Chapter.

Introduction
The birth of wireless communication dates from late 1800s, when M.G Marconi did the pioneer work establishing the first successful radio link between a land-based station and a tugboat. Since then, wireless communication systems have been developing and evolving with a furious pace and enjoying its fastest growth period in history. The mobile radio communication industry has been growing tremendously in the past decades. Wireless communication whose major goal is to provide multimedia communication at high data rates. The demand of the next generation communication networks is to support wide range of services which includes high quality voice, data, still pictures, streaming videos, and services which require several mega bits per second of data rate. When data is transmitted at high data rates over radio channel the CIR (channel impulse response) can extend to several symbol periods due to multipath signals and resulting ISI (Inter symbol interference). Signals traveling through several paths get reflected by different objects and signals taking less direct path arrive at receiver later and are often attenuated. A common strategy to deal with multipath signals is to ignore weaker signals by which the energy they contain is wasted. Traditional systems employ some improvement techniques to deal with multipath signals; one technique is to use multiple antennas to capture the strongest signal at each moment of time, another technique adds delays to back align the signals. What ever the technique is used, its very much clear that multipath signals are harmful and wasteful (rather). MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) in contrast to traditional systems takes advantage of multipath propagation signals. Rather to apply different techniques to handle with multipath signals MIMO puts multipath signals to work. This is done by sending and receiving more then one data signal in the same frequency band at the same time by using multiple transmit and receive antennas. OFDM (Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) is also a shining candidate to handle the effect of ISI and ICI (Inter carrier interference). OFDM converts the frequency selective wide band signal into frequency flat multiple orthogonally spaced narrow band signals also resulting in high bandwidth efficiency. Wireless channels are multipath fading channels, causing ISI (Inter symbol interference), ISI occurs when a transmission interferes with itself and receiver cannot decode the signal correctly. For multipath signals traveling through different paths have their independent effect imposed by the channel. Signal parameters on which multipath channel have effect are independent path gain (or loss), independent path frequency offset, independent path phase shift (change in angle), independent path time delay. To remove ISI from the signal, many kinds of equalizers can be used. Different techniques are used to handle the changes made by the channel; receiver requires knowledge over CIR (Channel Impulse Response) to combat with the received signal for recovering the transmitted signal. CIR is provided by the separate channel estimator. Usually channel estimation is based on the known sequence of bits, which is unique for a certain transmitter and is repeated in every transmission burst. Which enables the channel

estimator to estimate CIR for each burst separately by using the known transmitted signal and the corresponding received signal.

1.1. Digital Communication:

This thesis addresses methods to estimate the effects made by channel that may occur in a digital communication system. To set the stage for the research presentation, this section gives a short introduction to the principles of a digital communication system. Digital communication systems are normally divided into some functional blocks as shown in figure 1.1

Figure1.1: Digital Communication

The information source is assumed to be digital, the task of the source encoder is to represent the digital information by bits in an efficient way. The bits are then fed into the channel encoder, which adds bits in a structured way to enable detection and correction of transmission errors. Channel encoder introduces redundancy in the information sequence, this redundancy can be used by the channel decoder to reduce the impact of channel effects as noise and interference and the result is increased reliability of the received data. The bits from the encoder are grouped and transformed to certain symbols, or waveforms by the modulator and waveforms are mixed with a carrier to get a signal suitable to be transmitted through the channel. The simplest form of modulation is to map each binary zero to one waveform and each binary one to some other waveform that is easy to distinguish from the waveform representing the zero. This is called binary modulation and is one form of single-carrier modulation. In the last decade, multi-carrier systems have become more popular and especially orthogonal frequencydivision multiplexing (OFDM) has received much attention. With multiple carriers the superposition of several waveforms representing several bits are transmitted at the same time. More detail of OFDM modulation is discussed in Chapter. 2.

