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MIMO OFDM Signal Detection using Quadratic Programming

Farrukh A. Bhatti*, Shoaib A. Khan, Saeed Ur Rehman* and Faiz Rasool* * Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Auckland, New Zealand

Centre for Advanced Studies in Engineering, Islamabad, Pakistan

Email: fbha004@aucklanduni.ac.nz, shoab@carepvtltd.com, sreh008@aucklanduni.ac.nz, fras004@aucklanduni.ac.nz

AbstractIn this paper we present a novel optimization scheme based on quadratic programming (QP) for solving Maximum Likelihood Decoding (MLD) problem in Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signal detection systems. Though the MLD method gives the most optimum mathematical solution for detecting multiple signals at the MIMO receiver, but it is hard to implement because of its high computational complexity, that grows exponentially as the number of transmit antennas or the modulation order is increased. The proposed method has extremely low computational complexity as compared to that of the MLD scheme. The proposed method has also been compared with the Zero Forcing (ZF) method which is the simplest method but has high bit error rates. Overall the QP method offers a good tradeoff between high computational complexity (of MLD) and low error performance (of ZF) for a MIMO OFDM receiver. Index TermsMIMO, OFDM, Quadratic Programming, Space Division Multiplexing

I. INTRODUCTION HE main goals in developing new wireless communication systems are increasing the transmission capacity, improving spectrum efficiency, reducing the systems complexity and making communication more robust against channel impairments. For realizing most of these objectives Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has been a prime candidate in the recent research [1],[2]. OFDM is a multi-carrier modulation scheme in which the high data rate (serial) stream is split into many low datarates parallel streams, modulating orthogonal subcarriers in adjacent sub-bands. Since the bandwidth of the subcarriers is small compared to the channel coherence bandwidth, a frequency-flat channel model is assumed for each subcarrier. The effect of the channel on each subcarrier can thus be represented by a single complex-valued coefficient, affecting the amplitude and phase of the relevant signal. OFDM gives remarkable performance against frequency selective fading channels and in envirnoments offering multi-path effect [1],[2]. OFDM has been standardized for a variety of applications, such as digital audio broadcasting (DAB), digital television broadcasting, wireless local area networks (WLANs), and asymmetric digital subscriber lines (ADSLs).

Important improvements in throughput can be achieved when multiple antennas are applied at both the transmitter and receiver side, especially in a rich scattering environment [3],[4]. The technique that involves simultaneous transmission of independant data streams on different transmit branches of a MIMO system at the same carrier frequency, is referred to as Space Divison Multiplexing (SDM) [5]. This has an obvious advantage of data throughput enhancment. The combination of SDM and OFDM gives throughput enhancement as well as robustness in richscattering envirnoments. Recovering the multiple signals from the mixture of signals is a major task in SDM OFDM system. Considerable research efforts have gone into devising efficient signal detection schemes. There are two main objectives in designing signal detection schemes for SDM OFDM systems. Firstly the system should ensure highly accurate detection of component signals from the signal mixture. Secondly, the systems computational complexity should be kept to as low as possible for feasible implementation in practical scenerio. Most popular signal detection methods include Zero Forcing (ZF) [6], Vertical Bell Labortaries Layered Space Time (VBLAST) [7] and Maximum Likelihood Decoding (MLD). MLD has been shown to be mathematically the most optimum method [8], but its computational complexity increases exponentially as the number of transmit antennas (Nt) or the modulation order (M) is increased. In [9], an ordered successive interference cancellation scheme has been used to improve the BER performance of the K-best algorithm (for MIMO OFDM signal detection) while decreasing the complexity of the method. In [10] the MLD problem has been solved for l1 norm using linear programming, as linear programming cannot handle quadratic terms that arise from the solution of l2 norm. The motivation for this research work was to solve l2 norm for the same problem. For this quadratic programming has been chosen as it can solve a function involving quadratic terms as well. The proposed method exhibits significant reduction in computational complexity even with higher modulation order and higher number of transmit antennas. Though the accuracy of the proposed technique degrades slightly as compared to that of the MLD method. The rest of this paper is organized as following. In Section II, we briefly present the overview of the

Fig. 1. System Model

basic system model; in Section III, we present the proposed signal detection scheme. Section IV presents computer simulation results and finally conclusions are drawn in Section V.

