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This paper considers the application of widely linear (WL) receivers in an uplink multi-user system using real-valued modulation schemes, where the cellular base station (BS) with multiple antennas provides connectivity for randomly deployed single-antenna users. The targeted use case is massive machine type communication (mMTC) with grant-free access in the uplink, where the network is required to host a large number of low data rate devices transmitting in an uncoordinated fashion. Four types of WL receivers are investigated, namely the WL zero-forcing (ZF) and the WL minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) receivers, along with their enhanced versions employing successive interference cancellation (SIC) with channel-dependent ordering, i.e., the WL-ZF-SIC and WL-MMSE-SIC receivers. The outage performances of these receivers are analytically characterized in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime and compared to those of conventional linear (CL) receivers using complex-valued modulation schemes. For the non-SIC receivers, we show that, when compared to the CL counterparts, the WL receivers yield a higher diversity gain when decoding the same number of users and have the same diversity gain but a decreased coding gain when the number of users is nearly doubled. The outage performance analysis of WL-SIC receivers is facilitated by the marginal distribution of ordered eigenvalues of a real-valued Wishart matrix. It is shown that the SIC operation with channel-dependent ordering brings no additional diversity gain to the WL receivers but instead increases the coding gain. Moreover, the coding gain of WL-SIC receivers grows as the number of users increases and even exceeds that of CL-SIC receivers under suitable conditions. For the mMTC scenario with grant-free transmission, it is demonstrated that the WL receivers outperform their CL counterparts in terms of offering a lower outage (and packet drop) probability and a higher system throughput for a given packet drop probability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microwave backhaul links are characterized by high signal-to-noise ratios permitting spectrally-efficient transmission. The used signal constellation sizes and achievable data rates are typically limited by transceiver impairments, predominantly by phase noise from non-ideal carrier generation. In this article, we propose a new method to improve the data rate over such microwave links. We make use of the fact that adjacent frequency channels are inactive in many deployment scenarios. We argue that additional data can be transmitted in the skirts of the spectral mask imposed on the transmission signal by regulation. To accomplish this task, we present a shaped wideband single-carrier transmission using non-Nyquist pulse shapes. In particular, we design spectrum-skirt filling (SSF) pulse shaping filters that follow the spectral mask response, and perform detection using an accordingly increased sampling frequency at the receiver. We evaluate the achievable information rates of the SSF-based transmission considering practical dispersive channels and non-ideal transmitter and receiver processing. To compensate for phase noise impairments, we derive carrier phase tracking and estimation techniques, and utilize them in tandem with nonlinear precoding which mitigates the intersymbol interference introduced by the non-Nyquist SSF shaping filter. Quantitative performance evaluations show that the proposed system design achieves higher data rates in a dispersive microwave propagation environment with respect to the conventional transmission with Nyquist pulse shaping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) transmission employing antenna polarization multiplexing and higher order modulation (HoM) schemes can significantly increase the spectral efficiency (SE) of the existing wireless backhaul links. However, the benefits of each of these SE enhancement techniques come with a price. While FTN introduces inter-symbol interference, a dual-polarized (DP) transmission suffers from cross-polarization interference (XPI), and HoM makes a communication system vulnerable to phase-noise (PN) distortions. In this paper, we investigate, for the first time, a DP-FTN HoM transmission system. We propose a XPI cancellation and PN mitigation structure, coupled with adaptive decision-feedback equalization or linear precoding, to jointly mitigate interference and accomplish carrier-phase tracking. The DP systems combined with the FTN signaling presented in this paper offer more than 150% increase in SE compared with a single-polarized Nyquist transmission. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated through computer simulations of a coded DP-FTN microwave communication system in the presence of PN. Numerical results suggest that with the proposed interference cancellation methods, a DP-FTN transmission can yield a 3–5.5-dB performance improvement over an equivalent DP-Nyquist system that employs a higher modulation order to achieve the same data rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the design of linear precoders for secure transmission in the two-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) broadcast channel with confidential messages (BC-CM). The transmitter has multiple antennas, and each user has a single receive antenna. Two independent messages are simultaneously transmitted, one intended for each user, and each message should be kept confidential from the other user. Assuming real-valued transmitted signals, we design the linear precoders subject to total and per-antenna average power constraints, and also subject to amplitude constraints. In both cases, we tackle the design problem via weighted secrecy sum rate maximization. The resulting problem, however, involves a fractional objective, making it nonconvex and difficult to solve. Nevertheless, we show that this difficult problem can be transformed into a more tractable problem, for which a solution can be obtained by an iterative search algorithm. In addition, we characterize a condition under which the obtained solution is guaranteed to be optimal. Furthermore, we show that the problem formulation and solution approach can be easily extended to handle the robust version of the design problem with