Physical Layer Evolution for GSM/EDGE Huseyin Arslan Jung-Fu Cheng Kumar Balachandran Ericsson Research 7001 Development

Dr., Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, U.S.A. Abstract EDGE has enabled the GSM network to offer third generation services as part of the UMTS core network. This is due to the introduction of 8PSK modulation and the recent specification of interfaces from the GERAN to the UMTS core network. This paper studies further improvements to the spectral efficiency and capacity of EDGE through the use of more sophisticated adaptive modulation schemes based on QAM, and the use of novel turbo coding schemes. Furthermore, this work considers a novel transmit diversity scheme adapted for use in dispersive channels. We provide performance results for the enhanced system showing tremendous gains. We also use theoretical predictions of outage analysis to predict the gain in performance obtained by the use of higher order modulations and transmit diversity. The gains from theoretical predictions match our simulations almost exactly. Keywords EDGE, GSM, Transmit Diversity, Space-time Codes, QAM, turbo codes, DFSE, Cutoff rates. I. INTRODUCTION T T HE Enhanced Data rates for Global Evolution (EDGE) system is an evolution of the Global System for Mobile Communications(GSM) standard to higher data rates through the introduction of 8PSK modulation modes [1]. In addition, EDGE allows the use of the Enhanced General Packet Radio Service (EGPRS) for packet services. Future releases of the GSM/EDGE specification will allow deployment of all-IP networks, where all multimedia communication, including telephony will be handled by a packet-switched interface to the UMTS core network. EGPRS introduces the use of additional channel codes for 8PSK and GMSK. In addition, EGPRS introduces the use of a Type II Hybrid ARQ system, commonly known within the specification as incremental redundancy. Given the high price of spectrum and its scarcity, operators want to continue evolving their networks towards higher capacity and quality. In [2], our studies show one possible evolution path for GSM/EDGE in the direction of higher order modulations such as QAM. Further evolution of EDGE requires incorporation of a variety of techniques, each based on increasing the diversity order achievable at the receiver. Slow Frequency Hopping (SFH) within the EDGE system guarantees a minimum amount of diversity that is independent of the channel variation rates. However, as shown by studies of SFH, the attainable diversity orders on flat fading channels are bounded above by a function of the coding rates used [3,4]. For very high coding rates, the benefits of frequency hopping cannot be captured. Indeed, for the EDGE coding scheme MCS9 with a coding rate close to unity, system performance actually improves with frequency hopping disabled [2]. This anomalous fact was a prime motivation in our pursuit of this study.

Transmit diversity methods are commonly considered nowadays to increase coding diversity. Zangi et al [5] studied ap plication of the Time-Reversal scheme by Lindskog and Paulraj [6], that we denote as the LP code in this study. This code is specially suited to narrowband systems such as EDGE, as it provides gains equivalent to 2-antenna maximal ratio combining in the presence of channel dispersion. Furthermore, higher diversity orders offered by frequency hopping may be effectively captured with lower-rate codes especially when used in conjunction with transmit diversity. Subsequently, constellations larger than 8PSK can maintain the same date rates. Finally, we study the replacement of convolutional coding with turbo coding to explore the effect of increasing the size of the code state space with no increase in decoder complexity. Section II defines the system being studied. Our study consists of two related parts: (a) In Section III, we develop a formulation of outage rates based on cutoff rate calculations for discrete modulations on frequency-selective block-fading channels. This theoretical tool provides guidelines and accurate performance predictions of new coding and modulation designs. It also provides a unified framework for us to compare new transmission schemes at existing data rates as well as those with even higher data rates; (b) In Section IV, we apply enhancements considered to a GSM/EDGE system. Section V concludes this paper. We summarize the results in this paper as follows: 1. lower coding rates with higher modulation order enabling capture of coding diversity from frequency hopping, 2. improved performance with turbo codes, which work more effectively than convolutional coding with higher order modulations, 3. improvement of coding diversity by a factor of two with transmit diversity, 4. substantial increase in user data rates through higher order modulations, and 5. a unified and reliable information-theoretic tool to aid system design. II. SYSTEM MODEL In a basic EDGE transmitter, the data source is mapped to a coding and modulation scheme, designated designation MCS(112)[ MODxx][TC][LP], where items in brackets are optional designators, MOD is replaced by QAM or PSK, and xx is replaced by a constellation size. The designator TC represents Turbo-coding, while LP indicates transmit diversity. The coding schemes include block interleaving between channel coding and modulation over a time-span of 20 ms that corresponds to