simultaneously and at the same carrier frequency. The reciever recieves an Nr dimensional complex vector y. The baseband equivalent signal model for the ith subcarrier of the ath MIMO OFDM symbol is described as (2): y(i,a) = H(i)s(i,a) +n(i,a) (2)

II. SYSTEM MODEL In this section a MIMO OFDM system comprising Nt transmit antennas and Nr receive antennas is considered. Each transmitter and reciever uses the conventional OFDM modulator and demodulator. It is assumed that the subcarrier bandwidth of OFDM is so narrow that a flat fadding model can be assumed for a subcarrier. The binary data stream is modulated by M point constellation mapper (e.g for 16 QAM modulator M=4). These complex symbols after serial to parallel conversion form the input of IFFT. For computer implementation M is kept as a power of 2. We use a 64 point IFFT/FFT (as in 802.11a standard). In order to minimize the window shaping needed to avoid inter channel interference, the first six and the last five frequency indices are not used and set to zero during the IFFT operation. Also, to eliminate DC component during sampling operations, the frequency index zero is also not used. Therefore 52 frequencies are used for modulation. Let X={X0,X1,..,XN-1} denote the length-N data symbol block. The IFFT of the data block X yields the time domain sequence x={x0,x1,...,xN-1},i.e., xn=IFFT{Xk}(n) (1) where H is an NrNt dimensional complex channel matrix that is assumed constant for the length of a packet transmission (i.e. quasi-static channel). Each entry of H () is a channel coefficient between mth reciever and nth transmitter as shown in Fig.1. Since it is assumed that the system operates in a Rayleigh flat-fading environment, it can be said that H has independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.), zeromean, circularly-symmetric, complex Gaussian entries with unit variance (the variance of each entry is c2 = 1) [11]. The Nr-dimensional vector n represents zero mean, complex Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) with covariance matrix: E[nn*] = n2 INr (3)

Where n* refers to the conjugate transpose of n. The matrix I with subscript Nr, represents the identity matrix with dimension Nr. For our work it is assumed that the reciever has perfect knowledge of H. Perfect synchronization of phase and frequency for the recieved signals is also assumed at the reciever. III. DETECTION BY QUADRATIC PROGRAMMING Our proposed method for detection of MIMO OFDM signal at the reciever stems from MLD method [11], but it differs in the algortithim used to find the solution. MLD method performs a maximum likelihood search over all possible transmitted vectors s. The most likely transmitted vector is found as follows: ml = arg min (4)

To mitigate the effects of multi-path a cyclic-prefix (CP) (also called Guard interval) is appended to the sequence x. The length of CP in our case is 25% percent of N, which is 16 (Ng). Therefore the total length of the OFDM symbol is Ntotal=N+Ng. To avoid inter symbol interference (ISI) we assume that the length of CP is more than the length of discrete time channel impulse response (i.e. Ng ). At discrete times, the transmitter sends an Nt dimensional (complex) signal vector s. The elements of s are sent

3 2 2 2 (9) is a constant term in (9) and it is ignored. Equation (9) is a function of and it can be written in matrix notation as (7). Where and are vectors of length Nt and is dimensional matrix. (10)

where a search is performed over all si that are part of the ensemble si {s1,...sK} formed by all possible transmitted vectors [8],[10]. The number of possible combinations equals: K = M Nt (5)

where M is the number of constellation points and Nt is the number of transmit antennas. MLD is theoretically the most optimum method for MIMO signal detection but it requires an exhaustive search over all the possible vectors for finding the solution. The complexity of this method grows exponentially with increase in M or Nt . Thus MLD becomes infeasible to implement with high M or Nt . Our proposed method treats (4) as an optimization problem and we apply quadratic programming to find the solution vector. A. Quadratic Programming A linearly constrained optimization problem with a quadratic objective function is called a quadratic program. Much like in seperable programming, a modified version of simplex algorithm can be used to find the solution. The general quadratic program can be written as ,

(11)

