Adaptive

Channel Estimation using Cyclic Prefix for Single Carrier Wireless System with FDE
Kyushu Institute of Technology, Jizuka Campus, Kawazu 680-4, lizuka, Japan 820-8502 Email: (wasyafei,nishijo,nagao,kurosaki,ochi) @dsp.cse.kyutech.acjp tRadrixco.ltd. Email: support@radrix.com

Wahyul Amien SYAFEI*, Kunitoshi NISHIJO*, Yuhei NAGAO*, Masayuki KUROSAKI* and Hiroshi OCHIt *Department of Computer Science and Electronics

AbstractIt has been verified recently that single carrier cyclic prefixed (SC-CP) with frequency domain equalizer (FDE) is a promising system for mobile communication and robust channel estimation is needed to build the equalizer's weight. Conventional SC-CP wireless sytem uses training sequences that put in every packet to get the channel information. This increases the overhead of the system. Here we propose a new channel estimation technique by employing cyclic prefix (CP) to maintain both system performance and throughput for this SC wireless system, with 300 kHz bandwidth and 1.6 Mbps throughput. The CP, which is inserted between blocked data to avoid inter-block interference (IBI), can be viewed as a source of channel information. If we can estimate the transmitted CP by conventional way, we can continue to estimate the channel adaptively. The simulation results show that the proposed channel estimation technique can maintain the system performance and gives 14,9 % higher throughput compared with the conventional one when the number of packet is increased. Index Terms-channel estimation, cyclic prefix, frequency domain equalization, single carrier, wireless.
I. INTRODUCTION

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has received a lot of attention. By implementing Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) at the transmitter and FFT at the receiver, OFDM converts an inter-symbol interference (ISI) channel into parallel ISI-free subchannels with gains equal to the channel frequency response (CFR) values on the FFT grid. At the receiver, each subchannel can be easily equalized by a single-tap equalizer using scalar division. To eliminate IBI between successive IFFT processed blocks, a CP of length no less than the CIR order is inserted per transmitted block, and discarded at the receiver. In addition to IBI suppression, the CP also converts the linear channel convolution into circular convolution, which facilitates diagonalization of the associated channel matrix and lead to get the equalizer weight easily. On the other side, an OFDM signal consists of N sinusoidal waves, so a peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) becomes higher as N is increased [1], [2]. It also suffers from intercarrier interference (ICI) due to frequency offset between transmitter and receiver and Doppler shift. All of these drawbacks come from the IFFT at the transmitter. [3], [4]. It also has been verified that carefully designed linear precoding OFDM (LP-OFDM) is more effective in dealing with frequency-selectivity. One very good linear precoder,
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actually annihilates the IFFT at the transmitter, and lends itself to a single-carrier (SC) whether it is cyclic prefixed (SC-CP) or zero-padded (SC-ZP) [5]. This lead to simpler transmitter and better performance compared to OFDM.[4], [6], [7]. Correct channel estimation is very important to the implementation of any communication system. In most system, a known training sequence is sent by the transmitter and a training algorithm is performed by the receiver on the observed channel output and the known input to estimate the channel. The determinictics least square (DLS) channel identification algorithm is such a simple and widely used training approach. However it is not suited for time variant (TV) channel. In practice, we either assume that the channel is time invariant (TIV) and use the initial training to get CIR information or periodically sent this training sequence to track the channel variation. These solutions obviously yield in performance loss or decreasing the throughput. Other solution was proposed in [8], using CP to adaptively estimate the channel in Multicarrier modulation system. The algorithm can track the channel variation and the performance is comparable to system with retraining. However this scheme employs real value of the transmitted time-domain signal by using IFFT size twice bigger than data size. In this paper we propose adaptive channel estimation employing CP in SC modulation with frequency domain equalization (FDE) to maintain both system performance and throughput. CP brings more channel information than Pilot symbols and CP size is shorter than training sequence that usually occupies one block of data. We let the transmitted time-domain signal stays in complex value and use the same size of FFT and the data block. The paper is organized as follows. In Section II we explain the SC-CP with FDE system, obervation on CP, the proposed system and adaptive channel estimation technique using CP. Section III deals with the comparation between the proposed system with conventional and ideal system shown by simulation. Finally, We write some conclusion in Section IV.
II. THE PROPOSED ADAPTIVE CHANNEL ESTIMATION TECHNIQUE

Notation: Upper-case letters denote frequency domain signals; Lower-case letters denote time domain signals; Bold letters denote matrices; (.)T and (.)H denote transpose and Hermitian matrix; [.]i,,j denotes the (i, j)-th entry of a matrix;
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Fig. 1.

