2-Norm Condition Number Based Switching Algorithm in MIMO OFDM Systems

Yosra Mlayeh, Fethi Tlili and Adel Ghazel

CIRTACOM laboratory SUPCOM, 2088 Cit e technologique des communications Ariana, Tunisia Email: y.mlayeh@ttnet.tn, (fethi.tlili,adel.ghazel)@supcom.rnu.tn

Amor Nafkha
SCEE-IETR UMR CNRS 6164 SUPELEC, 5 Av. de la Boulaie CS 47601, F-35576 Cesson-S evign e cedex, France Email: amor.nafkha@supelec.fr

AbstractPerformances and capacity of MIMO-OFDM systems are enhanced with adaptive MIMO techniques such as Demmel condition number based switching algorithm. In this paper we show that the complexity of this algorithm can be reduced by using the 2-norm condition number of the channel matrix as the selection metric. Simulation results show that using this selection criterion, the switching algorithm offers the same performances obtained when using the Demmel condition number. Index TermsMIMO, OFDM, Transmit Diversity, Spatial Multiplexing, Matrix Condition Number.

I. I NTRODUCTION In the last decade, multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication systems have been extensively studied. They have many promising features such as array gain, spatial multiplexing gain, diversity gain, interference reduction, and improved capacity as compared to a single-input single-output (SISO) systems [1]. To cope with severe channel conditions, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has become a popular technique for transmission of signals over wireless channels. Channel equalization is simplied because OFDM may be viewed as using many slowly-modulated narrowband signals rather than one rapidly-modulated wideband signal [2]. MIMO-OFDM is currently being considered for a number of developing wireless standards such as digital audio broadcasting (DAB), digital video broadcasting (DVB-T), the IEEE 802.16e, and has been already used in beyond 3G (B3G) and 4G wireless communications [3]; consequently, the study of MIMO-OFDM in realistic environments is of great importance. Multiple antennas can be used to increase data rates through spatial multiplexing or to improve performance through diversity. Diversity techniques use two or more antennas in the transmitter and/or the receiver side to improve the wireless link quality and are not designed to increase the peak data rate of the system [4]. An effective and simple transmit diversity scheme named space time block coding (STBC) was proposed by Alamouti [5]. It encodes the signal through two transmitter antennas and in time to enhance signicantly the BER while preserving a unit code rate. STBC has been generalized for more than two antennas in [6]. On the other hand, spatial

multiplexing is obtained by exploiting the structure of the channel gain matrix to obtain independent signaling paths that can be used to send independent data to offer higher peak throughput [7,8]. Moreover, adaptive algorithms, where the transmitter blocks specications are adjusted according to the channel state, are employed in order to make a successful switching between transmit diversity (TD) and spatial multiplexing (SM) and to enhance the spectral efciency. Many works are interested to enhance the capacity gains using adaptation algorithms, where the selection criterion is based on the knowledge of the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and the determinant of MIMO channel matrix H [9-10]. In order to limit the quantity of feedback and the number of considered parameters in switching decision, other works have studied the adaptation problem in order to enhance the performances of MIMO systems in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) [11-13]; The Demmel condition number of the instantaneous channel matrix was proposed as a parameter based on the minimum Euclidean distance of constellations in order to characterize the suitability of a given instantaneous channel matrix for spatial multiplexing compared to transmit Diversity. The aim of this work is to reduce the complexity of Demmel condition number based switching algorithm. In this paper, we show that the regular (2-norm) condition number of the channel matrix can be used as the metric of selection instead of the Demmel condition number. This processing reduces the complexity of the algorithm will keeping the performances offered by the Demmel condition number based switching. In order to keep the same spectral efciency of the two schemes (SM/TD), we used QPSK modulation for the spatial multiplexing and 16-QAM modulation for the transmit diversity. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II presents the OFDM-based MIMO communication system and an overview of the switching algorithm principle. Then, in Section III, we dene the 2-norm condition number of the channel matrix and we establish the relationship between the 2-norm and the Demmel condition number. In Section IV, we gives the computation complexity of the proposed switching algorithm. Simulation results In Section V illustrate the performances in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) of the switching algorithm using

