Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Telecommunications and Malaysia International Conference on Communications, 14-17 May 2007,

Penang, Malaysia

Joint Adaptive Modulation Adaptive Beamforming for Mobile Transmissions

S. A. Ibrahim, M. Y. Alias, and N. N. Ahmad, Member, IEEE
Faculty of Engineering, Multimedia University, 63100 Cyberjaya Selangor, MALAYSIA
AbstractSpectrally efficient techniques such as adaptive beamforming (ABF) and adaptive modulation (AM) are two powerful methods to increase the capacity of mobile systems. Adaptive beamforming exploits the spatial knowledge from antenna arrays in suppressing co-channel interference. On the other hand, adaptive modulation maximizes the throughput while maintaining a given target bit error rate (BER) by selecting the modulation mode according to the instantaneous channel quality. In order to maximize the benefits from both techniques, their combination is considered. The simulation of fixed modulation adaptive beamforming (FM-ABF) shows that the degradation in BER is reasonably small even for a large reduction in weight recalculation rate. This motivates the investigation of joint adaptive modulation adaptive beamforming (AM-ABF) system, where adaptive modulator assists adaptive beamformer in determining the need to recalculate the weight. The novelty of this paper lies in the ability of the joint technique to adapt the weight recalculation rate according to the near instantaneous signal-tointerference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), which represents the channel fading rate. Simulation results are shown to compare the performance of the proposed joint AM-ABF with the FM-ABF for the case of one and two interferers. Results for both cases show that the proposed AM-ABF is able to fulfill the target BER 10-2, while improves the performance by reducing the required average received SINR as compared to the FM-ABF technique, with the improvement of up to 10 dB at BER of 110-2. In terms of average bits-per-symbol (BPS) throughput, the joint AM-ABF outperforms FM-ABF at the average received SINR of more than 24 dB and 26 dB for single interferer and two interferers, respectively. Index Terms Adaptive arrays, adaptive modulation, Rayleigh channel, cochannel interference.

HE increasing demand in mobile communication for various high speed multimedia data services entails a robust and high data rate transmission system. Moreover, the increase in number of users amid limited spectrum motivates research on technology to expand the capacity and increase spectral efficiency. However, transmitting signal over time varying multipath fading mobile channel require advanced adaptive techniques in both temporal and spatial domain. Adaptive modulation (AM) and adaptive beamforming (ABF) are some of the recent adaptive methods that have been studied

I. INTRODUCTION

to overcome this challenge [1, 2]. Adaptive beamforming is one of the smart antennas techniques that provides a mean of adaptively reducing the susceptibility to co-channel interference, hence increases the capacity in mobile radio environment [2]. On the other hand, adaptive modulation is a technique that selects modulation mode according to the instantaneous radio channel quality. As compared to the fixed modulation system, which was designed specifically for the worst case channel conditions, adaptive modulation offers higher spectral efficiency, higher throughput and remarkable capacity enhancement without sacrificing bit error rate (BER) or wasting power [1]. From a few recent works which employed both adaptive beamforming and adaptive modulation [3, 4], it has been proven that the combination of these two techniques gives a significant performance gain. In [3], the benefits of using adaptive antenna arrays have been demonstrated, with improved network quality for an increased number of users. These benefits were then extended through the use of adaptive modulation to further improve call quality while simultaneously increasing the data throughput and the number of users supported by the network. Another approach that combines these two techniques was an adaptive modulation system that employed adaptive beamforming weight as one of the varying parameters [4]. The proposed transmitter was based on two dimensional beamformer that optimally adapts the basis beams, the power allocation between the two beams, and signal constellation to maximize the transmission rate, while maintaining the target BER. It is observed that the previous work in [3] used both techniques independently in the same system, while [4] considered an adaptive modulation system that employed beamforming weight vector as one of the adaptation parameters. This paper will study another aspect of potential benefits in joint adaptive modulation adaptive beamforming. Specifically, we are studying a new approach that exploits the adaptive modulator to assist in saving the adaptive beamformers processing power. In this work, adaptive beamformer will recalculate the weight only if the modulation mode transition from certain mode to a lower mode occurs, which indicates an unacceptable degradation in output signalto-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). Therefore, the beamforming adaptation rate will be based on the channel fading rate. This will save the adaptive beamformers

