Multiplexing

We study two-hop communication protocols where one or several relay terminals assist in the communication between two or more terminals. All terminals operate in half-duplex mode, hence the transmission of one information symbol from the source terminal to the destination terminal occupies two channel uses. This leads to a loss in spectral efficiency due to the pre-log factor one-half in corresponding capacity expressions. We propose two new half-duplex relaying protocols that avoid the pre-log factor one-half. Firstly, we consider a relaying protocol where a bidirectional connection between two terminals is established via one amplify-and-forward (AF) or decode-and-forward (DF) relay (two-way relaying). We also extend this protocol to a multi-user scenario, where multiple terminals communicate with multiple partner terminals via several orthogonalize-and-forward (OF) relay terminals, i.e., the relays orthogonalize the different two-way transmissions by a distributed zero-forcing algorithm. Secondly, we propose a relaying protocol where two relays, either AF or DF, alternately forward messages from a source terminal to a destination terminal (two-path relaying). It is shown that both protocols recover a significant portion of the half-duplex loss

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems use antenna arrays at both the transmitter and receiver to provide communication links with substantial diversity and capacity. Spatial multiplexing is a common space-time modulation technique for MIMO communication systems where independent information streams are sent over different transmit antennas. Unfortunately, spatial multiplexing is sensitive to ill-conditioning of the channel matrix. Precoding can improve the resilience of spatial multiplexing at the expense of full channel knowledge at the transmitter-which is often not realistic. This correspondence proposes a quantized precoding system where the optimal precoder is chosen from a finite codebook known to both receiver and transmitter. The index of the optimal precoder is conveyed from the receiver to the transmitter over a low-delay feedback link. Criteria are presented for selecting the optimal precoding matrix based on the error rate and mutual information for different receiver designs. Codebook design criteria are proposed for each selection criterion by minimizing a bound on the average distortion assuming a Rayleigh-fading matrix channel. The design criteria are shown to be equivalent to packing subspaces in the Grassmann manifold using the projection two-norm and Fubini-Study distances. Simulation results show that the proposed system outperforms antenna subset selection and performs close to optimal unitary precoding with a minimal amount of feedback.

We evaluate the performance of three direct-detection orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) schemes in combating multipath distortion in indoor optical wireless links, comparing them to unipolar M-ary pulse-amplitude modulation (M-PAM) with minimum mean-square error decision-feedback equalization (MMSE-DFE). The three OFDM techniques are DC-clipped OFDM and asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) and PAM-modulated discrete multitone (PAM-DMT). We describe an iterative procedure to achieve optimal power allocation for DC-OFDM. For each modulation method, we quantify the received electrical SNR required at a given bit rate on a given channel, considering an ensemble of 170 indoor wireless channels. When using the same symbol rate for all modulation methods, M-PAM with MMSE-DFE has better performance than any OFDM format over a range of spectral efficiencies, with the advantage of (M-PAM) increasing at high spectral efficiency. ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT have practically identical performance at any spectral efficiency. They are the best OFDM formats at low spectral efficiency, whereas DC-OFDM is best at high spectral efficiency. When ACO-OFDM or PAM-DMT are allowed to use twice the symbol rate of M-PAM, these OFDM formats have better performance than M-PAM. When channel state information is unavailable at the transmitter, however, M-PAM significantly outperforms all OFDM formats. When using the same symbol rate for all modulation methods, M-PAM requires approximately three times more computational complexity per processor than all OFDM formats and 63% faster analog-to-digital converters, assuming oversampling ratios of 1.23 and 2 for ACO-OFDM and M-PAM, respectively. When OFDM uses twice the symbol rate of M-PAM, OFDM requires 23% faster analog-to-digital converters than M-PAM but OFDM requires approximately 40% less computational complexity than M-PAM per processor.