The transceiver of SC-CP system with FDE

where DH = diag[H(e'0) H(ei2k ... H(ei2 N ))] is a N x N diagonal matrix with its diagonal entries are CFR which can be obtained by Fh. The FFT output of Eq.l is
F y(k)
=

F h x(k) + F w(k)

(3)
(4)

by considering Eq.2, we obtain

F y(k)
Fig. 2. The proposed adaptive channel estimator
=

DH F x(k) + F w(k) DH X(k) + W(k)

or

Y(k)

(5)

Oij denotes zero matrix with size defined by index (i x j) diag(x) is a diagonal matrix with x on its diagonal.

output above with the inverse of DH.

Zero forcing (ZF) FDE is done by multiplying the FFT

A. SC-CP with FDE System

SC-CP as one kind of LP-OFDM eliminates the need of IFFT at the transmitter. Combining with frequency domain equalizer (FDE) at the receiver, make it gives better performance than OFDM, especially under mobile environment.[5], [9], [10], [11]. Figure 1 shows the transceiver of conventional SC-CP with FDE system. In our proposed system, we enhance the dashed-line bracketed part to build the adaptive channel estimation by employing CP, as illustrated in Fig. 2. If the lenght of CP (v) is equal to or greater than the length of channel impulse response (CIR) (1), i.e.v > 1, we obtain the received signal after removing the CP as:

X(k)

= =

DH' Y(k) X(k) + DH' W(k)

as

(6)

We get the estimated data after IFFT

x(k)

FH X(k) x(k) + DH1 w(k)

(7)

Here we can see that FDE can suppres channel effect from the received data. In the absence of noise, the transmitted data is recovered perfectly. In each packet, conventional system uses 3 blocks of training sequence in the preamble for channel estimation purpose followed by 20 blocks of the data, as illustrated in Fig.3.

y(k)

x(k) w(k)
+

(1)

where x(k) = LXO,k, XI,k, * * *, Xnl,k]T is transmitted data block, w(k) = [WO,k, WI,k, *, Wn_,k]T is aditive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), and h is a N x N circulant matrix with first column is [h O1 n-I]T From circulant matrix properties, we can diagonalize such matrix by pre and post-mulitplication with F and FH, where F is a N x N FFT matrix which its (n, k)-th entry is defined by [F]n,k = N- exp(-j27"nk/N), as:

B. Observation on Cyclic Prefix The CFR information in Eq. 2 is usually obtained by training process. For a time invariant channel, only initial training is needed. However, for a time varying channel, retraining must be done periodically to keep on with the channel variations, otherwise, the system performance degrades. Obviously, such a scheme increases the overhead of the system. In this section we see that by using cyclic prefix, retraining is not necessary to track the channel variations. Let's first consider the received prefix part ycp(k) which is originally discarded. The relationship between ycp(k) and the transmitted prefix xcp(k)
is

FhFH = DH

(2)

y,p(k)

= Tkh +

w,p(k)

(8)

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where Tk is a fat Toeplitz matrix with the lower triangle is composed by transmitted CP [x,p(k)]T and the upper triangle is composed by the previous transmitted CP which is actually the last v part of the previous symbol [x,p(k- 1)]T , or
X-p,k Xm-l,k-I
...

DATA 2'O SC symbols

Preamble B 40 samples Preamble Cl 40 samples Preamble C2 40 samples DATA 1 40 samples 37.5 us 862.5 us
*c
,.

DATA 20 40 samples
20 x 37.5
us =

37.5 us

112.5 us

750

us

~,

Xm-p,k-I

Fig. 3.

Packet Format
p

Tk
X_1,k
...