one RLC block1. Also, the coding schemes MCS1-9 have an unambiguous meaning as in the EDGE/EGPRS specifications this work considers MCS5-9 to use 8PSK modulation and convolutional coding.2 Similarly, MCS9QAM16TC corresponds to turbo-coded data mapped to 16 QAM after interleaving. Each coding and modulation scheme represents a fixed payload size in bits after channel coding, with coding rates adjusted appropriately. All convolutional codes used are as in the proposed GSM/EDGE standards, and are punctured from the rate r =1=3 code with generators in octal form given by [133, 171, 145] . Turbo codes used were based on the rate r =1=3 code used in WCDMA as defined for UMTS [7]. The two constituent recursive codes are separated by a prunable prime interleaver and use the same generator polynomial g(D)= . 1 1+D+D3 . : 1+D2 +D3 Eight iterations are used in the decoder. Table I shows the modulation and coding schemes used in the study. The coding schemes MCS10, MCS11 and MCS12 are the new proposed schemes for the higher order modulations. Notice that higher order modulations allow an increase the information rates or enable a reduction of coding rates. For the purposes of this study, the Typical Urban (TU3) channel model at 3 km/h was considered. We use a Nyquist root raised cosine receive filter. The sampled output of the receive filter is effectively a 2-tap channel, and the analysis in Section III follows this equivalence. In what follows, we use the development in [5] for the receiver architecture. Ideal frequency hopping with carrier frequency of 900 MHz is assumed. The receiver is based on a Decision Feedback Sequence Estimator (DFSE) and is illustrated in Fig. 1(a). The received signal is first passed through a prefilter that whitens noise as well as maximizes the energy of the leading taps of the effective response at the output of the prefilter. 3A joint least squares estimation is used for channel estimation. Channel parameters are not tracked over time. Soft bit values are extracted from the equalizer for use in the decoder.

Figs. 1(b-c) illustrate the receiver architecture with 2-antenna transmit diversity. We used a refined space-time coding method based on a two-antenna transmit diversity scheme proposed by Lindskog and Paulraj [6]. This scheme is a generalization of the celebrated Alamouti transmit diversity coding [8], which uses complex orthogonal symbols on two transmit antennas to achieve full (two) diversity on flat fading channels. The Alamouti coding also has the benefit that, following a simple combining process, the received signals can be decoded directly. However, when a Q-ary modulation is used with this diversity coding on a multipath channel with L taps, a time-varying equalizer with Q2L..1 states is needed to extract the soft values 1The Radio Link Control block is a basic unit of transmission over the air interface, and uses 4 time-slots spread over 4 TDMA frames. 2MCS5-9 are identical in meaning to MCS5PSK8-MCS9PSK8. 3This allows the bulk of the equalization in a DFSE to be performed by the Viterbi algorithm. for channel decoding. The required complexity becomes prohibitive for most applications. The LP coding scheme circumvents this problem by (a) applying complex orthogonal blocks on two transmit antennas, and (b) introducing enough separation between the blocks. This new coding scheme can be shown to achieve full (2L) diversity [9], and the soft values for channel decoding can be extracted after simple preprocessing from the received signals using an equalizer with only QL..1 states [5]. III. OUTAGE BASED ON CUTOFF RATES We adopt a block fading channel model [3, 4] such that the random fading coefficients are taken as constant during the length of a burst but change independently from burst to burst. This is justified by the use of frequency-hopping and short burst length in EDGE. Unlike previous work, we model each block as received from a frequency-selective fading channel with L taps. Performance analysis and design criteria for such communication systems is being formalized [9]. We model communication with a code C of length NcF and size jC| with symbols chosen from the alphabet X of size Q. The information rate and the equivalent binary coding rate are 1 defined as R = NcF log2

jC| and r = R/ log2 Q, respectively. A codeword c is first interleaved and multiplexed into F equallength blocks c1, c2;:::, cF of Nc symbols each. Each coded block cf is then transmitted using a single antenna or two antennas with LP over a multipath channel. We extend the bound on achievable diversity order D to such communication systems [3, 4]: (L..bF (1 r). +1, Single antenna D= (1) 2L..bF (1 r). +1, Two antenna with LP In what follows, we verify this bound using the concept of information cutoff probabilities. Let y denote the received signal sequence and H = (h1, h2;:::, hF ) be the collection of the fading coefficients from all the F blocks. The conditional (symmetric) cutoff rate is defined as the limiting exponent of the ensemble averaged Bhattacharyya bound on the pairwise codeword error probability between c and bc conditioned on H: 1