following that the receiver is able to acquire perfect knowledge of the channel. A signicant difference with receiver diversity at that the transmitter might not have the knowledge of the MISO channel. In this work, MIMO Diversity employs the Alamouti code [5] at the transmitter and the selective combining diversity in the receiver. In OFDM systems, this technique could be applied per subcarrier or per OFDM symbol. We remind that symbols are derived from a constellation with bits per symbol. B. Spatial multiplexing
Fig. 1. Block diagram of WiMAX physical Layer

the two selection metrics. Conclusion and perspectives of the work are outlined in Section VI. II. S YSTEM OVERVIEW Combining MIMO processing with OFDM is the key enabling technology for several current and future broadband wireless access systems and standards (LTE, WiMAX, etc). Let us assume a MIMO-OFDM system with transmit antennas and receive antennas as depicted in Figure 1. Different blocs are dened following IEEE 802.16e specications [3]. First, data are encoded using convolutional codes. After bitwise interleaving, the remaining R=2 (M) bits are then mapped to a symbol using ordinary -QAM constellation. The generated symbols are passed through MIMO encoder. Finally, for each encoded signal, an inverse fast fourier transform (IFFT) of size is performed, and the cyclic prex (CP) is added to mitigate the residual intersymbol interference (ISI) due to previous OFDM symbol. The MIMO module can perform spatial multiplexing, transmit diversity, or beamforming to achieve a constant high data rate and a small outage probability. In this paper, the switching algorithm is used to select between spatial multiplexing and transmit diversity. In the next subsection, we briey describe the TD and SM MIMO techniques in the OFDM context. A. Transmit diversity The main idea behind transmit diversity techniques is to produce different replicas of the transmitted signal to the receiver. If these replicas are sent over the propagation channel such that their statistics are independent, when one of them fades, it is less likely that the other copies of the transmitted signal will be in deep fade simultaneously. Thanks to this redundancy, the receiver can decode the transmitted signal even in fading conditions, as long as they all do not fade simultaneously. Receive diversity may be implemented via two rather different combining methods: the rst method is the selection combining when the combiner selects the branch with the highest SNR among the received signals, which is then used for detection. The second method is the gain combining when the signal used for detection is a linear combination of all branches. Note that we assume in the

When employed at both sides of the link, multiple antennas may also be used to increase the transmission rate (or the capacity) of communication systems. The idea behind spatial multiplexing is that multiple independent streams can be transmitted in parallel over multiple antennas and can be separated at the receiver using multiple reception chains through appropriate signal processing. This can be done as long as multipath channels seen by the various antennas are sufciently decorrelated, as would be the case in a scatteringrich environment. Spatial multiplexing provides data rate and capacity gains proportional to the number of antennas used. At the receiver side, SM streams can be demodulated using optimal detector such maximum likelihood detectors, sphere decoding or sub-optimal detector such as zero forcing (ZF),minimum mean square error (MMSE) detectors [14]. The ZF detector inverts the channel matrix to detect the transmitted symbols. Even though it suffers from poor performances at low SNR, it is employed in this work as the detection scheme because it has a very small complexity that does not depend on the modulation type. The SM offers increasing throughput at a given SNR when the channels matrix are well conditioned. The base station transmits independent data streams from each transmit antenna to the subscribers stations. Thus, during every symbol period, the encoder multiplexes OFDM symbols. As well as the TD technique, the spatial processing could be done per subcarrier inside one OFDM symbol. To ensure that a rate of bits per codeword is maintained, the symbols are derived from a constellation with / bits per symbol. III. S WITCHING ALGORITHM BASED ON D EMMEL
CONDITION NUMBER

The switching algorithm proposed in [11] is based on the Demmel condition number criterion. This metric can provide information about the invertibility of the channel which provides knowledge its goodness for use in spatial multiplexing or transmit diversity operational modes [15]. Let us denote by H the MIMO channel matrix of the subcarrier, then its Demmel condition number is expressed such that: (H ) = H (1)

The notation . refers to the Frobenius norm. The denominator of (1) is the minimum singular value of the subcarrier channel matrix. The Demmel condition number measures how ill posed, that is, how invertible, a given matrix is. Physically, in [11] it was shown that this metric provides a comparison between the minimum signal constellation distance needed to support spatial multiplexing and spatial diversity modes of operation for a given channel. Considering the expression of the Demmel condition number given by equation (1), one sufcient condition that multiplexing will be better than diversity for a given channel matrix is given by [11]: (H ) , , (2)