uncertain channel information. We provide numerical examples to demonstrate the performance of the proposed precoder in terms of the achievable secrecy rate regions subject to the aforementioned constraints. We also demonstrate the performance of the robust precoder under different channel uncertainty levels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) transmission applies non-orthogonal linear modulation to increase spectral efficiency compared with the well-known orthogonal transmission at Nyquist rate. This comes at a price of inter-symbol interference (ISI), which usually is equalized through receiver processing. In this paper, we investigate the alternative approach of pre-equalization at the transmitter. First, we consider Tomlinson–Harashima precoding (THP) for FTN and propose two novel soft demapping algorithms to generate the soft-input for the error-correction decoder. The developed demappers effectively compensate the modulo-loss associated with conventional THP transmission. Second, we propose a linear pre-filtering strategy to pre-equalize the ISI induced by FTN. We show that the linear pre-equalization approach is equivalent to an orthogonal transmission with a modified pulse shape. It thus yields the optimal error-rate performance while affording higher spectral efficiency. We validate our proposed precoding algorithms through computer simulations of a coded coherent optical communication system as a practical application example for FTN. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Vehicular power line communication (VPLC) is being considered as a potential solution to mitigate the increase of complexity and cost of the automotive wiring harness caused by the growth of the number of electronic devices and sensors deployed inside vehicles. This is because VPLC reuses power cables for data communication and, thus, avoids the need for additional communication wires. However, this reuse does not come without problems. One of the challenges for VPLC is the time, frequency, and location dependence of the access impedance, which can cause severe impedance mismatch for the communication signal. Impedance mismatch degrades the signal-to-noise-power ratio at the communication receiver and thus affects transmission reliability. Due to the variable nature of the access impedance, a fixed matching circuit will be inefficient. Hence, in this work, we present an adaptive impedance-matching system, which improves the communication-signal transfer from the transmitting to the receiving device. The system is evaluated via simulations for a wide range of access-impedance test points and $S$- parameters of VPLC networks obtained in previous measurement campaigns. Our simulation results demonstrate that the presented adaptive matching system is able to achieve VPLC signal-power transfer within 30% of the theoretical optimum. This translates to a power gain, up to a factor of 10, which is larger than that of other solutions reported in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most military underwater activities require stealth operations, and hydroacoustic transmissions might temper the mission. For this reason, military underwater acoustic transmission aims for low probability of detection (LPD). LPD communication systems are characterized by low transmission power and reception at low signal-to-noise power ratio (SNPR). As a side effect, LPD decreases acoustic noise pollution. In this paper, we study the LPD capability of underwater acoustic communication (UWAC) systems. We consider an interceptor with target false alarm and detection probabilities and a legitimate receiver with required detection and packet error probabilities. For the interceptor, we focus on an energy detector and calculate the minimal SNPR which satisfies its required performance. For the legitimate communication link, we consider spread-spectrum signaling with several modulation techniques, and calculate the minimal required SNPR to allow reliable detection and decoding of a data packet. Based on these minimal SNPR terms and using bounds on power attenuation in the channel, we quantify the LPD capability of the system and analyze the effect of channel and communication parameters. We also present results from a sea trial conducted in the Saanich Inlet off the coast of Vancouver Island, where we conducted LPD experiments for different transmission powers and carrier frequencies. We provide bounds for the minimal bandwidth and maximal transmission rate for LPD communication. Our results also show that LPD UWAC performs better in shallow and warm water, and for transmission at low carrier frequencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work considers secure downlink transmission in indoor multiple-input, single-output visible-light communication (VLC) links. In particular, we study the design of transmit beamformers that maximize the achievable secrecy rate subject to amplitude constraints imposed by the limited dynamic range of the light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Such constraints render the design problem nonconvex and difficult to solve. We show, however, that this nonconvex problem can be transformed into a solvable quasiconvex line search problem. We also consider the more realistic case of imperfect channel information regarding the receiver's and eavesdropper's links. We tackle the worst-case secrecy rate maximization problem, again subject to amplitude constraints. In our treatment, uncertainty in the receiver's channel is due to limited feedback, and is modeled by spherical sets. On the other hand, there is no feedback from the eavesdropper, and the transmitter shall utilize the line-of-sight channel gain equation to map the eavesdropper's nominal location and orientation into an estimate of the channel gain. Thus, we derive uncertainty sets based on inaccurate information regarding the eavesdropper's location and orientation, as well as the emission pattern of the LEDs. We also consider channel mismatches caused by the uncertain non-line-of-sight components. We provide numerical examples to demonstrate the performance gain of the optimal beamformer compared with the suboptimal schemes, and the robust beamformer compared with its nonrobust counterparts. We also evaluate the worst-case secrecy rate performance of the robust beamformer in a typical VLC