Method for discrete digital signal recovery in noisy overloaded wireless communication systems in the presence of hardware impairments - Patents.com

Abstract

A computer-implemented reconstruction method for discrete digital signal recovery in a noisy, overloaded wireless communication system in the presence of hardware impairments, characterized by a channel matrix of complex coefficients, comprising: receiving a signal from the channel by a signal detector; estimating a hardware impairment parameter η at the receiver; estimating noise power by a noise power estimator; and forwarding the detected signal, the hardware impairment parameter η, and the noise power estimate to a decoder that estimates transmitted symbols, wherein the decoder estimates possibly transmitted symbols that are forwarded to a demapper, which outputs bit estimates corresponding to the estimated transmitted signal and the corresponding estimated symbols to a microprocessor for further processing.

Description

[Technical field]

[0001] The present invention relates to the field of digital radio systems in overloaded scenarios and addresses the problem of estimating symbols sampled from a discrete digital signal alphabet (eg, a constellation) in a noisy environment under conditions of imperfect RF circuits or hardware. [Background technology]

[0002] Ever since Shannon developed the Shannon-Weaver communication model, embedding information bits in a discrete alphabet (constellation, index, codebook, etc.) has been an essential feature of any viable signal processing system. Due to the ever-increasing demand for high data rates and the trend towards operating wireless systems in higher frequency bands (where transceivers use more antennas), such discrete alphabet systems are expanding rapidly, making the problem of multi-dimensional discrete signal detection more relevant than ever before. Furthermore, the rapid increase in the number of wirelessly connected communication devices seen recently implies the need for receivers of future wireless systems to be able to deal with underdetermined system conditions.

[0003] The expression "resource overload" or "overloaded communication channel" usually refers to a number N T is the number of receivers (R), N ROrthogonal transmission refers to a communication channel used simultaneously by multiple users or transmitters (T) greater than 1. At the receiver, the multiple transmitted signals appear as one superimposed signal. The channel may also be overloaded by a single transmitter transmitting a superposition of symbols, thereby exceeding the available channel resources in a "traditional" orthogonal transmission scheme. Thus, "overload" occurs compared to a single transmitter having exclusive access to the channel, e.g., during a time slot, as in an orthogonal transmission scheme. Overloaded channels may be found, for example, in wireless communication systems using Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) and Underdetermined Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) channels.

[0004] "Two-stage list sphere decoding for under-determined multiple-input multiple-output systems," by C. Qian, J. Wu, Y. R. Zheng, and Z. Wang, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication, vol. 12, no. 12, pp. 6476-6487, 2013, proposed a two-stage list sphere decoding (LSD) algorithm for under-determined multiple-input multiple-output (UD-MIMO) systems that use N transmit antennas and M (< N) receive antennas. The two-stage LSD algorithm utilizes the unique structure of the UD-MIMO system by dividing the N detection layers into two groups. Group 1 includes layers 1 to M, which have the same structure as a symmetric MIMO system. On the other hand, Group 2 includes layers M + 1 to N, which contribute to the rank deficiency of the channel gram matrix. A tree search algorithm is used for both groups, but the search radii are different. A new method is proposed to adaptively adjust the tree search radius of Group 2 based on the statistical characteristics of the received signal. Using adaptive tree search can significantly reduce the computational complexity. Also, a modified channel gram matrix is proposed to address the rank deficiency problem. This provides better performance than the general gram matrix used in the Generalized Sphere-Decoding (GSD) algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed two-stage LSD algorithm can reduce the complexity by one to two orders of magnitude with a degradation of less than 0.1 dB in Bit-Error-Rate (BER) performance. This reference is used as reference [1] in the description of this application.

[0005] R. Hayakawa, K. Hayashi, and M. Kaneko, “An overloaded MIMO signal detection scheme with slab decoding and lattice reduction,” Proceedings APCC, Kyoto, Japan, Oct. 2015, pp. 1-5, proposes a signal detection scheme with reduced complexity for overloaded MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) systems. The proposed scheme first divides the transmitted signal into two parts. The post-voting vector contains the same number of signal elements as the number of receiving antennas, and the pre-voting vector contains the remaining elements. Then, slab decoding is used to reduce the solution candidates of the pre-voting vector, and the post-voting vector for each pre-voting vector candidate is determined by lattice reduction-aided MMSE (Minimum Mean Square Error)-SIC (Successive Interference Cancellation) detection. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve almost the same performance as the optimal ML (Maximum Likelihood) detection while significantly reducing the required computational complexity. This reference is used as reference [2] in the description of this application.

