Transmission Experiment of Bandwidth Compressed Carrier Aggregation in a Realistic Fading Channel

In this paper, an experimental testbed is designed to evaluate the performance of a bandwidth compressed multicarrier technique, termed spectrally efficient frequency division multiplexing (SEFDM) in a carrier aggregation (CA) scenario. Unlike orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), SEFDM is a nonorthogonal waveform which, relative to OFDM, packs more subcarriers in a given bandwidth, thereby improving spectral efficiency. CA is a long-term evolution-advanced (LTE-Advanced) featured technique that offers a higher throughput by aggregating multiple legacy radio bands. Considering the scarcity of the radio spectrum, SEFDM signals can be utilized to enhance CA performance. The combination of the two techniques results in a larger number of aggregated component carriers (CCs) and, therefore, increased data rate in a given bandwidth with no additional spectral allocation. It is experimentally shown that CA-SEFDM can aggregate up to seven CCs in a limited bandwidth, while CA-OFDM can only put five CCs in the same bandwidth. In this paper, LTE-like framed CA-SEFDM signals are generated and delivered through a realistic LTE channel. A complete experimental setup is described, together with error performance and effective spectral efficiency comparisons. Experimental results show that the measured bit error rate performance for CA-SEFDM is very close to CA-OFDM and that the effective spectral efficiency of CA-SEFDM can be substantially higher than that of CA-OFDM.

[1]  John Cocke,et al.  Optimal decoding of linear codes for minimizing symbol error rate (Corresp.) , 1974, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[2]  J. E. Mazo,et al.  Faster than Nyquist Signaling: Algorithms to Silicon , 2014 .

[3]  Donald C. Cox,et al.  Robust frequency and timing synchronization for OFDM , 1997, IEEE Trans. Commun..

[4]  Joachim Hagenauer,et al.  The turbo principle-tutorial introduction and state of the art , 1997 .

[5]  Izzat Darwazeh,et al.  A Spectrally Efficient Frequency Division Multiplexing Based Communication System , 2003 .

[6]  Stephan ten Brink,et al.  Achieving near-capacity on a multiple-antenna channel , 2003, IEEE Trans. Commun..

[7]  Fredrik Rusek,et al.  The two dimensional Mazo limit , 2005, Proceedings. International Symposium on Information Theory, 2005. ISIT 2005..

[8]  Fredrik Rusek,et al.  Improving OFDM: Multistream Faster-than-Nyquist Signaling , 2006 .

[9]  Dario Fertonani,et al.  Time-frequency packing for linear modulations: spectral efficiency and practical detection schemes , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Communications.

[10]  Fredrik Rusek,et al.  Multistream Faster than Nyquist Signaling , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Communications.

[11]  Gerhard Fettweis,et al.  GFDM - Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing , 2009, VTC Spring 2009 - IEEE 69th Vehicular Technology Conference.

[12]  Izzat Darwazeh,et al.  A Fast Constrained Sphere Decoder for Ill Conditioned Communication Systems , 2010, IEEE Communications Letters.

[13]  Izzat Darwazeh,et al.  Joint channel equalization and detection of Spectrally Efficient FDM signals , 2010, 21st Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications.

[14]  Kamran Etemad,et al.  Carrier aggregation framework in 3GPP LTE-advanced [WiMAX/LTE Update] , 2010, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[15]  Klaus I. Pedersen,et al.  Carrier aggregation for LTE-advanced: functionality and performance aspects , 2011, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[16]  Behrouz Farhang-Boroujeny,et al.  OFDM Versus Filter Bank Multicarrier , 2011, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

[17]  Izzat Darwazeh,et al.  A Truncated SVD approach for fixed complexity spectrally efficient FDM receivers , 2011, 2011 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference.

[18]  Izzat Darwazeh,et al.  VLSI architecture for a reconfigurable Spectrally Efficient FDM baseband transmitter , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Symposium of Circuits and Systems (ISCAS).

[19]  Zhouyue Pi,et al.  LTE-advanced modem design: challenges and perspectives , 2012, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[20]  Izzat Darwazeh,et al.  Robust channel estimation for Spectrally Efficient FDM system , 2012, 2012 19th International Conference on Telecommunications (ICT).

[21]  Izzat Darwazeh,et al.  An Improved Fixed Sphere Decoder Employing Soft Decision for the Detection of Non-orthogonal Signals , 2013, IEEE Communications Letters.

[22]  Fredrik Rusek,et al.  An 0.8-mm$^2$ 9.6-mW Iterative Decoder for Faster-Than-Nyquist and Orthogonal Signaling Multicarrier Systems in 65-nm CMOS , 2013, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[23]  Frank Schaich,et al.  Universal-filtered multi-carrier technique for wireless systems beyond LTE , 2013, 2013 IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps).

[24]  Wenhua Chen,et al.  Transmitter Architecture for CA: Carrier Aggregation in LTE-Advanced Systems , 2013, IEEE Microwave Magazine.

[25]  Chester Sungchung Park,et al.  Carrier aggregation for LTE-advanced: design challenges of terminals , 2013, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[26]  Giulio Colavolpe,et al.  Modulation Formats and Waveforms for 5G Networks: Who Will Be the Heir of OFDM?: An overview of alternative modulation schemes for improved spectral efficiency , 2014, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

[27]  Tao Gui,et al.  Optical SEFDM System; Bandwidth Saving Using Non-Orthogonal Sub-Carriers , 2014, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[28]  Izzat Darwazeh,et al.  A Soft Detector for Spectrally Efficient Systems With Non-Orthogonal Overlapped Sub-Carriers , 2014, IEEE Communications Letters.

[29]  Izzat Darwazeh,et al.  Multi-band reduced complexity spectrally efficient FDM systems , 2014, 2014 9th International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks & Digital Sign (CSNDSP).

[30]  Jeffrey G. Andrews,et al.  What Will 5G Be? , 2014, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[31]  Izzat Darwazeh,et al.  Spectrally efficient FDM: Spectrum saving technique for 5G? , 2014, 1st International Conference on 5G for Ubiquitous Connectivity.

[32]  Andrey V. Rashich,et al.  Asymptotically optimal algorithm for OFDM-signal reception under AWGN and OFDM interference shifted in frequency , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Black Sea Conference on Communications and Networking (BlackSeaCom).

[33]  Izzat Darwazeh,et al.  Bandwidth compressed carrier aggregation , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Communication Workshop (ICCW).

[34]  Wei Xue,et al.  Waveform Optimization of SEFDM Signals with Constraints on Bandwidth and an Out-of-Band Emission Level , 2015, NEW2AN.

[35]  Jan Bajcsy,et al.  On capacity merits of spectrally efficient FDM , 2015, MILCOM 2015 - 2015 IEEE Military Communications Conference.

[36]  Andrey V. Rashich,et al.  Optimal Input Power Backoff of a Nonlinear Power Amplifier for SEFDM System , 2015, NEW2AN.

[37]  Izzat Darwazeh,et al.  Bandwidth Compressed Waveform for 60-GHz Millimeter-Wave Radio Over Fiber Experiment , 2016, Journal of Lightwave Technology.

[38]  Izzat Darwazeh,et al.  Nyquist-SEFDM: Pulse shaped multicarrier communication with sub-carrier spacing below the symbol rate , 2016, 2016 10th International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks and Digital Signal Processing (CSNDSP).

[39]  Fa-Long Luo,et al.  Signal processing for 5G : algorithms and implementations , 2016 .

[40]  Izzat Darwazeh,et al.  Dual Polarization Coherent Optical Spectrally Efficient Frequency Division Multiplexing , 2016, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.