In wireless communication, the modulated waveforms can be transmitted into the communication channel using one or several transmitting antennas. A system with one transmitting antenna and one receiving antenna is called a single-input single-output (SISO) system, while systems with several transmitting and receiving antennas are called multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) systems. Multiple transmitting and/or receiving antennas will increase the spatial diversity and can be used to combat channel effects without increasing the bandwidth of the transmitted signal. In communication model the SISO/MIMO channel model represents the physical medium which connects the transmitter and receiver. This medium can be wired line or a wireless connection. All received waveforms will be more or less corrupted due to different factors that are thermal noise from electronic devices, non-linear distortion, interference from other transmissions, atmospheric noise, fading, etc. At the receiver side of the digital communication system, there are one or more receiving antennas. Each antenna receives a weighted and possibly filtered sum of the different transmitted waveforms. The digital demodulator processes these signals and produces a binary stream again. In MIMO systems, the d-modulator/equalizer module reconstructs the transmitted signals from the weighted sums of signals transmitted by different antennas, using the estimate provided by the channel estimator and received signal. The d-modulated signals are passed to the decoder. The decoder analyzes the structure of received bit pattern and tries to detect or correct errors. Finally, the corrected bits are fed to the source decoder that is used to reconstruct the destination signal or digital data input. The modules on which we focus in this thesis are modulator, channel, d-modulator and for most of the part on the channel estimator for MIMO communication systems. Designing of Modulator and demodulator for efficient transmission is a challenging problem. Choice of Modulation scheme is greatly influenced by the environment in which system is supposed to work. Here in this thesis PSK (phase shift keying) is used for modulating the distributed data stream over orthogonal sub carriers. To achieve high performance the receiver needs to know the impact of channel, the problem is how to extract this information in an efficient way. Usually known symbols are multiplexed into the data sequence in order to estimate the channel. From these symbols, all channel attenuations are estimated. The behavior of channel is described by its impulse response and also there is some additive noise which is often modeled as AWGN (additive white Gaussian noise) representing different disturbances in the system.

1.2. Wireless Systems:

Wireless systems operating in an environment have some special operating properties compared to wired systems and these properties identify special design considerations. In wired network there are no movements in the terminals and no reflecting objects creating multipath signals and channel parameters are changing very slowly. In addition, time dispersion is less severe in a wired system, though it might still be a hard problem. In wireless systems the mobile terminals are moving around, received signal strength

and phase are changing rapidly. More over the transmitted signal gets reflected by different objects (buildings, different means of transportation on the ground, etc) leading to different paths to the receiver with different individual path parameters. And if the length of paths differs the received signal will contain several delayed versions of the transmitted signal. To keep things simple, we will assume the existence of a direct path between the transmitter and the receiver. This path is called the line-of-sight (LOS), and is the shortest and strongest path. The reflection paths are longer than the LOS. Therefore, the reflected signals take longer time to reach the receiver. Besides the delay in a reflected signal, we should also expect some signal power loss due to the imperfect reflection as well as the longer distance. The third parameter of a signal path is phase distortion. All the signals we send are complex signals in nature. The phase shift caused by a multipath channel effectively rotates the signal coordinates in a complex plane about the origin. The time varying impulse response can be describes as

y (t ) =

a (t ) (t - ) e
i =1 i i

( ji )

Equation 1

Where a i denotes the i th path gain (or loss). is the time delay for i th path. And i is the i th path phase shift. is the Dirac delta function. i

y (t ) =

x (t ) H
i =1 i

AWGN

Equation 2

Where y(t) is the received signal, xi(t) is the transmitted signal traveling through ith path. Hi is the complex gain of ith path, AWGN is the Additive White Gaussian Noise.

Figure 1.2

Traditional non-MIMO wireless systems are linked over multiple channels by several frequencies, while MIMO wireless systems have multiple links operating at the same frequency. MIMO systems employ multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver

and they transmit different data streams from different antennas simultaneously in same frequency band. More details of MIMO wireless systems are provided in Chapter. 2.

