Source And Channel Coding Techniques for The MIMO Reverse-link Channel

Abstract

In wireless communication systems, the use of multiple antennas, also known as Multiple-Input Multiple-Output(MIMO) communications, is now a widely accepted and important technology for improving their reliability and throughput performance. However, in order to achieve the performance gains predicted by the theory, the transmitter and receiver need to have accurate and up-to-date Channel State Information(CSI) to overcome the vagaries of the fading environment. Traditionally, the CSI is obtained at the receiver by sending a known training sequence in the forward-link direction. This CSI has to be conveyed to the transmitter via a low-rate, low latency and noisy feedback channel in the reverse-link direction. This thesis addresses three key challenges in sending the CSI to the transmitter of a MIMO communication system over the reverse-link channel, and provides novel solutions to them. The first issue is that the available CSI at the receiver has to be quantized to a finite number of bits, sent over a noisy feedback channel, reconstructed at the transmitter, and used by the transmitter for precoding its data symbols. In particular, the CSI quantization technique has to be resilient to errors introduced by the noisy reverse-link channel, and it is of interest to design computationally simple, linear filters to mitigate these errors. The second issue addressed is the design of low latency and low decoding complexity error correction codes to provide protection against fading conditions and noise in the reverse-link channel. The third issue is to improve the resilience of the reverse-link channel to fading. The solution to the first problem is obtained by proposing two classes of receive filtering techniques, where the output of the source decoder is passed through a filter designed to reduce the overall distortion including the effect of the channel noise. This work combines the high resolution quantization theory and the optimal Minimum Mean Square Error(MMSE) filtering formulation to analyze, and optimize, the total end-to-end distortion. As a result, analytical expressions for the linear receive filters are obtained that minimize the total end-to-end distortion, given the quantization scheme and source(channel state) distribution. The solution to the second problem is obtained by proposing a new family of error correction codes, termed trellis coded block codes, where a trellis code and block code are concatenated in order to provide good coding gain as well as low latency and low complexity decoding. This code construction is made possible due to the existence of a uniform partitioning of linear block codes. The solution to the third problem is obtained by proposing three novel transmit precoding methods that are applicable to time-division-duplex systems, where the channel reciprocity can be exploited in designing the precoding scheme. The proposed precoding methods convert the Rayleigh fading MIMO channel into parallel Additive White Gaussian Noise(AWGN) channels with fixed gain, while satisfying an average transmit power constraint. Moreover, the receiver does not need to have knowledge of the CSI in order to decode the received data. These precoding methods are also extended to Rayleigh fading multi-user MIMO channels. Finally, all the above methods are applied to the problem of designing a low-rate, low-latency code for the noisy and fading reverse-link channel that is used for sending the CSI. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the improvement in the forward-link data rate due to the proposed methods. Note that, although the three solutions are presented in the context of CSI feedback in MIMO communications, their development is fairly general in nature, and, consequently, the solutions are potentially applicable in other communication systems also.