B. Threshold selection using a 2-norm condition number First, we remind the methodology adopted by [14] to dene this criterion based on a comparison of the minimum Euclidean distance calculated at the receiver for each MIMO technique. For transmit diversity, the squared minimum Euclidean distance in the receiver , for the full rate space-time codes is upper bounded by the following expression [11].
2 , 2 H 2 ,

(4)

For spatial multiplexing, the squared minimum Euclidean distance , is bounded by the following expression:
2 2 2 2 , , 2 ,

(5)

Where , and , are the square-root minimum Euclidean distance of spatial multiplexing and transmit diversity constellations at the transmitter side, respectively. They are dened as: 2 , 2 , = =
,, = ,, =

min min

2 2 G( )2 2

So to guarantee that the minimum Euclidean distance in the receiver side of the spatial multiplexing is greater than that of the MIMO diversity, it is sufcient to verify the condition expressed by equation (2). Using the denition of the Frobins norm, and under the condition that , the expression (4) can be written as:
2 2 2 2 (2 + ( 1) ), , (6) As it has been mentioned before, in order to select the spa2 2 tial multiplexing technique, we need to have , , . To satisfy this condition, we need to verify the following equation: 2 ,

Where , are two different uncoded code-words, is the constellation set, and G is the space-time coded matrix. IV. P ROPOSED SWITCHING ALGORITHM To choose the suitable technique, the Demmel condition number has to be calculated for every subcarrier. Hence, for OFDM systems with high number of subcarriers, this processing needs high computational capability. Aiming to reduce this complexity, we show that the 2-norm condition number could be used as the selection metric of switching algorithm instead of the Demmel condition number. After giving the denition of the regular condition number we address the new adapted selection threshold. A. 2-norm Condition number Let A be an matrix. If = 1 2 ... = are the , = (, ) , singular values of A. Then the 2-norm condition number of A is [16]: A2 A1 2

=1

2 2 (2 + ( 1) ), 2 1 + ( 1) 2

2 2 , 2 , 2 ,

(7)

Then, the spatial multiplexing will be selected if the 2norm condition number of the matrix verify the following expression: 2 1 , ( 2 1) (8) 2 (H ) 1 , V. C OMPUTATION COMPLEXITY The Frobenius norm, used to calculate the Demmel condition number, can be exactly evaluated using the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of the channel matrix. Moreover, the SVD decomposition is an iterative algorithm that is used to calculate all eigenvalues. By using this approach, the computation complexity of the switching algorithm is high. Our proposed algorithm only need the highest and the lowest eigenvalues of the channel matrix. The basic idea to use our algorithm is to use parallel Lanczos method to evaluate the extreme eigenvalues ( , ) of the channel matrix. The Lanczos method is well suited to the task of computing a

2 (A)

= =

(3)

If the condition number is large, the matrix tends to be illconditioned with the convention that 2 for a singular matrix. An ill-conditioned matrix has very bad numerical stability in matrix inverse operations.

Fig. 2. algorithm

Performances of Demmel condition number based switching

Fig. 3. Performances of 2-norm condition number based switching algorithm

few eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a large matrix. The wanted eigenvalues may be at either, or both, ends of the spectrum of the given matrix. VI. S IMULATION CONTEXT & PERFORMANCES
EVALUATION

