TH3C-4

E-Valuation of Synchronization andl Fractilonally Spaced Equalilzat'ion

in a MIMO SC-FDE Test-Bed
Qipeng Cai', Andreas Wilzeck' and Thomas Kaiser'
'University Duisburg-Essen, Department of Communication Systems,
Bismarckstrasse 47048 Duisburg, Germany; Email: {qipeng.cai, andreas.wilzeck}@uni-DuE.de
81,
2mimoOn GmbH, Technologiezentrum fur Duisburg,
Bismarckstrasse 120, 47057 Duisburg, Germany, Email: info@rmimoOn.de

Abstract- This contribution deals with the synchronization
and the fractionally spaced equalization for Multiple-Input
Multiple-Output (MIMO) Single-Carrier (SC) systems with
Frequency Domain Equalization (FDE). Synchronization, chan-
nel estimation and the proposed equalization are evaluated as
a system employing real-world over-air transmission in the
2.4 GHz ISM-band by using our current MIMO test-bed [1].
Spatial multiplexing is demonstrated, allowing the system to
reach an un-coded net data rate of 28.78 Mbit/s using 8-PSK
modulation and a 3-dB bandwidth of 10 MHz.
Index Terins Multiple-Input Multiple Output, Single-
Carrier, Frequency Domain Equalization, Synchronization.
I. INTRODUCTION
Inter Symbol Interference (ISI) caused by the time dis-
persion property of multi-path propagation has one of the
highest impacts on the speed of high data rate wireless
transmission. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
(OFDM), which has been widely deployed in current Wire-
less Local Area Network (WLAN) standards, is invented
to overcome the above mentioned difficulty with reasonable
digital signal processing complexity. However, an OFDM
system must fulfill rigorous requirements on timing and
frequency synchronization [2], otherwise the orthogonality
among the sub-carriers is lost and the communication system
suffers from ISI and Inter Carrier Interference (ICI). Another
weak point of OFDM systems is the high Peak-to-Average
Power Ratio (PAPR) of its signal, which impacts greatly
on the power efficienLcy of the power amplifier and then
limits the battery lifetime of mobile devices. Single Carrier
transmission with Frequency Domain Equalization (SC-
FDE) is viewed as an alternative approach to an OFDM
system It uses a concept similar to that of an OFDM system
to convert the linear convolution of the transmitted signal
and channel impulse response into circular convolution in
the discrete domain with the help of a Cyclic Prefix (CP) or
a Unique Word (UW). The benefits of SC-FDE are eased
synchronization requirements and its low PAPR property
signal, which are very advantageous to low cost portable
devices. Thus SC-FDE is a top candidate for the uplink
in the physical layer of next generation wireless commu
nication systems, for instance in the IEEE 802.16 Wireless
Metropolitan Area Network (WMAN) and 3GPP Long Term
Evolution of Universal Mobile Telecommunications System
(UMTS-LTE).
Another attractive technology expected to be exploited in
next generation wireless communication systems is MIMO
technology, which is able to increase channel capacity by
deploying several transmit and receive antennas without
increasing the signal bandwidth or the Signal to Noise
Ratio (SNR). In order to offer high data-rate communica-
tion, the MIMO technology attracts not only the academic
community, but also standardization bodies in the industrial
community.
Practical studies are a crucial part of the development
of complex systems like wireless communication systems.
The hardware (Hw) platforms can be differentiated into
three kinds, test-beds, demonstrators and prototypes. As
mentioned in [3] a test-bed or measurement device is able
to give access to real channel data with or even without
typical hardware effects. Typically no real-time processing is
performed on the Hw platform itself. A demonstrator is used
to demonstrate some functionality, for example synchroniza-
tion. A prototype is usually a complete set of functionalities
operating already in real-time such as a first Application
Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) implementation.
In this contribution we will evaluate a 2 x 2 MIMO
SC-FDE system employing spatial multiplexing based on
our flexible MIMO prototyping test-bed [1]. The tasks and
strategies for synchronization in time and frequency, equal-
ization and the frame structure are described. A modified
Schmidl & Cox metric [4] is adopted to achieve coarse
timing synchronization. The Unique Word technique is cho-
sen to ease residual frequency offset estimation and residual
phase tracking [5]. Fractionally spaced frequency domain
equalization [6] is deplo ed to omit a fine s nchronization
of the system.
II TEST-BED & MEASUREMENT SETUP
A detailed overview of our 4 x 2 MIMO test -bed can
be found in [ I]. Here we would like to simply point
out the most important features. The test-bed is based on
Sundance's signal processing platform, which is modular,
scalable and re-usable for different purposes. The test-bed
is an advanced of/ine or hardware in the loop system for