1.3. Packet switching versus Circuit switched:

A wireless system can either be circuit based or packet based switching. Some basics of both are discussed in this section. In packet based systems information bits are grouped together and transmitted in packets, and transmission occurs only when communication is required, connection is shared. These systems are suitable for bursty traffic conditions. While in circuit switched system physical or virtual connection is made and occupied as long as communication proceeds, uses dedicated connection. Circuit switched systems are well suited for real time traffic when delay is a limiting factor. In packet based system receiver have to achieve synchronization in very short time interval. It is hard to track channel variations between the packets, because packets may be traveling through independent paths and therefore fast acquisition algorithms are required. While in circuit switched systems the channel is steady therefore receiver needs to estimate channel more rarely but requires continuous tacking. In today world there is a trend towards more and more packets based data communication; therefore increased challenges of channel tracking are there.

1.4. Evaluation of Telecommunication Systems:

Many mobile radio standards have been developed for wireless systems throughout the world, with more standard likely to emerge. Categorization of Mobile Communication Systems is often made as different generations depending on the services offered. Most first generations systems were introduced in the mid 1980s, and can be characterized by the use of analog transmission techniques, and the use of simple multiple access techniques such as Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA). First generation telecommunications systems such as Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS) [15] only provided voice communications. They also suffered from a low user capacity, and security problems due to the simple radio interface used. Some of the standards are NMT, AMPS, Hicap, CDPD, Mobitex, DataTac Second generation systems were introduced in the early 1990s, and all use digital technology. This provided an increase in the user capacity of around three times [15]. This was achieved by compressing the voice waveforms before transmission [17]. The second generation consists of the first digital mobile communication systems such as the time division multiple access (TDMA) based GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication), D-AMPS (Digital AMPS), PDC and code division multiple access (CDMA) based systems such as IS-95. These systems mainly offer speech communication; GSM with GPRS (General packet radio services) is some times referred as 2.5 generation of mobile networks [34] which provides data communication limited to rather low transmission rates. The second generation standards are GSM, iDEN, DAMPS, IS-95, PDC, CSD, PHS, GPRS, HSCSD, and WiDEN. Third generation systems are an extension on the complexity of second generation systems. The system capacity is expected to be increased to over ten times original first

generation systems. This is going to be achieved by using complex multiple access techniques such as CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access), or an extension of TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access), and by improving flexibility of services available. Currently, transition is happening from 2nd Generation (2G) to 3rd Generation (3G) systems. As a part of this transition, lots of technologies are being standardized. From 2G to 3G: 2.75G - EDGE and EGPRS, and in 3G standards are - CDMA 2000,W-CDMA or UMTS (3GSM), FOMA, 1xEV-DO/IS-856, TD-SCDMA, GAN/UMA. Similarly from 3G to 4G: 3.5G standards are - HSDPA, HSUPA, and Super3G - HSOPA/LTE. A fourth generation (4G) system will provide an end-to-end IP solution where voice, data and streamed multimedia can be served to users on an "Anytime, Anywhere" basis at higher data rates than previous generations. No formal definition is set as to what 4G is, but some objectives are predicted. 4G will be a fully IP-based integrated system of systems and network of networks achieved after the convergence of wired and wireless networks as well as computer, consumer electronics, communication technology, and several other convergences that will be capable of providing 100 Mbit/s and 1 Gbit/s, respectively, in outdoor and indoor environments with end-to-end quality of service and high security, offering any kind of services anytime, anywhere, at affordable cost. According to the 4G working groups, the infrastructure and the terminals of 4G will have almost all the standards from 2G to 4G implemented. Even though the legacy systems are in place to be adopted in 4G for the existing legacy users, going forward the infrastructure will however only be packet based, all-IP. Also, some proposals suggest having an open platform where the new innovations and evolutions can fit. The technologies which are being considered as pre-4G are as follows: WiMax, WiBro, 3GPP Long Term Evolution and 3GPP2 Ultra Mobile Broadband. Recently, multiple antenna technologies are emerging to achieve the goal of 4G systems such as high rate, high reliability, and long range communications. In the early 90s, to cater the growing data rate needs of data communication, many transmission schemes were proposed, a technology, spatial multiplexing, gained importance for its bandwidth conservation and power efficiency.

