Cairo University

Faculty of Engineering
Electronics and Communication
Department

Multiuser Detection

Final Exam
2014
Time: 2 hours

This exam consists of five problems with a total number of 55 points. The maximum
grade is 50 points.
You are allowed to have a single-sided cheat sheet during the exam period. Put your
cheat sheet inside your answer booklet at the end of the exam.
Do NOT use any external paper sheets for your answers; there is enough room for your
answers in this booklet.

1. (13 points) Consider a downlink channel with two users. All terminals have one antenna. The channels
from the base station to user-1 and user-2 are denoted by
and , respectively. The base station
schedules the user that has the strongest channel magnitude. Assume the two channels are i.i.d. symmetric
complex Gaussian random variables with variance one.
i.

(2 points) Does this scheduling technique provide fair network access to the users? Justify your
answer (state the reason).

ii.

(2 points) What might be the limitation when using such scheduling technique in practical cellular
networks?

iii.

(2 points) State some other scheduling techniques and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.

iv.

(2 points) Would the system benefit from a multi-user diversity gain? Justify your answer.

v.

(2 points) Write an expression for the outage probability of the scheduled user as a function of the
channel.

vi.

(3 points) Using the outage probability of part-v, evaluate the outage-diversity.

| | and
| | are two independent identically distributed
Hint: if
exponential random variables with density function
, then the cumulative
(
) is ( )
distributive function (CDF) of a random variable
(
) (
) . You may also use the approximation:
(

) for small values of .

i)

ii)

iii)

iv)

v)

vi)

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2. (7 points) Consider a cyclic-delay diversity scheme shown in Figure-1. The modulated symbols
{ ( ) are transmitted on M antennas after applying a cyclic shift
and a cyclic-prefix (CP)
insertion. Specifically, the modulator outputs a block of symbols, each block has N symbols. Each
block is cyclically shifted by
symbols, where
is a symbol-delay unit. A cyclic-prefix is

inserted for each shifted block{ ( )} to obtain the block { ( ) .The length of the CP equals the
maximum delay spread of the channel. The channel is assumed quasi-static flat fading generated by
complex Gaussian process.
i.

(2 points) Assume N=2, M=2, and that there is a total power constraint P over the antennas.
Suggest (draw and explain) a single-antenna receiver to detect the symbols { ( ) .

ii.

(3 points) Assume a zero-forcing equalizer is used. Write an expression for the equalizer
and compute the symbol error probability.
Hint: Recall that cyclic-prefix can be used to diagonalize the channel. The diagonal channel
elements have the same distribution as the original channel coefficients when N=M.
(2 points) Now assume a minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalizer is used. Write an
expression for the equalizer and compute the symbol error probability.

iii.

Figure-1: Transmitter side for a cyclic-delay diversity (CDD) scheme. The symbol
denotes the cyclic delay for antenna i, and CP denotes insertion of a cyclic extension

i)

ii)

iii)

3.

(15 points) Consider an AWGN uplink channel with one base station and two single-antenna users.
The base station is equipped with three antennas. The channels from user-1 and user-2 to the base
station are denoted by the
vectors
and , respectively. Assume that the noise variance is
and that user transmits with power per channel use, where
.
i.
(3 points) Write an expression for the maximum achievable sum-rate of this channel (this rate
will be called SDMA rate throughout this problem)
ii.
(3 points) Assume orthogonal transmission (with a parameter for resource sharing). Write an
expression for the achievable sum-rate
iii.
(3 points) What is the degree-of-freedom achieved by the SDMA scheme and the orthogonal
scheme?
iv.
(2 points) Evaluate the sum-rates obtained in the SDMA scheme and the orthogonal scheme
assuming that
,
and that the channels
and
are given by

v.
vi.

(2 points) Compare the sum-rates obtained in part (iv), and verify which system (if any) gives a
higher rate. Justify your result.
(2 points) For the given values in part (iv), suggest a communication scheme (i.e. transmission
and reception techniques) that can achieve the SDMA sum-rate.
Hint: Note the special structure (relationship) of
and
in part (iv).

i)

ii)

iii)

iv)

11

v)

vi)

11

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12

4.

(15 points) A base station, with two antennas, uses zero-forcing precoding for downlink transmission.
The base station serves two single-antenna users per time-frequency grid. The zero-forcing precoder,
denoted by , can be found by solving the optimization problem
(

where
is the power transmitted for stream-k (dedicated for user-k), and
power constraint.
((

) where the constant b is

i.

(4 points) Show that the power

ii.

(
) )
calculated from the equation (
, and ( ) denotes the
(4 points) The
channel from the base station to user-k is given by . Let the
[

is given by

is the total transmitted

] denote the overall channel matrix such that

power levels obtained from part-i. Find

iii.

given total power

unit of power.
(3 points) The SVD of the channel matrix
[

iv.

][

and

], where

for the channel matrix

( )
channel
and

are the
], and a

is given by:
. Assume that the base station knows the channels

(
) and that each user knows its own channel (there is no cooperation between the
users).
a. If the base station precodes the data with a precoding matrix and then applies a waterfilling algorithm, find the power allocations obtained from the water-filling algorithm.
b. Describe the receiving scheme.
(4 points) Find the rates achieved by the schemes used in part-ii and part-iii assuming unit noise
variance and that capacity-achieving codes are used.

i)

13

14

ii)

iii)

15

iv)

16

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17

5.

(5 points) A base station, with three antennas, uses zero-forcing successive interference cancellation
(ZF-SIC) for uplink reception. The base station serves two users; the first one has two antennas and the
second one has one antenna. The channel between the users and the base station is denoted by
. The first two columns of correspond to the channel between the first user and the base station,
whereas the third column corresponds to the channel between the second user and the base station. The
first user transmits two independent streams on his antennas (the first stream on the first antenna and
the second stream on the second antenna), and the second user transmits one stream on his single
antenna. The channel (the overall channel observed at the base station) is assumed constant for all
transmissions and known by the base station. Assume user-1 transmits with a total power
(equally distributed on his two streams), and user-2 transmits with power
. The matrices and
are given by

i.
ii.

(3 points) Let the vector denote the i-th row-vector of the matrix
. Using the vectors
{
design the ZF-SIC utilized at the base station (draw and explain the different stages).
(2 points) Assuming unit noise variance and that capacity-achieving codes are used, calculate
the achievable sum-rate of this uplink channel.

i)

18

ii)

19