[0006] T. Datta, N. Srinidhi, A. Chockalingam and BS Rajan, “Low complexity near-optimal signal detection in underdetermined large MIMO systems,” inProc.NCC,Feb. 2012, pp.1-5, n t ×n r Consider signal detection in an underdetermined MIMO (UD-MIMO) system, where i) the overload factor α = n t n r > 1, n t >n r and ii) n t symbols are transmitted per channel usage by spatial multiplexing; and iii) n t , n ris large (in the range of tens of tens). A low-complexity detection algorithm based on reactive tabu search is considered. A variable threshold-based stopping criterion is proposed that provides near-optimal performance in large-scale UD-MIMO systems with low complexity. Lower bounds on maximum likelihood (ML) bit error performance of large-scale UD-MIMO systems are also obtained for comparison. The proposed algorithm is shown to achieve BER performance close to the ML lower bound within 0.6 dB at an uncoded BER of 10-2 in a 16×8 V-BLAST UD-MIMO system with 4-QAM (32 bps / Hz). Similar near-ML performance results are also shown for 32×16, 32×24 V-BLAST UD-MIMO with 4-QAM / 16-QAM. Performance and complexity comparison between the proposed algorithm and the λ-generalized sphere decoder (λ-GSD) algorithm for UD-MIMO shows that the proposed algorithm achieves nearly identical performance to λ-GSD, but at a significantly lower complexity. This reference is used as reference [3] in the description of this application.

[0007] Y. Fadlallah, A. Aissa-El-Bey, K. Amis, D. Pastor and R. Pyndiah, “New Iterative Detector of MIMO Transmission Using Sparse Decomposition,” IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, vol. 64, no. 8, pp. 3458-3464, Aug. 2015, addresses the problem of decoding in large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In this case, optimal maximum likelihood (ML) detectors become impractical due to the exponential increase in complexity with the signal and constellation dimensions. This paper introduces an iterative decoding procedure with an acceptable complexity order. This paper considers MIMO systems with finite constellations and models as systems with sparse signal sources. This paper proposes an ML relaxed detector that minimizes the Euclidean distance with the received signal while maintaining a constant 1-norm of the decoded signal. It is also shown that the detection problem is equivalent to a convex optimization problem, which can be solved in polynomial time. This reference is used as reference [4] in the description of this application.

[0008] T. Wo and PA Hoeher, “A simple iterative gaussian detector for severely delay-spread MIMO channels,” in Proc. IEEE ICC, Glasgow, UK, 2007, explains that in this paper, a low-complexity, high-performance detection algorithm for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels with severe delay spread is proposed. The algorithm performs iterative data detection on a factor graph applying independent as well as Gaussian approximations. The algorithm has been shown to achieve near-optimal BER performance for coded MIMO systems with severe delay spread. The computational complexity of the algorithm is strictly linear in the number of transmit antennas, the number of receive antennas, and the number of non-zero channel coefficients. This reference is used as reference [5] in the description of this application.

[0009] A. Aissa-El-Bey, D. Pastor, SMASbai, and Y. Fadlallah, “Sparsity-based recovery of finite alphabet solutions to underdetermined linear systems,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 2008-2018, Apr. 2015, describes the problem of estimating a deterministic finite alphabet vector f from underdetermined measurements y=Af, where A is a given (random) n×N matrix. Two convex optimization methods are introduced for the recovery of finite alphabet signals by 1-norm minimization. The first method is based on regularization. In the second approach, the problem is formulated as the recovery of a sparse signal after a suitable sparsity transformation. The regularization-based method is less complex than the transformation-based method. If the alphabet size p is equal to 2 and (n,N) grows proportionally, the conditions for the signal to be restored with high probability are the same for the two methods. The operation of the transformation-based method is established when p>2. This reference is used as reference [6] in the description of this application.

[0010] In “Discrete signal reconstruction by sum of absolute values,” IEEE Signal Process. Lett., vol. 22, no. 10, pp. 1575-1579, Oct. 2015, M. Nagahara considers the problem of reconstructing an unknown discrete signal that takes values ​​of a finite alphabet from imperfect linear measurements. The difficulty of this problem is that the computational complexity of the reconstruction is exponential as it is. To overcome this difficulty, they propose to extend the idea of ​​compressed sensing and solve the problem by minimizing the sum of weighted absolute values. They assume that the probability distribution defined by the alphabet is known and formulate the reconstruction problem as a linear programming problem. An example is given to illustrate that the proposed method is effective. This reference is used as reference [7] in the description of this application.

[0011] R. Hayakawa and K. Hayashi, “Convex optimization-based signal detection for massive overloaded MIMO systems,” IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 16, no. 11, pp. 7080-7091, Nov. 2017, propose a signal detection scheme for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems where the number of receive antennas is less than the number of transmit streams. Assuming real baseband digital modulation, we exploit the discreteness of the transmitted symbols to formulate the signal detection problem as a convex optimization problem called sum-of-absolute-value (SOAV) optimization. Furthermore, we extend the SOAV optimization to weighted SOAV (W-SOAV) optimization and propose an iterative approach to update the weights of the objective function and solve the W-SOAV optimization. Furthermore, for coded MIMO systems, we also propose a joint detection and decoding scheme in which the log likelihood ratio (LLR) of the transmitted symbols is iteratively updated between the MIMO detector and the channel decoder. In addition, a theoretical performance analysis is provided in terms of the upper bound on the estimated error size obtained with W-SOAV optimization. Simulation results show that the bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed scheme is superior to that of conventional schemes, especially in massively overloaded MIMO systems. This reference is used as reference [8] in the description of this application.