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processing power while maintaining a given target BER and maximizing the throughput. Section II gives the general description of the system. The issue of adaptive beamforming weight recalculation rate is then addressed in Section III. Section IV discusses the simulation results of the proposed combining approach. Finally, Section V concludes this paper. II. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION A. Adaptive Modulation Transmitter Input signal Adaptive modulator

No Transmission BPSK Mode = QPSK 16-QAM 64-QAM

if if if if if

S1 S1 S2 S3

>

SINR

SINR < S2 SINR < S3 (1) SINR < S4 S4

SINR

where the switching level values Sn are chosen to fulfill the target BER. Assuming perfect CSI estimation and no feedback error or delay, the selected mode is sent to the transmitter via feedback channel. It is also assumed that the channel is slow Rayleigh faded channel which does not change significantly within one transmitted signal frame. B. Adaptive Beamforming Figure 2 shows the basic functional diagram of an adaptive beamformer. In this paper, we consider a beamformer that consists of a uniformly spaced linear array (ULA) with L identical isotropic antenna elements. The received complex baseband signal at lth element in kth symbol interval xl ( k ) is multiplied by a complex conjugate of weight vector w l ( k ) . The weighted signals are then summed up to form the array output y (k ) . The received signal consists of a desired signal, M interfering signals and thermal noise. For simplicity, it is assumed that a temporal reference signal is available in the received signal frame, and there is no error in the received reference signal. Complex weight vector is computed by Sample Matrix Inversion (SMI) algorithm. This algorithm is chosen due to its fast convergence and block based adaptation property. x2(k) xL(k)
*

Wireless Channel Feedback Mode selector CSI estimator Receiver Demodulator output

Fading Noise

Fading compensator

Adaptive demodulator

x1(k) Figure 1: General adaptive modulation system. A general adaptive modulation system is shown in Figure 1. Adaptive modulator generates the symbol signals based on the chosen transmission mode. Five possible transmission modes are employed, which are No Transmission, Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK), Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK), 16level square Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (16-QAM) and 64-level square Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (64-QAM). At the receiver, the mode selector selects the appropriate mode based on estimated Channel State Information (CSI). The CSI used in this paper is near instantaneous SINR. The mode that is used is selected as follows;
Reference signal acquisition ABF algorithm W1*

W2*

WL*

+ Output y(k) Figure 2: Basic functional diagram of an adaptive beamformer. The equation for the weight vector that maximize the output SINR is [2]

w = R 1r

(2)

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where r = E{d (k ) x(k )} and R = E{x( k )x ( k )} . R is usually referred as the received signal correlation matrix and

r is the reference signal correlation vector. d * is the complex

conjugate of the reference signal and the superscript H denotes the matrix complex conjugate transpose. With SMI, the weight is estimated by averaging the received signal correlation matrix over K samples interval as [5]