scenario along with the aforementioned uncertainty sources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Visible light communication (VLC) reuses illumination devices, particularly light-emitting diodes (LEDs), for communication purposes. It has great potential to alleviate the strain on radio-frequency spectrum in indoor environments. VLC-enabled LED luminaries form VLC attocells that carry downlink data traffic to indoor mobile or stationary terminals. While one of the advantages of indoor VLC is low interference due to natural cell boundaries such as walls, multiple VLC attocells within a room would interfere. This is because illumination requirements often mandate a rich overlap of emissions of luminaries in a room. In this paper, we suggest the coordination of multiple VLC attocells (i.e., VLC-enabled LED luminaries) to turn the problem of overlap and thus interference into an advantage. We stipulate that this coordination can be accomplished through power line communication, which has been considered before as a means to transport data to VLC transmitters. Borrowing from concepts developed for radio-frequency wireless communications, we develop several precoding schemes for the new coordinated VLC broadcasting architecture. These include designs for the case of imperfect channel knowledge at the VLC transmitter, since channel information is usually provided through a low-rate feedback channel. The performance advantages for VLC transmission due to the proposed coordination and precoding designs are demonstrated based on a set of numerical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers improving the confidentiality of visible light communication (VLC) links within the framework of physical-layer security. We study a VLC scenario with one transmitter, one legitimate receiver, and one eavesdropper. The transmitter has multiple light sources, while the legitimate and unauthorized receivers have a single photodetector, each. We characterize secrecy rates achievable via transmit beamforming over the multiple-input, single-output (MISO) VLC wiretap channel. For VLC systems, intensity modulation (IM) via light-emitting diodes (LEDs) is the most practical transmission scheme. Because of the limited dynamic range of typical LEDs, the modulating signal must satisfy certain amplitude constraints. Hence, we begin with deriving lower and upper bounds on the secrecy capacity of the scalar Gaussian wiretap channel subject to amplitude constraints. Then, we utilize beamforming to obtain a closed-form secrecy rate expression for the MISO wiretap channel. Finally, we propose a robust beamforming scheme to consider the scenario wherein information about the eavesdropper's channel is imperfect due to location uncertainty. A typical application of the proposed scheme is to secure the communication link when the eavesdropper is expected to exist within a specified area. The performance is measured in terms of the worst-case secrecy rate guaranteed under all admissible realizations of the eavesdropper's channel. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Underwater acoustic communication networks (UWANs) have recently attracted much attention in the research community. Two properties that set UWANs apart from most radio-frequency wireless communication networks are the long propagation delay and the possible sparsity of the network topology. This in turn offers opportunities to optimize throughput through time and spatial reuse. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive coding method to realize the former. We consider time-slotted scheduling protocols, which are a popular solution for contention-free and interference-free access in small-scale UWANs, and exploit the surplus guard time that occurs for individual links for improving transmission reliability. In particular, using link distances as side information, transmitters utilize the available portion of the time slot to adapt their code rate and increase reliability. Since increased reliability trades off with energy consumption per transmission, we optimize the code rate for best tradeoff, considering both single and multiple packet transmission using the incremental redundancy hybrid automatic repeat request (IR–HARQ) protocol. For practical implementation of this adaptive coding scheme, we consider punctured and rateless codes. Simulation results demonstrate the gains achieved by our coding scheme over fixed-rate error-correction codes in terms of both throughput and consumption of transmitted energy per successfully delivered packet. We also report results from a sea trial conducted at the Haifa harbor, which corroborate the simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pre-rake ultra-wideband (UWB) systems are appealing for UWB communications applications which include devices with different processing capabilities so that signal processing complexity need to be shifted from the receiver of one or more devices to the transmitter of another. Recently, basic pre-rake schemes have been extended to include full pre-equalization, multiple-antenna, and multi-user interference processing. All these design approaches for pre-rake UWB systems have relied on the availability of accurate channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. However, uncertainties in the acquisition of CSI can drastically affect the overall system performance. Therefore, in this paper, we present robust design methods for pre-equalization filters (PEFs) for pre-rake UWB systems that take CSI uncertainties into account. We treat the general case of a broadcast (i.e., multiuser) pre-rake UWB system, which includes single-user communication often considered in literature as a special case. For this general setting, we derive new PEF designs that improve system performance with imperfect CSI. Similar to the literature on robust filter designs for multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) systems, we consider two uncertainty models, namely stochastic and bounded uncertainty, which correspond to different performance optimization paradigms, and we adjust these according to channel estimation of UWB channels. As most of previous work on (pre-rake) UWB, we focus on binary transmission. We argue that widely linear filter design should be applied in this case and thus extend the robust filter design methodology