[0012] R. Hayakawa and K. Hayashi, “Reconstruction of complex discrete-valued vector via convex optimization with sparse regularizers,” IEEE Access, vol. 6, pp. 66 499-66 512, Oct. 2018, proposes a signal detection scheme for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems where the number of receive antennas is less than the number of transmit streams. Assuming real baseband digital modulation and exploiting the discreteness of the transmit symbols, the signal detection problem is formulated as a convex optimization problem called sum of absolute values ​​(SOAV) optimization. Furthermore, we extend the SOAV optimization to weighted SOAV (W-SOAV) optimization and propose an iterative approach to update the weights of the objective function and solve the W-SOAV optimization. Furthermore, for coded MIMO systems, a joint detection and decoding scheme is proposed in which the log-likelihood ratios of the transmitted symbols are iteratively updated between the MIMO detector and the channel decoder. In addition, a theoretical performance analysis is provided with respect to the upper bound of the estimation error size obtained in the W-SOAV optimization. This reference is used as reference [9] in the description of this application.

[0013] Z. Hajji, A. Aissa-El-Bey, and K. A. Cavalec, “Simplicity-based recovery of finite-alphabet signals for large-scale MIMO systems,” Digital Signal Process., vol. 80, pp. 70-82, 2018, in this paper, the problem of finite-alphabet source separation in both determined and underdetermined large-scale systems is considered. First, we address the noiseless case and propose a linear criterion based on l1 minimization combined with a box constraint. We also investigate the system conditions to ensure successful recovery. Then, we apply this approach to noisy massive MIMO transmissions and propose a quadratic criterion-based detector. Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed detection method for various QAM modulations and MIMO configurations. It is noted that the computational complexity remains the same as the constellation size increases. Moreover, the proposed method outperforms traditional minimum mean square error (MMSE)-based detection algorithms. This reference is used as reference

[10] in the description of this application.

[0014] H. Iimori, G. Abreu, D. Gonzalez G. and O. Gonsa, “Joint detection in massive overloaded wireless systems via mixed-norm discrete vector decoding,” in Proc. Asilomar CSSC, Pacific Grove, USA, 2019, propose a novel 'l0-norm based multidimensional signal detection scheme for overloaded wireless systems such as non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and underdetermined multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). This converts the discreteness of maximum likelihood (ML) detection into a continuous l0-norm constraint, which is then convexified by fractional programming (FP). As a result, the proposed signal detection algorithm has the potential to achieve ML-like performance in terms of bit error rate (BER) at a small cost by appropriately tuning the weighting parameters. A simulation comparison with a state-of-the-art (SotA) alternative is presented, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed method both in terms of its ability to outperform SotA and the possibility of further improvement to ML-like performance by optimizing the weighting parameters. This reference is used as reference

[11] in the description of this application.

[0015] H. Iimori, R.-A. Stoica, G. T. F. de Abreu, D. Gonzalez G., A. Andrae, and O. Gonsa, “Discreteness-aware receivers for overloaded MIMO systems,” CoRR, vol. abs / 2001.07560, 2020. [Online]. Available: https: / / arxiv.org / abs / 2001.07560, describe three high-performance receivers suitable for symbol detection in large-scale, overloaded, multidimensional wireless communication systems. They are designed based on the usual perfect channel state information (CSI) assumption at the receiver. Using this general assumption, the maximum likelihood (ML) detection problem is first formulated in terms of a '0-norm based optimization problem, and then transformed in three different ways to provide different performance-complexity tradeoffs using a recently proposed fractional programming (FP) technique called the quadratic transformation (QT), in which the l0-norm is not relaxed to the l1-norm. The first algorithm, called the discreteness-aware penalized zero-forcing (DAPZF) receiver, aims to outperform the state-of-the-art (SotA) while minimizing computational complexity. The second solution, called the discreteness-aware probabilistic soft-quantization detector (DAPSD), is designed to improve the recovery performance by soft quantization and is found to achieve the best performance among the three through numerical simulations. Finally, the third scheme, named the discreteness aware generalized eigenvalue detector (DAGED), not only offers a performance-complexity trade-off compared to the other schemes, but also differs in that it does not require offline optimization of the penalty parameters. Simulation results show that all three methods outperform state-of-the-art receivers, with DAPZF exhibiting a significantly reduced complexity. This reference will be used as reference

[12] in the description of this application.

[0016] Boyd, S., and Vandenberghe, L. (2004) Convex Optimization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017 / CBO9780511804441 is a lecture book that describes the theoretical foundations of convex optimization. This reference is used as reference

[13] in the description of this application.

[0017] K. Shen and W. Yu, “Fractional programming for communication systems-Part I: Power control and beamforming,” IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 66, no. 10, pp. 2616-2630, May 2018, investigates the use of FP in communication system design and optimization. Part I of the paper focuses on FP theory and solving continuous problems. The main theoretical contribution is a new quadratic transformation technique to tackle multi-ratio convex-convex FP problems, in contrast to traditional FP techniques that can only handle single-ratio or max-min-ratio cases. Multi-ratio FP problems are important for the optimization of communication networks because system-level design often involves multiple signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio terms. This paper considers the application of FP to solve continuous problems in communication system design, especially power control, beamforming, and maximizing energy efficiency. These application cases show that the proposed quadratic transformation can significantly facilitate optimization involving ratios by recasting the original non-convex problem as a series of convex problems. This FP-based problem reformulation yields an efficient iterative optimization algorithm with provable convergence to a stationary point. This reference is used as reference

[14] in the description of this application.