(9)
X-p,k Xm-1,k-1

where

r(k) = Xir(k - 1) + X2 E xl(k) xH (k)

1=1

(13)

and w,p(k) = [W-p,k ... w l,k]T is the AWGN correspondence to the CP. Note: Xm-p,k-I1 X-p,k-I if all the prefix parts concatenate Hence together to form a pair of sequences {xpl = and P.. Xl ,k-l X-p,k X-l,k ..} X_p,kI
...

is the approximation of the correlation matrix of the transmitted CP, while

z(k)

X1z(k - 1) + X2 > xl(k) y7(k)

1=1

(14)

relationship

IYcp I

I...

between these two satisfies

Y-p,k-I

... Y-1,k-1 Y-p,k

...

Y-T,k *

the

Ycp

xcp * h + wcp

(10)

Eq.10 shows that if we send {xcp} to the channel as the training sequence, the channel output is exactly {ycp}. We can use this training sequences to estimate the channel if we can recover the transmitted CP {xcpj correctly.

is the approximation of the cross-correlation vector between the transmitted CP and the received CP, which is formed 1 as xl(k) = lX-I,k X- ,k X-v,k-I X-v+l,k-I ]T and y1(k) = [Y-l,k ... Y-),k Y-v,k-1 ... Y-v+l,k- ]T, respectively, for 1 = v, v- 1, ... , 1. While X, and X2 are forgetting factors for the data between blocks and within same block, usually we use X2 = 1 and )\ < 1. The channel estimation value is updated every k time.
...

III. SIMULATION RESULTS C. The Proposed System Perfect synchronization is assummed. The main parameters Our proposed adaptive channel estimator as shown in Fig. 2 of the system specification and simulation are shown in Table has 3 different parts compared to conventional one. They are I and Table II. Quantizer, time domain channel estimator and FFT. 1) Time Domain Channel Estimator: Quantizer is used to A. System Performance to reduce the probability of error propagation by quantizing The performance comparation between the ideal, the con(round up) the estimated data after IFFT x(k) to the original ventional and the proposed system, in a static multipath chanQuadrature Amplitudo Modulation (QAM) symbol value. For nel is shown in Fig.4. Ideal system means that the information channel estimation purpose we just take the last v samples of of CIR already provided at the receiver while conventional Quantizer output [xn_v,k -- x_,k] as the estimated CP, (note system uses retraining sequence in every packet i.e. preamble, that Xn-v,k = X-v,k and Xn_l,k = X_ ,k). After arranging these to estimate the CIR. We can see that on low SNR conventional estimated CP to Eq. 9 we can estimate the channel in time system shows good performance. However after 23 dB of domain as SNR, the proposed system gives better performance compared (1 to the conventional one as the SNR is increased. h(k) = T-1 ycp(k)

By the properties of Toeplitz matrix we can obtain the T-1(k) by using Tt(k), where [.]t is the pseudo invers matrix. Since we do the channel estimation in time domain while the equalization is in frequency domain, we need FFT to convert the estimated CIR of Eq. 11 to CFR value then build the zero forcing equalizer coefficient DH. 2) Adaptive Channel Estimation: To make this channel estimator adaptif we use the recursive least-square (RLS) algorithm to get the channel estimation value from Eq.10 due to its good tracking property [12]. Noticing that the data in Eq. 1 and 8 arrive block by block, we use a block RLS method which updates the channel estimation value by blocks. The estimated channel at time k is

B. System Throughput We can calculate the throughput for the conventional system from Table I and II as ND x NBPSC x R (15)

Throughputm,x

Ts YM 30x4x 1 37.5 x 10-6 1.6Mbps

h(k)

r-l(k) z(k)

(12)

where NBPSC is number of coded bit which is defined by modulation type. Since we use 16-QAM, NBPSC = 4. By considering the non-data parts in the preamble, we obtain the data rate becomes (16) Throughput = 20 x 1.6 Mbps = 1.3913 Mbps

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Symbol period (TSYM) [us]

TABLE I SPECIFICATION PARAMETER PARAMETER SC Frequency Carrier [MHz] 265.85 Bandwidth [kHz] 300 Number of data (ND) 30 2 Number of pilot FFT sampling [MHz] 1.066 FFT Point 32 FFT period (TFFT) [PS] 30 CP length (TGI) [us] 7.5

10

Ideal + Retraining Adaptive

10

10

1
. n0

37.5

10-3

TABLE II SIMULATION PARAMETER

Modulation Coding rate (R) Multipath CIR Delay spread [us] Number of transmitted packet (P)

16 QAM 1/2 [1.0 0.813 0.676 0.55 0.447 0.372] 5 5000

10 10 15 SNR (dB) 20 25 30

Fig. 4.