accordingly. Our numerical results for typically UWB test channels demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed design procedures to achieve reliable communication in multiuser pre-rake UWB systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the design of ultra-wideband (UWB) systems that enable high data rate communications for short-range wireless applications. In particular, we consider the downlink of a direct sequence UWB (DS-UWB) system in which the base station is equipped with multiple antennas and employs pre-rake combining, while each user employs a simple single antenna receiver. We propose the use of multiuser filters for the purpose of pre-equalization at the transmitter in order to mitigate the combined effects of intersymbol interference (ISI) and multiuser interference (MUI) that are generated at the receivers as a result of the wideband nature of the users' channels. For this system, we study the joint design of the transmitter's pre-equalization filters and each receiver's scalar gain under two design criteria. The first design minimizes the total transmitted power from the base station subject to achieving physical layer quality of service requirements of different users. For this design, we show that the calculation of the pre-equalization filters and the receiver gains can be formulated as an efficiently solvable convex optimization problem. In the second design, we consider the minimization of a weighted sum of each user's mean-square error. In order to obtain a computationally tractable solution for this design criterion, we exploit the dual DS-UWB uplink that employs rake combining and post-equalization filters at a central receiver. The numerical studies for each design criterion under realistic models of UWB channel propagation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed multiuser pre-equalization filter designs in mitigating ISI and MUI, and thus their ability to enable reliable pre-rake DS-UWB downlink transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multilevel coding (MLC) is the main contender to the celebrated bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) technique for combining binary error-control codes with multilevel constellations. Although MLC has a more complex encoding-decoding structure, it can achieve a larger rate in a number of important scenarios such as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and orthogonal modulation transmission. In this paper, we consider two issues related to the application of MLC. First, we examine the use of general decoding metrics in MLC, including mismatched metrics that arise from approximations to reduce detection complexity. We make use of recent advances in the analysis of BICM and apply those techniques to individual MLC transmission layers. Our contributions include rate analysis and metric-mismatch correction to improve throughput performance of MLC. Second, we consider the combination of MLC with binary rateless codes. Such a combination eliminates the need to carefully design code rate for each MLC layer. In slow fading environments, rateless coding can also seamlessly adapt to the instantaneous channel quality and achieve an increased average throughput compared to a fixed-rate MLC transmission. However, due to the MLC structure, we show that a naive combination of MLC and rateless coding can cause a significant rate loss. Thus, we propose a novel rotation rateless scheme which preserves the rate advantage of MLC over BICM. We provide relevant examples with MIMO, frequency-shift keying (FSK), and pulse-position modulation (PPM) signaling to demonstrate that our scheme can achieve throughput gains compared to BICM in a variety of transmission scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the problem of resource allocation and optimization for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cognitive radio (CR) systems under the assumption of imperfect channel state information (CSI) of the channels between the secondary users (SUs) and the primary users (PUs) at the SUs. We formulate robust design optimization problems for CR systems with one or more SUs communicating over a single or multiple frequency carriers in the presence of multiple PUs. We propose a linear matrix inequality (LMI) transformation that facilitates proper treatment of channel uncertainty at the SU transmitter and we provide solutions to the design problems based on convex optimization and Lagrange dual decomposition techniques. Finally, we demonstrate the importance of the proposed formulations and the implications of ignoring channel uncertainties when designing for CR systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Regulation in Europe and Japan requires the implementation of detect-and-avoid (DAA) techniques in some bands for the coexistence of licensed primary systems and secondary ultra wideband (UWB) systems. In a typical coexistence scenario, a primary system may have potentially interdependent uplink-downlink communication channels (e.g., simultaneous uplink-downlink communications in a frequency division duplex system) overlapping with the frequency band of a UWB system. If such interdependencies of primary systems' activities are known, the UWB system's ability to detect primary systems can be improved. In this study, we are interested in determining the possible gains in the detection performance when taking interdependencies into account for practically implementable detection methods. Contrary to selecting the detection thresholds individually for each band as in a conventional detection approach, the bands are jointly processed. To this end, maximum a posteriori (MAP) decision variables are generated at the receiver, and bias terms are introduced to achieve a desired trade-off between the probabilities of detection and false alarm. In addition to finding the optimal detection results based on the Neyman-Pearson (NP) test, a suboptimal but practically implementable approach is also considered, and the gain compared to conventional independent detection is quantified for various practical scenarios. The results obtained from this study can be used for improving the primary system detection performance of UWB systems, as well as for cognitive radios that perform spectrum sensing in multiple bands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]