[0018] Kai-Kit Wong, Member and Arogyaswami Paulraj, “Efficient High-Performance Decoding for Overloaded MIMO Antenna Systems”, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL.6, NO.5, MAY 2007, explains that the practical challenge of forward error correcting codes (e.g., space-time turbo codes) to achieve capacity is overcoming the significant complexity associated with optimal joint maximum likelihood (ML) decoding. For this reason, iterative soft decoding has been investigated to approach optimal ML decoding performance with affordable complexity. In multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, a sensible decoding strategy consists of two stages: 1) estimating soft bits using a list version of sphere decoding or its variants, and 2) updating the soft bits by iterative soft decoding. The MIMO decoder needs to generate reliable soft bit estimates in the first stage before the iterative soft decoding is performed. This paper focuses on overloaded (or fat) MIMO antenna systems, where the number of receive antennas is less than the number of signals multiplexed in the spatial domain. In this scenario, the original form of sphere decoding is essentially inapplicable, and our aim is to geometrically generalize sphere decoding to address overload detection. The proposed so-called slab-sphere decoding (SSD) guarantees to obtain accurate ML hard detection while significantly reducing the complexity. Using a list version of SSD, this paper proposes an efficient MIMO soft decoder that can generate reliable soft bit estimates with reasonable complexity as input for iterative soft decoding for promising performance. This reference is used as reference

[15] in the description of this application.

[0019] In “Detection algorithm and initial laboratory results using V-BLAST space-time communication architecture” ELECTRONICS LETTERS 7th January 7999 Vol.35 No.I by GD Golden, CJ Foschini, RA Valenzuela and PW Olniansky, a signal detection algorithm for the Vertical BLAST (Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time) wireless communication architecture is described. Using this joint space-time approach, spectral efficiencies in the range of 20-40 bits / sec / Hz have been demonstrated in the laboratory under flat fading conditions at indoor fading rates. Recent information theory work has shown that if multipath is properly exploited, huge theoretical capacity can be achieved in rich scattering wireless channels. The diagonally layered space-time architecture proposed by Foschini, now known as D-BLAST, uses multi-element antenna arrays at both the transmitter and receiver and an elegant diagonally layered coding structure in which code blocks are distributed across the entire diagonal of space-time. In an isolated Rayleigh scattering environment, this processing structure results in theoretical rates that increase linearly with the number of transmit antennas, and these rates approach 90% of the Shannon capacity. However, the diagonal approach is unsuitable for initial implementation due to its implementation complexity. It is described as a simplified version of the BLAST detection algorithm, known as Vertical BLAST or V-BLAST, which has been implemented in real time in the laboratory. Using a laboratory prototype, spectral efficiencies as high as 40 bits / sec / Hz have been demonstrated in indoor slow fading environments. This reference is used as reference

[16] in the description of this application.

[0020] 1 and 2 respectively illustrate basic characteristics of orthogonal and non-orthogonal multiple access. FIG. 1 illustrates one exemplary embodiment of ordered access of transmission resources to channels of a shared transmission medium, for example in a wireless communication system. The available frequency band is divided into several channels. A single channel or a combination of adjacent or non-adjacent channels may be used by any one transmitter at a time. Different transmitters, indicated by different hatched patterns, may transmit in discrete time slots or several subsequent time slots, and may change the channel or combination of channels they transmit on each transmission. It should be noted that any transmitter may use one channel resource for a longer period of time, another transmitter may use two or more channel resources at the same time, and yet another transmitter may use both, two or more channel resources for a longer period of time, as illustrated in FIG. 1. In any case, only one transmitter uses any channel resource or combination thereof at a time, and it is relatively easy to detect and decode the signal from each transmitter.

[0021] Figure 2a shows the same frequency band as shown in Figure 1, but there is not always a temporary exclusive allocation of one or more individual channels to the transmitters. Rather, at least a portion of the frequency band may be used by multiple transmitters simultaneously, making it even more difficult to detect and decode signals from the individual transmitters. This is indicated by the different shaded boxes. Starting from the left, initially three transmitters use the channel resources temporarily exclusively in an orthogonal manner, but at a next time, two transmitters transmit in partially overlapping channels. The transmitter represented by the horizontal shaded pattern has exclusive access to the channels shown at the bottom of the figure, and the next three channels used by this transmitter are also used by another transmitter, represented by the diagonal shaded pattern in the dotted oval. The overlap is indicated by the crosshatched pattern. At a next time, a similar situation occurs, where each of the two transmitters has exclusive use of two channel resources, while both share the third channel resource. It should be noted that more than two transmitters may share, at least temporarily, some or all of the channel resources that each of them uses. These situations may be referred to as partial overloading or partial NOMA. In a different representation, Fig. 2b shows the same frequency band as Fig. 2. Since there is no explicitly temporary exclusive allocation of one or more individual channels to the transmitters, and at least parts of the frequency band are used at least temporarily simultaneously by multiple transmitters, the difficulty of detecting and decoding signals from individual transmitters is indicated by the grey fill pattern, which makes it impossible to identify any single transmitter.

