA2=10, AoA1=10 and AoA2=30,
AoA1=30 and AoA2=10, AoA1=30 and AoA2=30.

The simulation parameters are the following:

Number of transmitting antennas = 2;

Number of receiving antennas = 2;
Number of codeword = 1;
Number of layers = 1;
Number of transmitted packets = 20000;
Symbol period = 0.0714;
Angle spread = 10;
Normalized array element distance = 0.5;
Medium correlation

The single interferer case simulation results are showed in the figures 3 and 4. In this
case a single interferer is consider, this means that DIP1=-0.1 and DIP2=-0.001.
Considering negative SINR, BLIC and SLIC receivers shows a similar throughput, also the
Throughput of MMSE-IRC when AoA1=30 and AoA1=45 is comparable to the BLIC and
SLIC one. When SINR is about 2dB, the SLIC (AoA1=10 and AoA1=0) and BLIC AoA1=0
throughput start to decrease and starting from 3dB MMSE-IRC provides higher
throughput. From this simulations seems that SLIC receiver is the optimal choice when
the SINR is less than about 3dB, while the MMSE-IRC is optimal (in terms of throughput
and complexity) when SINR is higher than about 3dB. Regarding the Raw BER figure,
SLIC and BLIC reach a minimum that shifts varying the AoA, so increasing the SINR, SLIC
and BLIC Raw BER becomes higher than MMSE-IRC ones. The double interferer case
simulation results are shown in the figures 5 and 6, as expected when there are two

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Figure 20: Raw BER - Single Interferer

interfering signals SLIC and BLIC provide higher gain respect to MMSE-IRC and
Alamouti receiver in the low SINR region. In this case, for negative SINR, BLIC receiver
is the optimal choice, while SLIC performances are comparable to the MMSE-IRC ones.
When SINR is higher than about 1dB, the MMSE-IRC becomes the best receiver
because, rather than SLIC and BLIC, does not suffer from the error propagation effect
in the regeneration of the interfering signals.

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Figure 3: Throughput - Single Interferer

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Figure 4: Raw BER - Single Interferer

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Figure 5: Throughput - Double Interferer

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Figure 6: Raw BER - Double Interferer

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CONCLUSION
Symbol level successive interference cancellation and interference rejection combining
receivers represent a good trade-off between complexity and performance results. Bit
level successive interference cancellation is optimal in presence of two interfering
signal when SINR is low (at cell edge), but in presence of single interfering signal or for
a UE close to the base station the switching on-off procedure between SLIC and
MMSE-IRC represents the optimal choice to respect the trade-off between complexity
and performances. From the analysis and simulation tests, it follows that there is no an
optimal receiver useful for all the interferer scenarios, but surely a class of receivers
becoming to the NAICS (i.e. SLIC and BLIC that include MMSE-IRC) are very promising.
Some research activities must be done about the topic of NAICS, in particular to clarify
the type of network assistance and to find new network parameters useful to improve
the UE interference cancellation capabilities. Clearly, since UE will become more
powerful, the research must be address to receiver side, limiting the spectrum usage
foe transmitting assistance from the network. UE could be able to sense the interfering
signals to switch their IC receivers to the optimal one.
This capacity could be reached implementing in software or directly in the chipset
hardware a set of IC receivers, for example starting from: MMSE-IRC, SLIC and BLIC. As
analyzed in the chapter 4, it is possible to subdivide the SINR range in regions in which
the selection of the best receiver can be done on performance basis. Moreover,
identifying accurately (tagging) each interferer signals and tracking their received
powers, would be possible to order and filter each interferer signals in the most
suiable way.

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