1.5. Literature Study:

The earliest idea about MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) communication systems go back to work by A.R. Kaye and D.A. George (1970) and W. van van Etten (1975, 1976) [34]. Jack Winters at Bell Laboratories and Jack Salz at Bell Labs published several papers on beam forming related applications in the mid eighties 1984, 1986 [34]. Arogyaswami Paulraj and Thomas Kailath proposed the concept of Spatial Multiplexing using MIMO in 1993. Their US Patent No. 5,345,599 issued 1994 on Spatial Multiplexing emphasized applications to wireless broadcast. In 1996, Greg Raleigh and Gerard J. Foschini refine new approaches to MIMO technology [34]. Bell Labs was the first to demonstrate a laboratory prototype of spatial multiplexing (SM) in 1998 [34], where spatial multiplexing is a principle technology to improve the performance of MIMO communication systems. Lospan Wireless Inc. developed the first commercial system in 2001 that used MIMO-OFDMA technology; Lospan technology supported both diversity coding and spatial multiplexing. In 2006, several companies (Beceem Communications, Samsung, Runcom Technologies, etc.) have developed MIMO-OFDMA based solutions for IEEE 802.16e WIMAX broadband mobile standard. Also in 2006, several companies

(Broadcom, Intel,..) have fielded a MIMO-OFDM solution based on a pre-standard for IEEE 802.11n WiFi standard. Spatial multiplexing techniques makes the receivers very complex, and therefore it is typically combined with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) or with Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) modulation, where the problems created by multi-path channel are handled efficiently. The IEEE 802.16e standard incorporates MIMO-OFDMA. The IEEE 802.11n standard, which is expected to be finalized soon, recommends MIMO-OFDM. [34] The first OFDM scheme was proposed by R. Chang in 1966 for dispersive fading channels [18], which has also undergone a dramatic evolution due to the efforts of S. Weinstein and P. Ebert in 1971, they applied DFT (discrete Fourier transform) to parallel data transmission system as part of modulation and demodulation process to replace the banks of sinusoidal generators [19], which significantly reduced the implementation complexity of OFDM modems. In 1980s OFDM was studied for high speed modems and digital mobile communication. In 1990s OFDM was exploited for wide band data communications. OFDM was selected as the high performance local area network transmission technique. A method to reduce the ISI is to increase the number of sub carriers by reducing the bandwidth of each sub carrier while keeping the total bandwidth constant. In 1993 M. Okada, S. Hara and N. Morinaga [20] proposed that ISI can instead be eliminated by adding a guard interval at the cost of power loss and bandwidth expansion. Channel estimation and channel equalization is an essential issue in designing MIMOOFDM systems. Basic task of equalizer is to compensate the influences of the channel. This compensation requires an estimate of the channel response is available. Often the channel frequency response or channel impulse response is derived from training sequence or pilot symbols, but it is also possible to use non pilot aided approaches like blind channel equalizer algorithms. Channel estimation is one of the fundamental issues of MIMO-OFDM system design. Use of the pilot symbols for channel estimation is an overhead of the system, and it is desirable to keep the number of pilot symbols to a minimum. In [21], Julia proposed a very good approach for OFDM symbol synchronization in which synchronization (correction of frequency offsets) is achieved simply by using pilot carriers already inserted for channel estimation, so no extra burden is added in the system for the correction of frequency offsets. Similarly in [22], it has been shown that the number of pilot symbols for a desired bit error rate and Doppler frequency is highly dependant on the pilot patterns used, so by choosing a suitable pilot pattern we can reduce the number of pilot symbols, but still retaining the same performance. Most common pilot patterns used in literature are block and comb pilot arrangements [23], [24]. Comb patterns perform much better than block patterns in fast varying environments [23]. MIMO uses multiple transmit and receive antennas communicating in same frequency band, [28] which increases the capacity linearly with the number minimum of transmit and receive antennas. The technology however imposes a challenge that is the increased complexity [27] of channel equalization (to separate all the signal paths and to remove the changes caused by the channel) on receiving side. An artificial neural network is an information processing system that has certain performance characteristics familiar with biological neural networks. NN (Neural network) has been developed as generalization of mathematical models of human