[0022] The problem of multidimensional discrete signal detection also arises in various branches of modern electrical engineering related to signal processing, including audio and video systems, communication systems, control systems, etc. In general, the objective is to extract from a limited number of observed measurements of a signal subjected to random distortions, noise, and interferences a quantity of information (symbols) generated by the source according to a systematic model that is random (unknown) but known to the receiver (coding book, constellation, etc.).

[0023] One of the main challenges of such large-scale, potentially underdetermined systems is the trade-off between performance and complexity. Indeed, on the one hand, its classical near-optimal alternatives, such as ML receivers and sphere decoders [1, 2], suffer from prohibitive computational complexity that grows exponentially with the number of input variables and the cardinality of the source constellation, giving rise to combinatorial formulations of the problem, making them intractable even in relatively small settings. On the other hand, traditional low-complexity linear estimators (i.e., zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum mean squared error (MMSE)) lead to severe bit error rate (BER) performance degradation in the underdetermined case. Several low-complexity counterparts have been proposed in the past [3–5], but they prove limited in either scalability due to relatively high computational complexity or performance due to moderate detection capabilities.

[0024] Recently, much progress has been made in this field with the introduction of Compressive Sensing (CS) methods. In the context of multidimensional discrete signal detection, CS methods lead to new finite alphabet signal regularization techniques proposed by [6, 7] that are solvable in polynomial time. In detail, the central idea of ​​this new concept, called discreteness-awareness, is to bias the search for likely signals towards a discrete constellation set, using techniques recently emerged from CS methods, while preserving the continuity of the search space, thereby preserving convexity and thus allowing the optimal solution to be obtained efficiently.

[0025] In this context, several recent papers have pursued the design of discreteness-aware receivers. For example, in [6, 7], a new sparsity-based recovery method for noiseless underdetermined linear systems is proposed, which shows the feasibility of discrete signal recovery even for severely overloaded large-scale systems.

[0026] To take into account the effect of noise on the decoding performance at the receiver, [8–10] developed new discreteness-aware receivers, called sum of absolute values ​​(SOAV), sum of complex sparse regularizers (SCSR), and simplicity-based recovery (SBR), respectively. These were shown to significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art techniques (SotA), including the graph-based iterative Gaussian detector (GIGD) [5], Quad-min [4], and enhanced reactive tabu search (ERTS) [3], as well as traditional linear ZF and MMSE estimators. However, the latter approach relies on the well-known l1-norm approximation to replace the l0-norm non-convex function that appeared in the original discreteness-aware receiver to capture the discreteness of the input signal, which shows the potential to improve detection performance.

[0027] Aiming to address this challenge, the authors in [11, 12] developed a new type of discreteness-aware receiver without resorting to the usual convex hull relaxation. It demonstrated that the proposed method not only outperforms other SotAs (i.e., SOAV, SCSR and SBR), but also approaches the theoretical performance bound. Their two main components are adaptive l0-norm approximation and fractional programming (FP), which reduces the intractable l0-norm minimization to a set of convex problems and narrows the approximation gap.

[0028] In

[12] , a new discreteness-aware receiver called discreteness-aware penalized zero forcing (DAPZF) was shown to significantly outperform other SotA discreteness-aware detectors, namely SOAV, SCSR, and SBR mentioned above, indicating that DAPZF is a novel one that results in better performance. However, DAPZF as well as other SotAs assumed an ideal situation in which ideal hardware circuits such as power amplifiers, digital-to-analog (Analog-to-Digital) converters, and I / Q mixers are available at the transmitter. However, the performance of the aforementioned signal detection algorithms for multi-dimensional wireless systems is limited in practice by these unavoidable hardware impairments. Therefore, such imperfections need to be incorporated into the design of the signal detection method to suppress the associated undesirable effects.

[0029] Thus, the present invention addresses the problem of hardware imperfections in digital signal recovery and provides a method for estimating transmitted discrete symbol vectors in noisy environments, particularly in overloaded communication channels. Summary of the Invention [Problem to be solved by the invention]

[0030] The inventors recognize that because symbols used in digital communications are ultimately transmitted as analog, i.e., analog signals in the continuous domain, and because attenuation, intermodulation, distortion, and all kinds of errors inevitably modify the signals on their way from the transmitter through the analog communications channel to the receiver, the "detection" of the transmitted symbols at the receiver remains primarily an "estimate" of the transmitted signals, regardless of how they are used. In most cases, the signals are represented by the signal amplitude and the signal phase relative to an estimate of the transmitted signal vector. However, in the context of this specification, the terms "detect" and "estimate" are used interchangeably unless the distinction is indicated by the respective context. Once the estimated transmitted signal is determined, it is converted into estimated transmitted symbols and ultimately provided to a decoder that maps the estimated transmitted symbols to transmitted data bits. [Means for solving the problem]

[0031] All patent applications and patents mentioned in this disclosure are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety. European Patent Specification No. 2019 / 079532, entitled "Method of estimating transmit Symbol Vectors in an overloaded Communication Channel." European Patent Specification No. 2020 / 082987, entitled "Method for Wireless X2X Access and Receivers for Large Multidimensional Wireless Systems."