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Binrydata1
I ingI-1u-Y
j jnaftng
RRC
-(OR2
IV
Digital IF Mod.
Multiplexer
IPreamble rm&mae
ITraining Seq (OCRS2) Digital IF Md.
Fig. 1. Block Diagram of 2 2 MIMO SC-FDE Transmitter
Fig. 2. Block Diagraimn of 2 x 2 MIMO SC-FDE Receiver
the 2.4 GHz ISM band. The function can be described
as follows: pre-processed digital base-band signals are first
digitally up-converted to a low Intermediate Frequency (IF).
These IF signals are then converted by Digital-to-Analog
(D/A) converters into analog signals and then further up-
converted to the 2.4 GHz ISM-band by an analog MIMO
Radio Frequency (RF) front-end. The RF signals are radiated
by the two transmitting antennas. At the receiver-side RF
signals are received with four antennas and are at first down-
converted to a low IF by the analog MIMO RF front-end. All
four received low IF signals are synchronously sampled by
Analog-to-Digital (A/D) converters, and the resulting data is
logged in real-time by huge memory modules. The memory
size is 2 x 1 GByte, resulting in a logging memory of 512
MByte per antenna. The maximum sampling rate is 100
Mega Samples Per Second (MSPS), and the resolution is
14 bit.
For our evaluation we will use a 2 x 2 setup of the test-
bed. The RF carrier frequency is 2.46 GHz and the IF is 15
MHz. Both the A/D conversions and the D/A conversions,
are operating with 40 MHz. The transmit signals have a 3-
dB signal band-width of 10 MHz. No reference cables or
similar are shared between the transmitter and the receiver.
which means that they are fully independent systems.
III MATLAB IMPLEMENTION OF MIMO SC-FDE
A. Overview
The digital low IF signals for transmissio are generated
by a MATLAB implementation of the MIMO SC-FDE
transmitter, which employs spatial multiplexing. The block
diagram can be seen from Fig. 1. The binary data is first
mapped to symbols employing 8-PSK data modulation. This
symbol stream is separated into blocks of 48 symbols and a
Unique Word (UW) of Lcp = 16 symbols is added at the
beginning of each block. Therefore, the IFFT/FFT block size
is 64 symbols. The addition of a Cyclic Prefix (CP), or in
this case a UW, is required to avoid Inter Block Interference
Tx 1
(IBI) and to fulfill the theorem of cyclic convolution. The
STARS^2
length Lcp should be as long as the length of the channel
Transmitter Ta 2
impulse response plus the group delays of all the filters in
the transmitter and the receiver.
TX AAAAAAAA| Chu ° Chu 0 | B, > B2 >-BC
TxTX2 L 0 0 0 h h a2 2 E--N
Preamble *-< Trainingsequences Data playload blocks
(TDM)
Sub-frame
Fig. 3. Frame Structure of Our MIMO SC-FDE System.
Corresponding to a special frame/sub-frame structure the
resulting blocks are multiplexed to the two transmitter
branches, and preambles for synchronization and channel
estimation are added. For our 2 x 2 MIMO SC-FDE demon-
stration a frame structure as given in Fig. 3 is proposed,
which consists of a preamble and several sub-frames. Eight
Frank-Zadoff sequences with 16-symbol length constitute
the preamble, which is used to obtain frame synchronization
and coarse timing synchronization. Each sub-frame starts
with training sequences assisting the MIMO channel estima-
tion and frequency offset estimation. The training sequences
of each transmit antenna are chosen in such a way that
they are orthogonal in time. The training sequences for each
transmit antenna are two repeated Chu sequences, each with
a length of 64 symbols and an added Cyclic Prefix (CP) of
length Lcp. Several data payload blocks follow this sub-
frame training.
Root Raised Cosine (RRC) filters with a roll-off factor
oft = 0.3 are carrying out pulse shaping and are limiting
the bandwidth of the base-band signals. These filters are
operating at an over-sampling factor of 2. Afterwards a dig-
ital quadrature modulation converts the base-band signals to
digital low IF signals, which requires further over-sampling
to reach the D/A conversion rate. The digital low IF signals
are converted into analog signals and then further trans-
formed into RF signals. Thereby, several filtering, mixing
and amplification processes are involved. Finally RF signals
are broadcast over the air.
The RF signals are received by the receiver (Fig. 2) via its
antennas, filtered by band-pass filters, down-converted from
radio frequency to IF frequency by mixers and amplified
by low-noise amplifiers. Next, A/D converters change the
analog IF signals into digital IF signals, which are passed to
the digital processing functions implemented in MATLAB.
A digital quadrature demodulation is performed to obtain
complex base-band signals. Afterwards RRC filters are de-
ployed to limit the noise bandwidth to the system signal
bandwidth. They also act as matched filters for the transmit
pulse shape.
Time and frequency synchronization functions have to he
carried out to achieve the frame detection and to estimate
the frequency offset caused by the independently running
receiver and transmitter local oscillators. The compensation
528
for the carrier frequency offset is performed for the whole
frame. The channel estimation is carried out afterwards, and
the channel transfer functions of the MIMO channels are es-
timated under the assumption of quasi-static channels. Based
on this estimate, a fractionally spaced MIMO Frequency
Domain Equalizer (FDE) resolves the superposition of the
MIMO channel, compensates fractional delays, and removes
the distortion caused by the multi-path channel.
