Asri Shaheem
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 220
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[Truncated abstract] The transmission of digital information over a wireless communication channel gives rise to a number of issues which can detract from the system performance. Propagation effects such as multipath fading and intersymbol interference (ISI) can result in significant performance degradation. Recent developments in the field of iterative detection have led to a number of powerful strategies that can be effective in mitigating the detrimental effects of wireless channels. In this thesis, iterative detection is considered for use in two distinct areas of wireless communications. The first considers the iterative decoding of concatenated block codes over slow flat fading wireless channels, while the second considers the problem of detection for a coded communications system transmitting over highly-dispersive frequency-selective wireless channels. The iterative decoding of concatenated codes over slow flat fading channels with coherent signalling requires knowledge of the fading amplitudes, known as the channel state information (CSI). The CSI is combined with statistical knowledge of the channel to form channel reliability metrics for use in the iterative decoding algorithm. When the CSI is unknown to the receiver, the existing literature suggests the use of simple approximations to the channel reliability metric. However, these works generally consider low rate concatenated codes with strong error correcting capabilities. In some situations, the error correcting capability of the channel code must be traded for other requirements, such as higher spectral efficiency, lower end-to-end latency and lower hardware cost. ... In particular, when the error correcting capabilities of the concatenated code is weak, the conventional metrics are observed to fail, whereas the proposed metrics are shown to perform well regardless of the error correcting capabilities of the code. The effects of ISI caused by a frequency-selective wireless channel environment can also be mitigated using iterative detection. When the channel can be viewed as a finite impulse response (FIR) filter, the state-of-the-art iterative receiver is the maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) based turbo equaliser. However, the complexity of this receiver's MAP equaliser increases exponentially with the length of the FIR channel. Consequently, this scheme is restricted for use in systems where the channel length is relatively short. In this thesis, the use of a channel shortening prefilter in conjunction with the MAP-based turbo equaliser is considered in order to allow its use with arbitrarily long channels. The prefilter shortens the effective channel, thereby reducing the number of equaliser states. A consequence of channel shortening is that residual ISI appears at the input to the turbo equaliser and the noise becomes coloured. In order to account for the ensuing performance loss, two simple enhancements to the scheme are proposed. The first is a feedback path which is used to cancel residual ISI, based on decisions from past iterations. The second is the use of a carefully selected value for the variance of the noise assumed by the MAP-based turbo equaliser. Simulations are performed over a number of highly dispersive channels and it is shown that the proposed enhancements result in considerable performance improvements. Moreover, these performance benefits are achieved with very little additional complexity with respect to the unmodified channel shortened turbo equaliser.