[0032] All publications disclosed herein, including the following, are incorporated by reference in their entirety: H. Iimori, G. Abreu, D. Gonzalez G., and O. Gonsa, “Joint detection in massive overloaded wireless systems via mixed-norm discrete vector decoding,” in Proc. Asilomar CSSC, Pacific Grove, USA, References

[11] H. Iimori, R.-A. Stoica, GTFde Abreu, D. Gonzalez G., A. Andrae, and O. Gonsa, “Discreteness-aware receivers for overloaded MIMO systems,” CoRR, vol.abs / 2001.07560, 2020, References

[12] . De Mi, Mehrdad Dianati, Lei Zhang, Sami Muhaidat, and Rahim Tafazolli, “Massive MIMO Performance With Imperfect Channel Reciprocity and Channel Estimation Error” IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL.65, NO.9, SEPTEMBER 2017. This paper describes how to estimate SINR in TDD systems using channel estimation and reciprocity error. Again, assuming the power of the signal is known (pilots), the increase in SINR due to channel estimation error can be measured. Hwanjin Kim and Junil Choi, “Channel Estimation for Spatially / Temporally Correlated Massive MIMO Systems with One-Bit ADCs,” arXiv:1910.13243 9 Dec 2019, available at 1910.13243.pdf (arxiv.org). The paper describes how to do this in the context of resource-constrained systems (1-bit ADCs). “FDD Massive MIMO via UL / DL Channel Covariance Extrapolation and Active Channel Sparsification” by Mahdi Barzegar Khalilsarai, Saeid Haghighatshoar, Xinping Yi, and Giuseppe Caire, available at arXiv:1803.05754v2[cs.IT]24 Aug 2018;1803.05754.pdf (arxiv.org). G.E. Prescott, J.L. Hammond, and D.R. Hertling, “Adaptive estimation of transmission distortion in a digital communications channel,” in IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 36, no. 9, pp. 1070-1073, Sept. 1988, doi:10.1109 / 26.7519.

[0033] In the context of this specification and claims, a communication channel is characterized by a set or matrix of complex coefficients. A channel matrix may also be referred to by the capital letter H. A communication channel may be established in any suitable medium, for example, a medium carrying electromagnetic, acoustic, and / or light waves. The channel characteristics are known and constant during each symbol transmission period / time, i.e., each symbol transmission is assumed to experience a constant channel, while the channel characteristics may change over time.

[0034] The term "symbol" refers to the discrete symbol c i, which forms a constellation C of symbols, or more colloquially, an alphabet used to organize transmissions. A symbol represents one or more bits of data, the smallest amount of information that can be transmitted at one time in a system using constellation C. In a transmission channel, a symbol may be represented by a combination of analog states, for example the amplitude and phase of a carrier wave. The amplitude and phase may refer, for example, to complex numbers or to ordinate values ​​on the abscissa of a Cartesian space, and may be treated as vectors. A vector of symbols is referred to herein by a lowercase s. Each transmitter may use the same constellation C to transmit data. However, it is equally possible for the transmitters to use different constellations. The receiver is assumed to have knowledge of the constellations used at each transmitter.

[0035] A convex function is a function

[13] such that any two points on the function can be connected by a straight line that remains entirely on the function itself. A convex domain may have any number of dimensions, and we recognize that the idea of ​​a straight line in a domain of four or more dimensions can be difficult to visualize.

[0036] The terms "component" or "element" may be used interchangeably throughout the following specification, particularly when referring to vectors.

[0037] Motivated by all of the above, we provide a theoretical foundation for the present detection scheme, which fully incorporates the noise effect into the signal detection procedure, and thus outperforms the aforementioned SotA in terms of discrete signal detection performance, as shown in Fig. 4.

[0038] Considering a device-to-device half-duplex communication link under a (possibly) determined scenario with channel estimation error, it can be modeled as follows:

number

number

[0039] In the above,

number

number

number

number

[0040] The detection performance at the receiver may be limited by non-ideal practical issues such as hardware impairments caused by non-ideal RF chains such as PA, DAC, ADC, I / Q mixers, etc., and therefore should be incorporated in the design of the signal detection mechanism

[14] . It has been shown in

[14] that the effective hardware distortion, which aggregates all contributions from the RF components, can be well approximated as an independently distributed additive zero-mean Gaussian random variable, which is found to be proportional to the power of the undistorted signal. In detail, the transmitted signal vector x is distorted by additive noise at the transmitter, i.e., S=x+w (2) where w is w~CN(0,η diag(x H x)), where η denotes an RF distortion level parameter that is characterized by the quality of the RF chain.

[0041] From the above, the fixed channel

number

number

[0042] From the above, the corresponding ML detection can be easily expressed as

number

number

[0043] In a conventional detector, ML detection can be used to estimate the transmitted signal vector for a received signal y. ML detection is performed by comparing the received signal vector y with the symbol c of a constellation C. iThe number of calculations is N times the number of transmitters T. t and grows exponentially with the cardinality of the constellation C.