cognition or neural biology. Over the last few years, as researchers from different backgrounds have produced a firm theoretical foundation and demonstrated several applications of this rich field of study. Neural networks are useful tools for solving many type of problems, however it has some strengths and limitations as nature of problem differs. Due to high degree non-linearity of NN, they can be effectively used to decode symbols transmitted through difficult channels. Channel equalization can be also regarded as a classification task [16]. NN can form decision regions in the space of received symbol sequences. In particular, due to their universal approximation capability, NN can form arbitrarily shaped decision boundaries [35]. This property defends the introduction of NN to perform task of equalizers. In recent years NN have been often proposed for digital equalization of communication channels, In [1] NN based digital receiver is proposed, which claims that the neural network based receiver achieves better performance in terms of bit error rate for various E b/No values, especially in the case of a Rayleigh multipath channel. In [2] NN based channel estimation technique is proposed for Time Varying Multipath Satellite Channel, showing that the learning algorithm NG(Natural Gradient) can reasonably track the variation of the channel parameters when compared to BPA (Back-propagation Algorithm). In [3] blind channel estimation is done using modified radial basis function, which claims to equalize phase problems more efficiently.

1.6. Motivation:
Fourth-generation (4G) mobile systems is focusing on supporting high data rate services and ensuring error free functional services across a large number of wireless systems and networks, for indoor to outdoor, from one interface to another, and from private to public network infrastructure. Higher data rates allow the deployment of multi-media applications which involve voice, data, pictures, and video over the wireless networks. At this moment, the data rate envisioned for 4G networks is 1 GB/s for indoor and 100Mb/s for outdoor environments [25]. The concept of MIMO system is its motivation to achieve higher throughputs within a given bandwidth. MIMO-OFDM is communication system using multiple antennas (transmit & receive) with OFDM modulation at each antenna, is a promising candidate for 4G systems. Without a good channel estimate, it is not possible to make reliable data decisions. Thus, an accurate and efficient channel estimation procedure is necessary. Several channel estimation techniques related with OFDM systems have been proposed in literature. To define the techniques such as neural network researchers prefer to use the term computational intelligence. In recent years, the art of using neural networks for wireless-communication engineering has been gaining momentum [26]. In [2], neural network based channel estimation technique is proposed for identifying the parameters of a nonlinear time varying satellite channel. Back propagation (BP) and natural gradient (NG) algorithms have been studied for the channel identification technique. It has been found that the learning algorithm NG can reasonably track the variation of the channel parameters when compared to BPA.

1.7. Objectives:

This thesis focuses on research and simulation of MIMO-OFDM communication systems, analyze and test different techniques for channel estimation, propose a new technique based on artificial neural networks, which estimates and compensates the MIMO-OFDM channel effect. Estimate of channel is calculated in terms of synaptic weights and bias values of neural network, whereby, different training algorithms will be analyzed to calculate weight and bias values. The research also attempts to measure the usefulness of neural network based channel estimator by comparing results obtained by use of different NN-training algorithms. Further, length of the training sequence has been varied over a reasonable range and the result has been observed. Finally, a comparison of the results obtained by using different algorithms for training NN with each-other and against the traditional least square algorithm for channel estimation is presented, which along with observations/comments form part of the thesis.

1.8. Outline of thesis:

This thesis is organized as follows: In chapter.2 basics of MIMO, OFDM and MIMO-OFDM systems are presented. It is explained how MIMO communication system work, MIMO channel model is discussed in detail. How signal is modulated at each antenna using OFDM modulation. It is explained how an OFDM signal is formed using the inverse fast Fourier transform, how the cyclic extension helps to mitigate the effects of ISI & ICI. Chapter.3 focuses on various aspects, first we give some general background information on channel estimation with an over view of different approaches in channel estimation are presented, secondly some basics of artificial neural networks are discussed and some details for NN used in our simulation are discussed. Chapter.4 describes the proposed architecture and simulation details. Chapter.5 demonstrates the simulation results of neural networks based channel estimator and compensator, also concludes the thesis.