R0(XjH) . lim Nc!8 NcF log2 Ec;bc . pPr (y jc, H ) Pr (y jbc, H )dy . Q..Nc Here, the expectation is evaluated as qNc F (c)= F . It can then be shown that F 1 R0(XjH)= . R0(Xjhf ), where F f =1 1 R0(Xjhf ) .

lim log2 PNc (Xjhf ) (2) Nc!8 Nc

represents the conditional cutoff rate for the coded block f , and PNc (Xjhf ) is the ensemble averaged Bhattacharyya bound on pairwise coded block error probability for length Nc. As with capacity outage probabilities [10], we define the probability that the realized conditional cutoff rate is lower than the actual information rate, Pr (R0(XjH) < R), as the information cutoff probability Pco (X;R) of a rate R communication with the coded symbol alphabet X. This quantity can be shown to be an upper bound on the average codeword error probability of randomly chosen codes of very large length. For our purpose, this probability provides a unified framework to compare the average Block Error Rate (BLER) performance of different coding and transmission configurations. Let ef . cf bcf =(ef (1);ef (2);:::;ef (Nc))t be the error sequence of length Nc and let us define ef (n) . 0 for all n = 0. Then, PNc (Xjhf ) can be expressed as . Nc . Es . Eef . exp

2(ef (n), sf (n)jhf ) , (3) 4N0 n=1 where sf (n)=(ef (n 1);ef (n 2);:::;ef (n L + 1)) and 2 ..(ef (n), sf (n)

hf . is defined as 2 L..1

. hlf ef (n l)

l=0 for single-antenna transmission, and as 22 L..1L..1 (1) (2)

. hlf ef (n l)

. +

. hlf ef (n l)

l=0 l=0 for two-antenna transmission with LP. The error symbol ef (n) belongs to the error symbol alphabet (X) . fc c: 8c, c. . X} derived from X with the derived probability measure 1 . . Xg q(ef (n)= e)=

fc c : c c = e, 8c, c

: eQ2 It is simple to enumerate the error alphabet and the corresponding multiplicity. Using (3), and the fact that qeNc (ef )= . q(e(n)), the conn e ditional cutoff rate of (2) can be computed as in Theorem 5.8.1 of Viterbi and Omura [11]: R0(Xjhf )= log2 max, (4) where max is the largest eigenvalue of the conditional transL ..1 fer function matrix T(X)jhf of dimension j(X)j j(X)jL..1 [9, 11]. IV. RESULTS Fig. 2 and Fig. 5 plot the information cutoff probabilities and corresponding simulation results for the MCS9 information rates respectively. Fig. 2 plots cutoff probabilities for 8PSK with and without frequency hopping, and frequency-hopped 16QAM with and without the LP code. All the curves in this figure assume 2 equal power Rayleigh-faded taps for the channel and frequency hopping was ideal over four frequencies. Fig. 5 plots MCS9PSK8, MCS9QAM16, MCS9QAM16TC and MCS9QAM16TCLP performance. It can be observed from Fig. 2 that MCS9 achieves a diversity order of only 2 even though the system has four independent frequency hops. This has been verified through simulation [2]. It is noteworthy that turning off frequency hopping does not lose any coding diversity and actually improves performance. We can increase the achieved diversity order to 4 with 16QAM of lower code rate, while maintaining the information rate. Furthermore, the LP transmit diversity coding effectively doubles this to 8. These observations agree completely with (1). Overall, the average BLER performance improvement at 10% can be expected to be around 8 dB. Also noteworthy is the fact that the same 8 dB gain is observed in Fig. 5 between MCS9PSK8

and MCS9QAM16TCLP at 10% BLER. The reader may look for other like corresponding differences in the figure, but most significant are the slopes of the falloffs (i.e. diversity orders) in the two figures. Similarly, a combined gain of 4 dB and 6 dB over MCS8PSK8 is observed in Fig. 4 with MCS8QAM16TC and MCS8QAM16TCLP respectively. The reduction in gain from MCS9 is of course due to the greater coding gain that MCS8 provides over MCS9. These results suggest that very high coding rates should not be used over frequency-hopped fading channels. Instead, these schemes should be replaced with a higher order modulation that provides a lower coding rate, as the gain in Hamming distance in the code more than compensates for the loss in Euclidean distance due to the modulation. Indeed, we have observed these effects even after taking practical issues such as synchronization and radio impairments into account [2]. Throughput and performance enhancements may be obtained simultaneously with properly designed coding and modulation/ transmission schemes. This is illustrated in Fig. 3 and Fig. 6 for the proposed new coding configurations. It is possible to gain 0.5 dB at 10% BLER as well as increase peak data rate 50% over the current standard if MCS12QAM64TCLP were to be specified as an option. The other codes are able to tradeoff the gain in data rate for better performance. The gains by the introduction of the new physical layer enhancements can be translated into higher average throughput. In Fig. 7, the maximum achievable throughput using the current and new coding and modulation schemes are shown assuming perfect link adaptation.4 Indeed, the maximum achievable throughput can be increased by introducing higher order modulations. Addition of transmit diversity increases the maximum achievable throughput further. These results are used in [12,13] to evaluate system performance of transmit diversity and higher 4For simplicity, the effect of Type II hybrid ARQ available in EDGE is not simulated.