[0044] First, recognize that the regularization constraint in (5) is satisfied if and only if the solution x ∈ C. However, this can only be verified by testing all different combinations of the elements of C in x, making the constraint disjoint, making the problem intractable for realistic massive radio systems. To get around this issue, state-of-the-art receivers, including SBR, SOAV, SCSR, and DAPZF in

[10] , [8], [9],

[12] , respectively, propose the following regularized alternative to (5) for some penalty parameter λ ≥ 0:

number

[0045] The latter formulation reveals that at its core, the SOAV MIMO decoder proposed in [8] and the SCSR scheme in [9] are nothing more than convexified alternatives to equation (6) with a rather classical replacement of the l0 norm by the convex l1 norm. Discreteness-aware state-of-the-art detection algorithms proposed in [6–12] significantly outperform traditional linear estimators (i.e., zero forcing (ZF) and minimum mean squared error (MMSE)) not only in determined scenarios but also in significantly underdetermined scenarios that can closely approach the absolute performance lower bound. It should be noted that one of the main advantages of optimization-based approaches is that, unlike message-passing-based approaches, optimal convergence is guaranteed regardless of the type of channel matrix.

[0046] Notwithstanding the above, none of the previous studies have fully taken into account the effects of possible distortions (i.e., CSI imperfections and AWGN noise) as shown in equation (6), which shows that the discreteness-aware ZF can be classified as a similar solution in the context of a comparison between traditional ZF and MMSE estimation processes, which also means that the interference caused by CSI errors has not yet been fully considered in the problem formulation.

[0047] Aiming to address this issue, by introducing a generalized least squares framework, we propose a novel detection algorithm that fully considers the effects of both noise and CSI imperfections in the detection procedure, which can be seen as a generalization of the state-of-the-art technique DAPZF

[12] .

[0048] For this purpose, the effective noise

number

number

[0049] Error covariance matrix

number

number

number

[0050] In Equation 8, the first term is modified in the optimization formulation to compensate for the effects of hardware failures.

[0051] As mentioned above, s is selected in a way that directly minimizes the effect of noise and compensates for hardware impairments and channel correlation, especially when s is large, thus creating robustness against noise, hardware impairments, and channel correlation, while simultaneously enhancing the solutions belonging to the constellation.

[0052] Aiming to tackle the intractable non-convexity of the l0-norm in the ML-like formulation given in Eq. (9), we introduce the following adaptive l0-norm approximation:

number

[0053] Substituting (10) into (8) and applying the fractional programming convexity technique, we obtain

number

number

number

number

[0054] It can be observed that equation (11) is a differentiable convex quadratic minimization problem without any constraints, which implies the existence of a closed-form expression for its minimization. To that end, equation (11) can be compactly rewritten as

number

number

[0055] Thus, a computer-implemented method according to the invention for estimating a transmit symbol vector transmitted in an overloaded communication channel characterized by a channel matrix H of complex coefficients comprises, at a receiver R, estimating a received signal vector

number

[0056] In case of more than one transmitter, the transmitters T are synchronized in time, i.e. a common time reference is assumed between the transmitters T and the receivers R, such that the receivers R receive transmissions of symbols from the different transmitters T substantially simultaneously, for example within a predefined time window. Receiving symbols simultaneously or within a predefined time window means that, assuming that the transmitters T transmit a sequence of symbols one by one, all the time-synchronously transmitted symbols are received at the receiver R before the subsequent symbol is received. This may include setting the transmitters T to adjust the start time of their transmissions such that the propagation delays that depend on the distance between the transmitters T and the receivers R are compensated. This may also include providing a time gap between transmitting subsequent symbols.

[0057] The method further comprises: i The method further involves defining a convex search space that includes at least the components of the received signal vector y and the components of the transmitted symbol vector s for y, which is strongly biased towards the discrete constellation points by regularization (i.e., the third term in equation (4)), while at the same time incorporating knowledge of the noise into the signal detection process, unlike other SotA discreteness-aware receivers, including [6–12].

[0058] This noise and CSI imperfection aware capability of the presented invention is its main advantage over other SotAs and is achieved by introducing another regularization term and utilizing a generalized least squares framework such that noise amplification and hardware impairments can be sufficiently suppressed, resulting in the presented invention being a generalization of the state-of-the-art DAPZF.

[0059] On the other hand, when firmware or software is used to implement embodiments of the present invention, the firmware or software may be configured to include modules, procedures, and / or functions for performing the above-described functions or operations of the present invention, and the firmware or software configured to implement the present invention may be loaded into a processor or stored in memory and run by the processor.

[0060] The flow charts illustrating the disclosed methods include "processing blocks" or "steps" that may represent computer software instructions or groups of instructions. Alternatively, the processing blocks or steps may represent steps performed by a functionally equivalent circuit, such as a digital signal processor (DSP), a field programmable gate array (FPGA), an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), or a graphic processing unit (GPU), or a computer processing unit (CPU) programmed with software instructions to perform the disclosed methods. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that unless otherwise indicated herein, the particular sequence of steps described is merely exemplary and may be modified. Unless otherwise indicated, the steps described herein are in any order, meaning that the steps may be performed in any convenient or desirable order.

[0061] The invention will now be further explained with reference to the drawings. [Brief description of the drawings]

[0062] [Figure 1] 1 shows a representation of orthogonal multiple access where resources are utilized by one user at a time. [Figure 2a] 1 illustrates partial non-orthogonal multiple access. [Figure 2b] 1 shows a complete non-orthogonal multiple access. [Diagram 3] A detailed description of the embodiments is provided. [Figure 4] We present an uncoded BER performance evaluation of the proposed scheme in comparison with state-of-the-art signal recovery methods as a function of various hardware impairment levels. DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS

[0063] Figures 1 and 2 have been described in detail above and will not be described again here.