Instead of a CP, we used a UW prefixed to each block.
This UW is still included after equalization of a block and
can therefore be used to analyze the behaviour of the FDE
(quality measures), to estimate a residual frequency offset,
which can be also caused by sampling offsets as well, and
for phase tracking purposes. Afterwards the UW needs to be
removed. We implemented phase tracking after the equalizer
in order improve the received signal constellation prior to the
detection (de-mapper). At the end the received and equalized
symbol streams are de-multiplexed, detected and translated
into binary data, which can be compared to the transmitted
data.
B. Synchronization
Frame start position, frequency offset and phase offset
within the data transmission duration as well as the channel
impulse responses should be detected and estimated in the
base-band signal processing of the receiver. For frame start
detection we choose the metric proposed by Schmidl & Cox
in [4], but we extend it to fit our preamble with 8 short
Frank-Zadoff sequences.
The k-th received symbols of the i'-th sequence can be
expressed by a vector as
rik = [r(k+ (i-I)L). r(k+iL- 1)]T i = I,2.
The proposed metric can be formulated as
k r-Lk ri,k c r ,k2)
i=2 i=2 / where arg(Q) is the operator to get the angle information of
A property of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) is
that a cyclic shift of the sequence will only result in a
constant phase rotation which can be easily compensated via
equalization. Thereby, the constraint for choosing an optimal
start point for the DFT window is greatly relaxed. The DFT
window only needs to be placed in such a way that the data
block used for the DFT process will not be smeared by the
dispersion from a previous block. Under this requirement
we can almost arbitrarily choose a start position and while
being more concerned with robustness
The modified Schmidl & Cox metric for frame detection
generates a plateau which corresponds to the position of the
optimal window with some constant offset. It is intuitive to
select the central position of the plateau as the starting point
of the DFT process. Unfortunately, there is an uncertainty
concerning the optimal position caused by the frequency
selective channel and the noise. A longer impulse response
of the channel yields a narrower optimal window of possible
529
start positions and the slopes of the left and right sides of the
plateau are getting lower. Thus, it is difficult to get a reliable
result by selecting the central position of the plateau when
the channel length grows near the length Lcp. Hence, we
choose an additional algorithm in order to get a more reliable
result, which is based on proposals in [7]. Details will be
shown in an upcoming contribution.
A carrier frequency offset can significantly degrade the
receiver performance. The offset causes a continuous rota-
tion of the base-band signal constellation and must therefore
be cormpensated for correct detection of the data. In order to
estimate the carrier frequency offset, the repetition property
of the training sequences can be employed to estimate the
frequency offset in the received base-band signal.
Corresponding to the proposed frame structure, the train-
ing sequence of each transmitter antenna consists of two
repeated Chu sequences of length LChu = 64 symbols,
as shown in Fig. 3. Each Chu sequence is protected by a
CP of length Lcp. So the period of the repeated symbols
in these two Chu sequences, Lp = LChu + Lcp, is 80
symbols. Under the assumption that the channel length is
not above the length of the CP and that the channel is
constant during frame transmission, meanwhile neglecting
the frequency offset and the noise, the received symbols in
the two repeated Chu sequence have the relationship as
r[k + Lp] = r[k3, k = 0(1)LCh,-1f (3)
With Af, the frequency offset, (3) is changed to
r[k + Lp]r[k] eJ2,TAfLpT,, k = O()Lchu- 1, (4)
=
where Ts denotes the symbol duration.
Hence, the estimate of Af from symbol k can be expressed
as
Afk =.._.JLI aru(r [k] r[k+Lp]), k = O(I)LChu-1,
(5)
a complex value, r[k] are the received symbols of the Chu
sequence and * denotes complex conjugate.
A more robust estimator can be constructed through
averaging Afk over the whole Chu sequence as
1 LCh, i
A = Ch E AJk (6)
k=O
In order to cope with residual offsets and possible vari-
ations of the phase, we implemented a phase tracking
algorithm based on the UW approach as given in [5] (method
3).
C. Equaliation
Fractionally Spaced Equalization (FSE) [6] is motivated
hy bandwidth expansion by the factor (1 + a) caused by the
Root Raised Cosine (RRC) filters with a roll off factor of
a, which are typi ally deployed in communication systems.
This bandwidth expansion requests an over-sampling factor
of two in the digital processing. The fractionally spaced Constellation Diagram
equalizer performs equalization in such away that a fore-
going fine synchronization is not required, which simplifies
the synchronization requirements. The input of the FSE is 1.5
over-sampled by a factor of two, while the output is on
symbol rate. 1-
In the case of a MIMO SC-FDE system with NT transmit
antennas and NRF receive antennas a MIMO FSE of an single 0.5k-
block can be described by
0F-
d = NT X (FN D)] W JIN,' 9 (F2NGRRC) r (7)
whereda d dNT]T is an NTx1 Ivector, containing -0.5k-
the equalized data vector of the transmitted streams, I is the
z x z identity matrix, FN the N X N Fourier matrix, D the -1 k-
frequency domain down -sampling matrix of size N X 2:N, W