order modulations respectively. V. CONCLUSIONS We have successfully used information-theoretical concepts to provide far reaching improvements to the GSM/EDGE system. It has been shown that careful systems engineering using a combination of approaches can improve performance as well as increase data rates for EDGE. The major results from our study are reiterated below: 1. Use of lower coding rates with higher modulation order enables capture of coding diversity from frequency hopping. Using this result, we have demonstrated improvement in performance of EDGE by introducing 16QAM as an option. Indeed, the code, MCS9QAM16TC, has a demonstrated improvement of upto 6 dB over MCS9PSK8 due to improvement in coding diversity. 2. Turbo codes improve performance over convolutional codes, and work more effectively with higher order modulations owing to the lower rates and larger block lengths. Implicit in this conclusion is the observation that Turbo codes offer extreme increases in code complexity with relatively lower increase in decoding complexity with respect to the Viterbi algorithm. 3. Introduction of transmit diversity improves coding diversity by a factor of two. The effect of this is seen in substantially better performance improvements for small increases in signal-tonoise ratio, and results in improved data rates for EDGE users. 4. Introduction of new coding and modulation schemes based on 32QAM and 64QAM allow substantial increase in data rates at performances equivalent to or better than the coding rates available to EDGE currently. We have been able to demonstrate 50% improvement in peak data rates for EDGE. 5. A unified and reliable information-theoretic tool to aid system design has been developed. The differences between information cutoff probabilities and simulated BLER s are due to the differences between random coding bounds and real-world performance. This difference may be closed by using more complex receiver structures with larger effective decoding state spaces. For example, an iterative equalization/decoding algorithm proposed in [14] has shown BLER improvements up to 3 dB. Acknowledgments. The authors are grateful to their colleagues Kambiz Zangi and Dennis Hui for developing the simulation platform used. The authors also appreciate encouraging discussions with Ali Khayrallah and R. Ramesh. REFERENCES [1] A. Furuskuller, and H. Olofsson, EDGE: Enhanced ar, S. Mazur, F. M data rates for GSM and TDMA/136 evolution, IEEE Personal Commun. Mag., June 1999. [2] H. Arslan, J.-F. Cheng, and K.Balachandran, Evolution of EDGE to higher data rates using QAM. in proceedings IEEE Vehic. Tech. Conf., VTC2001, Atlantic City, NJ, U.S.A., Fall 2001.