adaptive modulation technique, the mode transition to a lower level shows degradation in SINR, this transition can be used by the adaptive beamformer to indicate the need for weight vector recalculation. If such transition does not occur, the weight vector for the previous received signal frame will be reused for the current received signal frame. This helps the adaptive beamformer to avoid unnecessary continuous weight recalculation in a time varying channel. III. ADAPTIVE BEAMFORMING WEIGHT RECALCULATION RATE An important parameter in adaptive beamforming system is the weight recalculation rate. Normally, this rate is fixed at a certain value which is sufficient for the beamformer to continually adapt with the changes in the environment. Higher recalculation rate is needed in a frequently changing environment such as urban area and low recalculation rate is sufficient in a nearly stationary environment such as fixed WiMAX [7]. An example of work that shows the method of determining the rate is the implementation of smart antenna prototype for Personal Access Communication System (PACS) [8]. It can be seen that the rate is environment specific and need to be determined prior to system implementation. In mobile radio application, due to multipath fading, temporal reference based adaptive beamformer is preferred to spatial reference [9]. Normally, in this type of beamformer, after the weight is determined using the reference signal, the weight is fixed for the entire remaining data signals in the frame. This frozen weight may be desired to avoid additional complexity and continuous updating. Continuous updating will ensure a continuous maximum SINR is achieved at the beamformer output. However, certain SINR degradations from the maximum value can be tolerated as long as it is sufficient for the required performance in terms of achievable throughput or BER. Frozen weight used in temporal reference beamformer is expected to give satisfactory performance as long as the SINR degradation is tolerable within the frozen duration. The constant fixed weight recalculation rate as explained above can be seen as not versatile and some predictions in fading rate is needed prior to the implementation. Inadequate rate will cause performance degradation. At the same time, the processing power needed for the high rate updating circuit also need to be considered. In order to fulfill the rate requirement and at the same time to avoid wasting processing power, we suggest the use of variable weight recalculation rates in joint adaptive modulation adaptive beamforming system. The proposed system will adapt to the environment based on a certain mode transition in adaptive modulation. The transition which indicates unacceptable performance degradation will be used to trigger the adaptive beamformer to recalculate the weight. Hence, weight recalculation is performed only at the needed instants.

1 R (k ) = K

x( k ) x
k =1

(k )

(3)

and the estimated reference signal correlation vector as [5]

r (k ) =

1 K * d ( k ) x( k ) . K k =1

(4)

When a new received signal sample arrived, the estimate of

R can be updated by [6]

H (k + 1) = kR (k ) + x(k + 1)x (k + 1) . R k +1

(5)

C. Joint Adaptive Modulation Adaptive Beamforming Since adaptive beamforming is maximizing the output SINR, it is expected that the highest throughput modulation mode will always be utilized if both techniques are jointly used. In this work, we consider another approach of joint adaptive modulation adaptive beamforming (AM-ABF).

MS

BS with ABF

Output

Calculate SINR Decide AM mode

Feedback Figure 3: Functional block diagram of the proposed joint Adaptive Modulation Adaptive Beamforming. Figure 3 shows the functional diagram of our proposed joint technique. Here, we only consider an uplink transmission since higher complexity processing required at the receiver, which is suitable to be carried out at the base station. At the base stations (BS) receiver, the beamformers output SINR is used as the CSI and the chosen mode will be sent to the mobile stations (MS) transmitter via a feedback channel. Since for an

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IV. SIMULATION RESULTS In a mobile environment, there are a relatively large number of interferers compared to antenna elements. Normally, to simplify the analysis, only the strongest interferers are considered. For our simulation, we consider the case of one and two interferers only. We employ uniformly spaced linear array (ULA) with two antenna elements having a spacing of /2, where denotes the signal wavelength. All the received signals, i.e., the desired and the interfering signals, are affected by Rayleigh flat fading channel. The symbol rate is 256 ksymbols/s, and all mobiles are moving at a velocity of 120 km/h at 900 MHz. The first 10 symbols in each received signal frame are used as the reference signal. We did not consider the effect of errors on the reference signal; i.e., the reference signal symbols were the same as the transmitted symbols. For the interfering signals, randomly generated symbols, independent of the desired signals symbols were used. The first 10 symbols are orthogonal to the desired signals reference sequence. The target BER of 10-2 is used since it is suitable for speech signal as in [3]. The near instantaneous SINR at the output of the adaptive beamformer was calculated by averaging the instantaneous SINR for a frame of 100 symbols. It can be seen in Figure 4 that this estimated near instantaneous SINR is following the envelope of the exact instantaneous SINR.
60 instantaneous SINR near instantaneous SINR 50

modulation adaptive beamforming (FM-ABF) technique. It is observed that most of the time the performance degrades by reducing the rate. However, the degradation is reasonably small for a large reduction in the rate.
10
0