Results show that as well as the Demmel condition number, the 2-norm condition number could be used as a selection metric in the switching algorithm. In fact The performances offered by the switching algorithm are kept wile reducing the complexity of the algorithm. VII. C ONCLUSION The main contribution of this work is the reduction of complexity of the switching algorithm based on Demmel condition number criterion. We developed a new switching algorithm with reduced complexity. This algorithm use the 2norm condition number as the selection metric. Simulations results show that the 2-norm condition numbed based switching algorithm offer better performances than the transmit diversity or the spatial multiplexing considered separately. R EFERENCES
[1] H. Sampath et al., A Fourth-Generation MIMO-OFDM Broadband Wireless System: Design, Performance, and Field Trial Results, IEEE Commun. Mag., Sept. 2002 [2] M. D. Batariere et al., An Experimental OFDM System for broadband Mobile Communications, IEEE VTC-2001/Fall, Atlantic City, NJ. [3] IEEE Standard for Local and metropolitan area networks, Part 16: Air Interface for Fixed and Mobile Broadband Wireless Access Systems, Amendment 2: Physical and Medium Access Control Layers for Combined Fixed and Mobile Operation in Licensed Bands and Corrigendum 1, 28 February 2006. [4] D. Gesbert, M. Sha, D. Shiu, P. J. Smith and A. Naguib, From Theory to Practice: An Overview of MIMO Space Time Coded Wireless Systems, IEEE Jrnl. on Select. Areas of Comm., vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 281 - 302, Apr. 2003. [5] S. M. Alamouti, A simple transmit diversity technique for wireless communications, IEEE J. Sel. Areas in Comm., vol. 16, no. 8, pp. 1451 - 1458, Oct. 1998. [6] V.tarokh, H.Jafarkhani and A. R. Calderbank Space time block codes from orthogonal designs, in IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, July 1999. [7] A. J. Paulraj and T. Kailath, Increasing Capacity in Wireless Broadcast Systems Using Distributed Transmission/Directional Reception (DTDR), U. S. Patent 5,345,599, Sep. 1994. [8] J. Adeane, W. Q. Malik, and I. J. Wassell, Error performance of ultrawideband spatial multiplexing systems, IET Mircow. Antennas Propagat., vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 363-371, Mar. 2009 [9] C. Han, A. Doufexi, S. Armour, K. H. Ng, J. McGeehan, Adaptive MIMO OFDMA for Future Generation Cellular Systems in Realistic Outdoor Environment, IEEE VTC Spring, May 2006.

In order to evaluate the performances of the proposed algorithm, we reproduce the same physical layer as specied in 802.16e standard. Simulations setting are described in table I.
Channel bandwidth Sub-carriers spacing Number of sub-carriers Cyclic prex OFDM symbol period Modulation for SM / TD Power delay prole Sampling frequency 5 Mhz 10.94 Khz 512 22.8 s 91.4 s 4-QAM / 16-QAM SUI4 channel model 5.6 Mhz

TABLE I S IMULATIONS SETTING

Moreover, to ensure a xed bit rate, the switching module switches between the Alamouti MIMO diversity scheme with 16-QAM modulation and spatial multiplexing with 4-QAM modulation. In each channel realization, we assume having a constant Rayleigh fading channel for every block of 4 OFDM symbols. Simulations are done such as Bit Error Rates (BER) is averaged for every 300 channel realizations. The SUI4 channel model is adopted to generate channels used in the simulations. Curves of Figure 2 illustrate the performances of the switching technique, using Demmel condition number as the selection metric, in comparison with spatial multiplexing and transmit diversity. Results show a signal to noise ratio gain of 2 dB at BER=103 . Curves in Figure 3 illustrate the performances of switching algorithm using the 2-norm condition number as the metric of selection.

[10] C. Han, S. Armour, A. Doufexi, K. H. Ng and Joe McGeehan, Link Adaptation Performance Evaluation for a MIMO-OFDM Physical Layer in a Realistic Outdoor Environment, Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC 2006), Vol. 74, Issue September 2006, pp.1-5. [11] W. Robert, Jr. Heath, and Arogyaswami J. Paulraj, Switching Between Diversity and Multiplexing in MIMO Systems, IEEE Trans. On Comm., Vol. 53, Issue June 2005, pp.962-968. [12] Robert W. Heath Jr., Arogyaswami J. Paulraj; Diversity Versus Multiplexing in Narrowband MIMO Channels: A Tradeoff Based on Euclidean Distance; December 2002. [13] Robert W. Heath Jr., Arogyaswami J. Paulraj; Characterization of MIMO channels for Spatial Multiplexing Systems; Proc. of IEEE International Conf. on Communications, Helsinki, Finland, June 11 - 14, 2001 [14] J. Adeane, W. Q. Malik, and I. J. Wassell, Error performance of ultrawideband spatial multiplexing systems, IET Mircow. Antennas Propagat., vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 363-371, Mar. 2009 [15] J. W. Demmel, The probability that a numerical analysis problem is difcult, Math. Comput., pp. 449-480, 1988. [16] Alan Edelman, On the Distribution of a scaled Condition number Mathematics of computation ISSN 0025-5718, 1992, vol. 58, no197, pp. 185-190.