1. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting1 PRIN 2005 WOMEN Project– Kickoff meeting Research Unit Università of Napoli Federico II Activities to be carried out within the first semester Giacinto Gelli DIET, Università of Napoli Federico II gelli@unina.it

2. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting2 Research Unit in brief Manpower: 6 researchers + 1 postdoc + 1 PhD student Leader of WP2 “Multi-antenna transceivers for mesh networks” encompassing the following tasks: –T2.1 “Multi-carrier space-time modulation and multi-antenna coding techniques for broadband fading channels” (Roma, Napoli); –T2.2 “Efficient receiver multi-antenna architectures” (Napoli); –T2.3 “Smart antenna techniques for alien-interference mitigation” (Napoli); –T2.4 “Adaptive beamforming” (Roma). Other research activities: –T3.6 “Mesh connectivity layer” within WP3 coordinated by Firenze.

3. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting3 Transceiver design for MIMO channels Task T2.1 Deals with multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) communication systems. MIMO topics: –multiple antenna systems; –multiuser detection; –multicarrier systems (es. OFDM, MIMO-OFDM); –diversity techniques.

4. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting4 Goals of MIMO research To design communication links that offer: High data rate Maximize the channel capacity Quality of service Minimize the error rate Low-cost implementation Trade-off between performances and computational complexity

5. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting5 MIMO channel model Assumptions for the lowpass representation: –channels modeled as finite impulse response (FIR) linear time- invariant (LTI) systems; –additive noise.   inputsinputs outputsoutputs

6. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting6 MIMO equalization (1/2) Receiver ? Research topics (under study): MMSE equalization techniques exploiting the statistical redundancy due to non-circularity of the channel input.

7. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting7 MIMO equalization (2/2) Receiver ? Proposed structures: Widely linear (WL) FIR receivers based on the decision feedback strategy. MIMO channel WL feed-forward filter Decision device WL feed-back filter

8. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting8 MIMO transceivers Transmitter (TX) ? Receiver (RX) ? Channel State Information (CSI) Furher research topics: Joint design of the TX and RX with transmit power constraint: –WL-FIR TX/RX; –optimization critera: MMSE, mutual information, QoS.

9. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting9 Blind adaptive channel shortening (1/3) Task T2.2 In multicarrier systems, channel frequency selectivity can be compensated for by inserting a cyclic prefix (CP) longer than the channel impulse response (CIR). Highly time-dispersive channels -> long CP -> significant reduction of channel throughput. Goal: Minimize throughput reduction by means of a time- domain equalizer (TEQ) at the receiver front-end: –the TEQ shortens the channel so that the combined channel- equalizer impulse response is shorter than the CP length.

10. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting10 Blind adaptive channel shortening (2/3) Traditional channel shortening (CS) techniques need channel knowledge or training sequences. –Drawback: the use of training sequences reduces channel throughput ! Blind CS approaches are able to shorten the CIR, without requiring training sequences. A blind CS algorithm must exhibit three desirable features: –suitable for a large class of CIR; –manageable complexity (adaptive implementation); –fast and global convergence.

11. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting11 Blind adaptive channel shortening (3/3) Existing blind CS techniques rely on: –CP redundancy: low complexity, global convergence; a large amount of data is required to converge. –Auto-correlation minimization: fast convergence, tracking capabilities; high complexity, global convergence is not ensured; –Oversampling of the received signal: fast convergence, high performance; high complexity, batch processing (non adaptive); restrictive assumptions on the CIR to be shortened.

12. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting12 Proposed approach (1/2) The proposed approach (under investigation) relies on oversampling the received signal. Thanks to the time redundancy induced by oversampling, the channel convolution matrix exhibits quite a rich structure, since each column can be linearly parameterized as where is a known matrix, whereas collects the unknown channel parameters. The number of columns of depends on the length of the CIR to be shortened.

13. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting13 Proposed approach (2/2) The combined channel-equalizer response is where collects the TEQ parameters. Shortening the CIR amounts to force to zero some entries of. Vector is chosen so as to minimize the mean-output- energy (MOE) at the TEQ output, with blind constraints preserving only a small number of entries of (smaller than the CP length). Blind constraints are imposed by resorting to the aforementioned parameterization of. Expected features of the MOE-based approach: –easy adaptive implementation; –fast convergence; –mild conditions on the CIR to be shortened.

14. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting14 Equalization, channel identification, and NBI suppression Task T2.3 Space-time block coding (STBC) exploits both temporal and spatial diversity, enabling a significant increase in transmission rate. To decode STBC, channel state information (CSI) must be acquired at the RX by training or blind methods. The amount of training data increases with the number of TX and RX antennas. To avoid a throughput decrease, training approaches can be integrated with blind ones (semi-blind approach), shortening thus the training period. Equalization and interference suppression in multiantenna systems is also more challenging than in single-antenna systems.

15. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting15 Alamouti’s STBC (1/3) Due to size and power limitations, mobile units usually cannot employ more than two antennas. Alamouti’s STBC (AL-STBC) is a popular and practical technique employing two transmit antenna and one receive antenna. In AL-STBC, two consecutive symbol blocks and are subject to space-time encoding: space time

16. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting16 Alamouti’s STBC (2/3) AL-STBC originally proposed for flat-fading channels: –maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding can be performed by using linear processing and multiantenna diversity of order two can be achieved. AL-STBC can be generalized to frequency-selective channels: –ML decoding is computationally heavy: simple linear ML decoding is not directly applicable. To maintain decoding simplicity and advantages of AL- STBC for flat-fading channels, suboptimal decoding approaches must be pursued over frequency-selective channels.

17. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting17 Alamouti’s STBC (3/3) AL-STBC can be regarded as a widely-linear (WL) precoding, which generates an improper (non circular) transmitted signal. When the transmitted signal is improper, it is well-known that WL processing is beneficial. Existing suboptimal decoding approaches for AL-STBC multicarrier systems rely on linear processing and thus do not fully exploit the improper nature of the transmitted signal.

18. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting18 Proposed approach WL processing of the received data: –the received signal and its complex conjugate are jointly elaborated; –the dimensionality of the observation space is doubled -> additional degrees of freedom for RX synthesis. Research topics: –Synthesis of WL generalized zero-forcing (ZF) equalization structures with NBI suppression capabilities. –Design of improved (semi)-blind methods for acquiring CSI.

19. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting19 Mesh connectivity layer (1/2) Task T3.6 Goals: To design a functionality for network topology monitoring and to identify its possible implementation in order to: –provide to any active node the topology knowledge, in terms of node position, state and connectivity; –support routing and network management.

20. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting20 Mesh connectivity layer (2/2) The mesh connectivity layer is composed of: –A cooperative and distributed mechanism for connectivity management in the backbone layer. + –A cooperative and distributed mechanism for localization and mobility management in the ad hoc layer. In both domains the hierarchic organization of the network has to be exploited.

21. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting21 Ad hoc domains The main problem consists of localization and mobility management. A procedure for network clustering (each cluster controlled by a single Wireless Router - cluster head) is necessary. A procedure for monitoring, acquisition and distribution of localization information inside the cluster and toward the cluster head (WR) is necessary.

22. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting22 Localization management The solution is based on a virtual backbone to support localization-information distribution inside the network and toward the cluster head. We look for a distributed algorithm for virtual backbone building and dynamic updating.

23. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting23 Virtual backbone The virtual backbone identifies a subset of nodes as Location Servers (LS). The virtual backbone must: –minimize the number of LS; –control the overhead level; –exploit the intrinsic hierarchic organization of the network.

24. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting24 Application The mesh connectivity layer provides a mechanism for network topology control via cross-layer approach. It can be exploited to support routing, but also for a new MAC protocol for wireless mesh networks.

25. Roma, February 3, 2006WOMEN Project - Kickoff meeting25 MAC research activity Solution: to use the already existent 802.11 MAC protocol and to design an LLC level able to manage temporal and frequential multiplexing and to control the topology in order to adaptively assign the transmitting resources, both reducing the collisions and increasing the throughput. The mesh connectivity layer provides updated information about the network topology and state, and allows one to design a highly adaptive MAC protocol.