10

-1

10 BER

-2

64-QAM 16-QAM QPSK BPSK

10

-3

10

-4

weight recalculation rate = 2.53 kHz weight recalculation rate = 50.50 Hz

10
-5

10 15 20 average received SINR (dB)

25

30

Figure 5: Average BER for Fixed Modulation Adaptive Beamforming (FM-ABF) versus average received SINR with weight recalculation rates of 2.53 kHz and 50.50 Hz. Let us define the performance degradation as the increase in the average received SINR required for a given BER as we reduce the rate from 2.53 kHz to 50.50 Hz. Figure 5 shows that the largest performance degradation is 2.3 dB increment in the required average received SINR for the BER of 510-2, which occurs when 16-QAM is used. Interestingly, for BPSK, the performance improves for BER between 210-4 and 210-3. This suggests that in some situations, high frequency weight recalculation is unnecessary. This motivates us to propose the joint adaptive system, which enables the use of variable weight recalculation rates. Performance of the proposed joint technique is measured in terms of average BER and average bits-per-symbol (BPS) throughput. Firstly, we consider the performance of the proposed joint technique in the presence of a single interferer. The signal of the desired user arrives from the direction of 0o, while that of the interfering user from 22.5o. Figure 6 shows the BER performance of the proposed AM-ABF that employs variable weight recalculation rates, compared to FM-ABF with a constant weight recalculation rate. It is assumed that the FMABF uses QPSK modulation and the constant recalculation rate of 2.53 kHz. Let us define the AM-ABF performance improvement as the decrease in the average received SINR required for a given BER as compared to the FM-ABF technique. Figure 6 shows that the proposed AM-ABF is able to fulfill the target BER 10-2, while improves the performance by reducing the required average received SINR as compared to the FM-ABF technique for the range of BER between 910-5 and 7.510-2. The largest improvement is 10 dB at BER of 110-2, while the smallest

40 SINR (dB)

30

20

10

0 0

5 6 time (msec)

10

Figure 4: Near instantaneous SINR and instantaneous SINR versus time. In order to investigate the effects of different constant weight recalculation rates on the adaptive beamformers average BER performance, we simulated adaptive beamforming with two different weight recalculation rates. The average BER for weight recalculation rates of 2.53 kHz and 50.50 Hz are plotted versus average received SINR as depicted in Figure 5. The rate of 2.53 kHz and 50.50 Hz corresponds to weight recalculation for every 100 symbols and 5000 symbols, respectively. Different modulation types in this plot represent the fixed modulation type used for the adaptive beamformer, hence this figure represents the plot for fixed

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improvement is 1.15 dB at BER of 1.1410-4. As shown in Figure 7, the average BPS throughput for the proposed AMABF increases as the average received SINR increases, while it is constant for FM-ABF, i.e., 2 bits-per-symbol for QPSK in this case. The throughput of AM-ABF outperforms FM-ABF at average received SINR of more than 24 dB.
10
-1

than 24 dB, it is still the highest modulation mode as compared to the other modes. Hence, the average BER for the AM-ABF is still closer to QPSK as compared to the other modulation types.
1 0.9 0.8 Mode Selection Probability 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 No transmission BPSK QPSK 16-QAM 64-QAM

10

-2

BER

10

-3

10

-4

proposed joint AM-ABF FM-ABF with QPSK target BER

0.1 0

10 15 20 average received SINR (dB)

25

30

10

-5

10 15 20 average received SINR (dB)