Bit

error

rate comparation in multipath channel

After applying the adaptive channel estimator that employs CP, we annhilate the need of training sequences start from the second transmitted packet and get the higher data rate as 20+20x(P- 1) 1.6Mbps Throughputpro 23 + 20 x (17) (P 1) where P is the number of transmitted packet. As P is increased we almost attain the maximum data rate. In this simulation we send 5000 packets and show the throughput for the first 200 transmitted packets in Fig. 5. Furthermore, certainly the system throughput can be increased by using higher modulation, such as 64 QAM.
x

1.601.

.-

1.55

Maximum Data rate

> 1.50
Q.

Proposed System

1.45
1.40

Retraining System

IV. CONCLUSION In this paper, we have presented an adaptive channel estimation technique using cyclic prefix for SC wireless system with FDE. The proposed system can maintain the system performance and gives 14.9 % higher throughput as the number of transmitted packet is increased. For future work we will enhanced the algorithm and examine the proposed system under dynamic channel then use higher modulation such as 64 QAM to achieve higher throughput.

1.35
0

50 100 150 Number of Transmitted Packet (P)

200

Fig. 5.

Throughput comparation for the first 200 of P

REFERENCES
[1] D Falconer, S. L. Ariyavisitakul, A. Benyamin-Seeyar, and B. Eidson, Frequency Domain Equalization for Single-Carrier Broadband Wireless Systems, IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 58-66, 2002. [2] X. Huang, J. Lu, and J. Zheng, Generalized Circular Transform for in Proc. Vehicular Technology Conf., vol.1, OFDM Transmission, pp.474-478, 2004 [3] S. Ohno, Performance of Single-Carrier Block Transmission Over MulIEEE tipath Fading Fading Channels With Linear Equalization, Transactions on Signal Processing. Vol.54, No.10, pp. 3678-3687, October 2006. [4] Z. Wang, X. Ma, and G.B. Giannakis, OFDM or Single Carrier Block Transmission?, IEEE Transactions on Communications, V6l.52, No.3, pp. 380-394, March 2004. [5] Z. Wang and G.B. Giannakis, Linearly Precoded or Coded OFDM in Proc. of IEEE Workshop on Against Wireless Channel Fades?, Signal Proc. Adnavces in Wireless Comm. Taoyuan, Taiwan, pp. 267270, March 20-23, 2001.

[6] Z. Wang, X. Ma, and G.B. Giannakis, Optimality of Single Carrier Zero-Padded Block Transmission?, in Proc. Wireless Communications Networking Conf. Orlando, Florida, Vol.2, pp. 660-664, March 17-21, 2002. [7] Y P. Lin and S.M. Phoong, BER Minimized OFDM Systems with Channel IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Independent Precoders, Vol.51, No.9, pp. 2369-2380, September 2003. [8] X. Wang and K. J. Ray Liu Adaptive Channel Estimation Using Cyclic IEEE Communications Prefix in Multicarrier Modulation System, Letters Vol. 3, No. 10, October 1999. pp. 291-293. [9] Wahyul Amien Syafei, Kunitoshi Nishijo, Yuhei Nagao, Masayuki Kurosaki, and Hiroshi Ochi. "Performance Verification between OFDM and SC-FDE For Narrowband Mobile Communication System, IEICE Society Conference Procedings, Tottori, Japan, September 12, 2007. [10] A. Czylwik, Comparison between Adaptive OFDM and Single Carrier Modulation with Frequency Domain Equalization, in Proc. Vehicular Technology Conf., vol. 2, Phoenix, AZ, pp. 865-869, 1997. [11] Z. Wang and G.B. Giannakis, Wireless Multicarrier Communications, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. where Fourier Meets Shannon, vol.47, no.3, pp. 29-48, May 2000. [12] S. Haykin, Adaptive Filter Theory, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 4th Edition, 2000.

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