(6)

subject to inequality constraint . The dimensional vector describes the coefficients of the linear terms in the objective function, and [.]T denotes transpose of the vector. is a dimensional symmetric matrix that describes the coefficients of the quadratic terms. If a constant term exists it is dropped from the model. The decision variables are denoted by the n-dimensional column vector , and the constraints are defined by dimensional matrix A and an mdimensional column vector b. When a feasible solution exists then the constraint region is bounded. B. Objective function The objective function for our proposed method of MIMO OFDM signal detection is obtained by solving (4), which turns out to be a quadratic equation. It has the form which is suitable for the application of quadratic programming. Equation (4) can be written in elaborate vector form as:

(12)

The diagonal elements of matrix are The non-diagonal elements of matrix are equal to their transpose Equation (9) shows the MIMO problem taking the quadratic matrix form. It is a minimization (optimization) problem which is solved by quadratic programming. A vector is found that minimizes (9). We apply inequality constraint to our problem as: (13)

(7)

Solving the inner brackets and taking norm () results in [ ] ]2 ]2

2

(8)

Where is the channel matrix, is the received signal vector of the ith subcarriers of the ath OFDM symbols and is the corresponding transmitted signal vector.

Opening the square terms give

The length of these vectors is Nt. III. SIMULATIONS

(18)

Fig. 2. 8QAM Constellation

C. Separate processing of I and Q channels The received vector consists of complex symbols of the form a , where and are the real and imaginary parts of the complex symbol respectively (also called I and Q channels of a constellation diagram) and . Except for the BPSK symbols that consist of only I channel, rest of the modulation schemes (e.g. 4QAM, 4PSK, 8QAM etc) consist of symbols that have both I and Q components. For dealing with higher order modulation schemes (other than BPSK) we independently solve the real and imaginary components of the received symbol. The vector is resolved into two vectors and , such that and contain the real and imaginary components of the complex symbols of respectively.

We present Bit Error Rate (BER) performance curves that are produced through simulations in MATLAB. Each simulation result shows the performance curves of Maximum Likelihood Decoding (MLD) method, Zero Forcing (ZF) Method and the proposed Quadratic Programming (QP) method, that are simulated under same conditions. The MIMO configurations simulated in this work include 2 2, 3 3 and 4 4 MIMO. Where in each case BPSK, 4QAM, 8QAM and 16QAM modulation schemes have been used in the OFDM blocks. For MIMO case the performance of QP method is almost similar to ZF method (Fig 3 and Fig 4). But for and 4 MIMO QP method shows improvement in BER performance by up to about 10 dB (Figs 5, 6, 7 and 8) as compared to ZF. Fig 9 shows the remarkable computational efficiency that is achieved with the QP method.

(14)

(15)

Inserting and in (7) yields the solution vectors and respectively. The solution vector is obtained as follows: (16)

Fig. 3. BER performance of MIMO system using 8QAM and 16QAM modulation

The solution in (16) is then quantized to the nearest point of the constellation diagram to obtain the final solution. The quadratic programming in our case also has bounds. For and the upper and lower bound vectors are independently chosen depending upon the signal constellation. This is explained with the help of a simple example of 8QAM constellation. The upper bound and lower bound vectors for in case of 8QAM are:

(17)

This is so because the highest and the lowest values of I channel in this case are 2 and -2 respectively. Thus they are the bounds for the problem and the solution should exist within these. Similarly the upper and lower bounds for in case of 8QAM are:

Fig. 4. BER performance of MIMO system using 8QAM and 16QAM modulation

Fig. 5. BER performance of MIMO system using BPSK and 4QAM modulation

Fig. 8. BER performance of 4 MIMO system using 8QAM and 16QAM modulation

Fig. 9. Computation time comparison of QP and MLD methods Fig. 6. BER performance of MIMO system using 8QAM and 16QAM modulation

IV. CONCLUSION This paper has presents a new signal detection scheme for MIMO OFDM systems, which is more effective for systems employing higher number of transmit antennas and higher order modulation schemes. The simulation results show that the proposed QP method offers better results as the number of antennas or the modulation order is increased. As MLD method becomes computationally cumbersome with higher number of antennas and higher order sub-carrier modulation, our proposed scheme is a potential solution for such scenarios. A performance comparison of the proposed QP method is presented with the well-known MLD and ZF techniques where MLD gives the best BER performance and ZF gives the best computational efficiency. The QP method offers a good tradeoff between low error rates and low computation time. This technique would be suitable for real time systems where less computation time is desired.

Fig. 7. BER performance of 4 MIMO system using BPSK and 4QAM modulation

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