25

30

Figure 8: Mode selection probability versus average received SINR for joint AM-ABF in the presence of single interferer. The mode selection probability in Figure 8 also explains the average BPS throughput performance behavior of the AMABF in Figure 7. At the average received SINR of less than 24 dB, the average BPS of the AM-ABF is lower than QPSK due to the deployment of the lower modes, i.e., No Transmission and BPSK, along with QPSK. On the other hand, the utilization of the higher modes, i.e., 16-QAM and 64-QAM, at the average received SINR of more than 24 dB leads to the average BPS performance improvement for the AM-ABF as compared to QPSK.
10
-1

Figure 6: Average BER versus average received SINR for the joint AM-ABF and the FM-ABF in the presence of a single interferer.

2.6 proposed joint AM-ABF FM-ABF with QPSK

2.4

BPS

2.2

1.8

10
1.6

-2

BER

10 15 20 average received SINR (dB)

25

30

Figure 7: Average BPS versus average received SINR for joint AM-ABF and FM-ABF in the presence of a single interferer. Figure 8 shows the mode selection probability for the joint AM-ABF in the case of one interferer. This figure justifies our choice to compare the proposed AM-ABF with the FM-ABF that utilizes QPSK, as this modulation type is the most often mode used in the AM-ABF within this range of average received SINR. It is observed that the probability of selecting QPSK in the AM-ABF increases as the average received SINR increases. This results in the average BER for AM-ABF approaching the FM-ABF at the higher average received SINR, as shown in Figure 6. Even though the probability of selecting QPSK decreases for average received SINR of more

10

-3

proposed joint AM-ABF 10

-4

FM-ABF with QPSK target BER

10

-5

10 15 20 average received SINR (dB)

25

30

Figure 9: Average BER versus average received SINR for the joint AM-ABF and the FM-ABF in the presence of two interferers. Then, we consider the presence of two interfering signals. The direction of arrivals for the desired signal and the first

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interfering signal are similar as in the previous simulation. Meanwhile, the other interfering signal arrives from the direction of 15o. It is shown in Figure 9 that the proposed joint AM-ABF is still be able to fulfill the target BER and improves the performance as compared to the FM-ABF technique. The largest improvement is 10 dB at BER of 110-2, while the smallest improvement is 0.77 dB at BER of 1.1810-4.

V. CONCLUSIONS In this paper, we have proposed a new approach of joint adaptive modulation adaptive beamforming (AM-ABF) technique. The new approach enables the use of variable weight recalculation rates in adaptive beamforming, which avoid wasting processing power. We showed that the proposed joint AM-ABF technique is able to fulfill the target BER and improves the performance in terms of the decrement in the required average received SINR as compared to the fixed modulation adaptive beamforming (FM-ABF) in the presence of one and two interferers. The improvement is up to 10 dB at BER of 110-2 for both cases. In terms of BPS throughput, the AM-ABF outperforms the FM-ABF at a higher average received SINR, which are more than 24 dB and 26 dB for one and two interferers, respectively. REFERENCES
[1]

2.6

proposed joint AM-ABF FM-ABF with QPSK

2.4

BPS

2.2

1.8

1.6

10 15 20 average received SINR (dB)

25

30

[2] [3] [4]

Figure 10: Average BPS versus average received SINR for the joint AM-ABF and the FM-ABF in the presence of two interferers. The increase in the number of interferer is seen to give more effect on the performance in terms of BPS throughput as shown in Figure 10. In this case, the AM-ABF outperforms the FM-ABF at the average received SINR of more than 26 dB, which is 2 dB more than the single interferers case. This is due to the probability of choosing the modes higher than QPSK, i.e., 16-QAM and 64-QAM, increases only after average received SINR more than 26 dB as shown in Figure 11.
1 0.9 0.8 Mode Selection Probability 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 No transmission BPSK QPSK 16-QAM 64-QAM

[5] [6]

[7] [8]

[9]

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Figure 11: Mode selection probability versus average received SINR for joint AM-ABF in the presence of two interferers.

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