[3] E. Malkamaki and H. Leib, Coded diversity on block-fading channels, IEEE Trans. Inform. Th., vol. 45, pp. 771 781, March 1999. [4] R. Knopp and P. A. Humblet, On coding for block fading channels, IEEE Trans. Inform. Th., vol. 46, pp. 189 205, January 2000. [5] K. C. Zangi, D. Hui, and J.-F. Cheng, Physical-layer issues for deploying transmit diversity in GPRS/EGPRS networks, in IEEE Vehic. Tech. Conf., (Atlantic, City, NJ, U.S.A), Fall VTC 2001, September 2001. [6] E. Lindskog and A. Paulraj, A transmit diverstiy scheme for delay spread channels, in Intl. Commun. Conference, ICC 00, New Orleans, LA, U.S.A., December 2000. [7] C. Berrou, A. Glavieux, and P. Thitimajshima, Near Shannon limit errorcorrecting coding and decoding: Turbo-codes(1), in Intl. Commun. Conf., ICC 93, pp. 1064 1070, May 1993. [8] S. V. Alamouti, A simple transmit diversity technique for wireless communications , Jour. on Select. Areas Commun., vol. 16, pp. 1451 1458, October 1998. [9] J.-F. Cheng, On the performance of MIMO space-time coding with discrete modulations, in preparation Jour. on Select. Areas on Commun., 2001. [10] L. H. Ozarow, S. Shamai, and A. D. Wyner, Information theoretic considerations for cellular mobile radio, IEEE Trans. Vehic. Tech., vol. 43, pp. 359 378, May 1994. [11] A. J. Viterbi and J. K. Omura, Principles of Digital Communication and Coding. McGraw-Hill, 1979. [12] F. Kronestad, K. Zangi, D. Hui, M. Eriksson, C. Tidestav, and J.-F. Cheng, System capacity with transmit diversity techniques in GERAN. to appear in IEEE Vehic. Tech. Conf. VTC2001, Athens, Greece, Spring 2001. [13] M. Eriksson, D. Turina, H. Arslan, K. Balachandran, and J.-F. Cheng, System performance with higher level modulation in the GSM/EDGE radio access network. in proceedings IEEE Global Telecom. Conf., Globecom2001, San Antonio, TX, U.S.A. [14] M. Lopez, K. C. Zangi, and J.-F. Cheng, Reduced-complexity MAP equalizer for dispersive channels, in IEEE Vehic. Tech. Conf., VTC2000, Boston, MA, U.S.A., pp. 1371 1375, September 2000. TABLE I PAYLOADS AND CODING RATES FOR CODING AND MODULATION SCHEMES. Code Payload Constellation 8PSK 16QAM 32QAM 64QAM MCS7 924 0.75 0.54 0.42 0.35 MCS8 1128 0.92 0.66 0.52 0.43 MCS9 1224 0.97 0.72 0.57 0.47 MCS10 1500 NA 0.89 0.70 0.57 MCS11 1688 NA 1.00 0.78 0.65 MCS12 1900 NA NA 0.88 0.73 No. of Modem bits 1224 1688 2152 2616 r(t)

Prefilter DFSE. an Deinterleaver Decoder bn (a) Given data sequences fd1(n)gN..1 and fd2(n)gN..1 n=0 n=0 Tail (3) TS1 (26) Tail (3) Ant1 d (N 1);:::, ..d (0) 22 d1 (0);:::;d1(N 1) Tail (3) TS1 (26) Tail (3) Ant2 d

(N 1);:::;d (0) d2 (0);:::;d2(N 1) 11 (b) LP code time reversal Prefilter DFSE h1(n)h2(n) h2(n) h 1(n) bn () (c) Fig. 1. (a). Single-antenna receiver (b). Transmission format for the LP code the triangles with negative slope depict a time-reversed sequence, and sequence d1 is shaded; ()* denotes conjugation; (c) Receiver architecture for the LP code.

100 10 PSK8 QAM16TC QAM16 QAM16TCLP 0 8PSK, 4iFH 8PSK, noFH 16QAM, 4iFH 16QAM LP, 4iFH Prob( CutoffRate < InfoRate ) 10-1 10-1 BLER 10-2 10-2 10-3 8 11141720232629 32 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 C/N in dB C/N Fig. 2. Information cutoff probabilities for various coding configurations at Fi g. 5. Block error rate performance of the enhanced physical layer with MCSMCS9 information rates; 4iFH corresponds to ideal frequency hopping over 4 9 coding s cheme; the best curve is 8 dB better than the standard at 10% error channels, while noFH represents absence of freqiuency hopping. rate. 0 MCS9PSK8 MCS12QAM64LP MCS11QAM64LP MCS10QAM32LP MCS9QAM16LP 10 100 MCS9PSK8 (1224) MCS12QAM64LP (1900) MCS11QAM64LP (1688) MCS10QAM32LP (1500) MCS9QAM16LP (1224) 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34

C/N Prob( CutoffRate < InfoRate ) 10-1 BLER -1 10 10-2 10-3 8 11141720232629 32 10-2 C/N in dB Fig. 3. Information cutoff probabilities for the proposed coding configurations; Fig. 6. Illustration of performance and throughput gains by introduction of there is an 8 dB difference between the two MCS-9 curves at 10% outage. higher order modulation along with turbo coding and transmit diversity; payload lengths are in parentheses. 0 10 PSK8TC QAM16TC QAM16TCLQAM16 PSK8 P 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Throughput (kb/s) Improved-noLP Standard-noLP Improved + LP Standard + LP BLER

10-1 -2 10 15 20 25 30 35 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 C/N (dB) C/N Fig. 7. Throughput curves comparing the EDGE standard with proposed imFig. 4. Block error rate performance of various enhancements with the MCS-8 provements that include turbo coding; the effect of the LP-code has been sepa coding scheme; the best curve is 6 dB better than the standard at 10% error rate . rated out.