I~~~~~~~
is the 2NNT X 2NNR equalizer matrix, GRRC is the 2N x
2N RRC filter matrix. 'r is a 2NNR x 1 vector containing the
stacked received vectors, where the cylic prefix is already
removed. We formulate it as
-1.5

-2
-2
I

-1 0 1 2
Re {d}

r =
(INR (8 PremT)rC
=(INR Prer)
LH(INT (GRRCPadd))d + v (8)
where Prem, and Padd denote CP removal matrix and CP in-
sertion matrix respectively, GRRC = F2 GRRC F2N signi-
fies the linear RRC convolution matrix, d = Id1 ? dNT]
is the stacked transmit data vector, and v = IV I * VNR ]T
is the stacked receive noise vector.
The MIMO channel estimation procedure is based on a
Least Square (LS) approach and makes use of the time
orthogonal training sequences offered at the start of each
sub-frame. For the later measurements a Zero Forcing (ZF)
MIMO equalizer is used, which simply inverts the MIMO
channel effects, but comes at the cost of noise amplification.
IV. RESULT & CONCLUSION
The transmitter and the receiver are placed in two different
sized office rooms, which are separated by a wall. Thereby,
the measurement is performed in an indoor environment
without Line of Sight (LoS) path. The constellation dia-
gram of the received de-multiplexed symbols is shown in
Fig. 4. The measurement is based on 172 sub-frames, each
containing 10 blocks. Each block has a data payload of 48
symbols, which are 8-PSK modulated. The reached un-coded
net data rate (excluding trainlngg) of this 2 x 2 MIMO SC-
FDE transmission employing 8-PSK modulation and a 3-db
bandwidth of 10 MHz can be calculated to 28.78 Mbit/s
Fig. 4. Constellation of Equalized Received Symbols.
The analog RF hardware of the current test-bed will be
updated within the next few months. The aim is to reach a
better performance and to have access to the 5 GHz ISM-
band as well.
V. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work is partly funded by the Deutsche Forschungs-
gemeimnschaft (DFG) under the project title "Analytische und
experimentelle Untersuchung von mehrteilnehmerfahigen
Mehrantennen-Systemen mit niederratiger Ruckkoppelung"
(KA 1154/15).
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