[0064] 3 shows an exemplary generalized block diagram of a transmitter T and a receiver R communicating over a communication channel 208. The transmitter T may include, among other things, a source 202 of digital data to be transmitted. The source 202 provides bits of digital data to an encoder 204, which forwards the data bits, encoded into symbols, to a modulator 206. The modulator 206 transmits the modulated data over the communication channel 208, for example, via one or more antennas or any other type of signal emitter (not shown). The modulation may be, for example, quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), in which a transmitted symbol is represented by the amplitude and phase of the transmitted signal.

[0065] The channel 208 may be a wireless channel. However, the generalized block diagram is valid for any kind of channel, wired or wireless. In the context of the present invention, the medium is a shared medium, i.e., multiple transmitters and receivers access the same medium, and more specifically, the channel is shared by multiple transmitters and receivers.

[0066] The receiver R receives a signal through a communication channel 208, for example via one or more antennas or any other type of signal receiver (not shown). The communication channel 208 may introduce noise into the transmitted signal, and the amplitude and phase of the signal may be distorted by the channel. The distortion may be compensated for by an equalizer (not shown) provided in the receiver that is controlled based on channel characteristics that may be obtained, for example, through analyzing pilot symbols with known characteristics transmitted over the communication channel. Similarly, noise may be reduced or removed by a filter in the receiver (not shown).

[0067] A signal detector 212 receives a signal from the channel, and 210 attempts to estimate the noise variance and hardware distortion level parameters ETA from a series of received signals accumulating over a priori knowledge from previous transmissions or the transmitter. The signal detector 212 forwards the estimated signal to a decoder 214 that decodes the estimated signal into estimated symbols. If the decoding produces a symbol that could possibly have been transmitted, it is forwarded to a demapper 216. The demapper 216 outputs bit estimates corresponding to the estimated transmitted signal and the corresponding estimated symbols to a microprocessor 218, for example, for further processing.

[0068] The signal detector 210 receives a signal from the channel and attempts to estimate from the received signal which signal was transmitted on the channel. The signal detector 210 forwards the estimated signal to the decoder 212, which decodes the estimated signal into an estimated symbol. If the decoding produces a symbol that could have been possibly transmitted, it is forwarded to the demapper 214. The demapper 214 outputs the bit estimates corresponding to the estimated transmitted signal and the corresponding estimated symbol, e.g., to a microprocessor 216 for further processing. Otherwise, if the decoding does not produce a symbol that could have been possibly transmitted, the failure of the attempt to decode the estimated signal into the expected symbol is fed back to the signal detector to repeat the signal estimation with different parameters. The processing of data in the transmitter's modulator and the receiver's demodulator are complementary to each other.

[0069] While the transmitter T and receiver R of FIG. 3 are generally assumed to be known, the receiver R, and more particularly the signal detector 210 and decoder 212 of the receiver in accordance with the invention, are adapted to perform the inventive method described below and to operate differently from known signal detectors.

[0070] Fig. 4 shows the uncoded BER performance evaluation of the proposed scheme in comparison with state-of-the-art signal recovery methods as a function of different hardware impairment levels.

Claims

1. 1. A computer-implemented reconstruction method for discrete digital signal recovery in a noisy and overloaded wireless communication system in the presence of hardware impairments, characterized by a channel matrix of complex coefficients, comprising: receiving a receive signal from the channel (208) by a signal detector (212); an estimation of the hardware impairment parameter (η) is performed in a noise power estimator (210); An estimation of noise power is performed by the noise power estimator (210); forwarding the received signal, the hardware impairment parameter (η) and the noise power estimate to a decoder (214) which estimates the transmitted symbols; Including, The estimates of the decoder (214) generate possibly transmitted symbols that are forwarded to a demapper (216), which outputs bit estimates corresponding to the estimated transmitted signal and the corresponding estimated symbols to a microprocessor (218) for further processing; minimizing an effect of channel estimation errors on a minimization formulation via a first function, a second function, and a third function used to estimate the transmitted symbols; the first function is a Euclidean distance function centered on the vector of the received signal including channel correlation effects; the second function being the product of the estimated noise power and the transmitted signal power; The third function is ０ A norm-based function, A computer-implemented reconfiguration method.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the hardware impairment parameter (η) is incorporated into a covariance matrix that captures channel correlation.

3. The method of claim 1 or 2, wherein the fractional programming algorithm aims to find a value of the third function that is lower than a global minimum of the first function.

4. A receiver (R) of a communication system having a processor, a volatile and / or non-volatile memory, and at least one interface adapted to receive a signal in a communication channel (208), wherein the non-volatile memory stores computer program instructions which, when executed by a microprocessor, configure the receiver (R) to perform the method according to any one of claims 1 to 3.

5. A computer program comprising computer executable instructions which, when executed on a computer, cause said computer to carry out the method according to any one of claims 1 to 3.

6. A computer readable medium storing the computer program of claim 5.

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