IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSII: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 55, NO.

8, AUGUST 2008

821

An Effective MIMOOFDM System for IEEE 802.22

WRAN Channels
Hyunwook Kim, Student Member, IEEE, Jaewoon Kim, Student Member, IEEE, Suckchel Yang,
Minki Hong, Student Member, IEEE, and Yoan Shin, Senior Member, IEEE

AbstractWe propose a closed-loop multiple-input multiple-output

orthogonal
frequency-division
multiplexing
(MIMOOFDM) transmission scheme appropriate for the
IEEE 802.22 wireless regional area network (WRAN) channel
environments. The proposed scheme utilizes the Grassmannian
beamforming and an antenna selection algorithm to maintain bit-error-rate (BER) performance and to reduce feedback
information. To further reduce the feedback information considering the channel property of the IEEE 802.22 WRAN, the
proposed scheme employs an extension of the feedback period
and subcarrier grouping. Simulation results in the IEEE 802.22
WRAN reference channel models indicate that the proposed
MIMOOFDM transmission scheme achieves superior BER performance and spectral efficiency than open-loop MIMOOFDM
system even considering the feedback overhead of the system.
Index TermsAntenna selection, cognitive radio, Grassmannian beamforming, IEEE 802.22, multiple-input multiple-output
orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMOOFDM),
wireless regional area network (WRAN).

I. INTRODUCTION

ECENTLY, the explosive advent of various wireless

communication systems has led to serious deficiency of
valuable frequency resources. As a solution to this problem, the
cognitive radio (CR) effectively reuses the finite frequency resources by intelligent recognition of idle frequency bands using
spectrum sensing [1]. The IEEE 802.22 WRAN is one of the
first standardization efforts to incorporate the CR concept into
the commercial wireless communication system. In November
2005, IEEE 802.22 WRAN received 9 PHY proposals, and the
most proposals were based on the orthogonal frequency-division
multiplexing (OFDM) techniques. This is because the OFDM
is more suitable than any other techniques to provide flexible
spectrum management, which makes the CR systems effectively
reuse the frequency resources. All of the proposals have been
merged to an OFDM-based PHY at meeting in March 2006
[2], [3]. Based on the OFDM scheme, the IEEE 802.22 WRAN
system exploits the unused spectrum in the licensed TV bands
using the CR techniques for transmission. Its service range from
a fixed base station (BS) to the customer premise equipments
(CPEs), which are also fixed, should cover from the typical 33 km
Manuscript received July 30, 2007; revised November 8, 2007. First published June 17, 2008; last published August 13, 2008 (projected). This work
was supported in part by LG Electronics and by the Basic Research Program of
the KOSEF under Grant R01-2006-000-10578-0. This paper was recommended
by Associate Editor A. Tasic.
The authors are with the School of Electronic Engineering, Soongsil University, Seoul 156-743, Korea (e-mail: hwkim@amcs.ssu.ac.kr;ecko99@amcs.
ssu.ac.kr; ysc0809@amcs.ssu.ac.kr; hmk0906@amcs.ssu.ac.kr; yashin@e.
ssu.ac.kr).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSII.2008.922403

up to the maximum of 100 km [4]. Due to its fixed configuration

and wide range, a WRAN channel environment shows a very
low Doppler spread and a high delay spread [5].
The multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission
techniques can be introduced in the WRAN systems for the
purpose of improving the spectral efficiency and the BER
performance. The MIMO systems are classified into either
open-loop or closed-loop depending upon the use of feedback
information on the channel states [6]. According to the number
of data streams transmitted through the transmit antennas, the
MIMO schemes are also classified into either single-stream
or multiple-stream [6]. Since the open-loop multiple-stream
MIMO scheme such as V-BLAST [7] aims at the increase of
data rate based on spatial multiplexing under good channel
conditions, it is not suitable for harsh WRAN channels. Thus,
the open-loop single-stream MIMO scheme such as STBC
[8], which can improve the performance by achieving spatial
diversity gain, may be considered for the WRAN.
Theoretically superb spectral efficiency of the closed-loop
MIMO systems may be significantly deteriorated when the
feedback information is taken into consideration in actual
implementation [9], [10]. Fortunately, however, extremely
long coherence time of the WRAN channels due to very small
Doppler spread opens up an opportunity to significantly reduce
the amount of feedback information by extending the feedback
period in the time domain. Moreover, subcarrier grouping in
the frequency domain also reduces the feedback overhead. Due
to these characteristics of the WRAN channels, the closed-loop
single-stream MIMO scheme such as beamforming can be
considered as a more effective MIMO technique to improve the
spectral efficiency of the CR systems.
In this paper, we propose a closed-loop MIMOOFDM
system suitable for the IEEE 802.22 WRAN channel environments. In the proposed system, to maintain good bit-error-rate
(BER) performance as well as to reduce feedback information,
the Grassmannian beamforming [11] is utilized and the antenna
selection algorithm is also proposed. In addition, to improve
the spectral efficiency by further reducing the feedback information based on the characteristics of the WRAN channels,
the proposed system employs the period extension of feedback
signaling and the subcarrier grouping.
II. FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS AND CHANNEL MODELS FOR
IEEE 802.22 WRAN SYSTEMS
Data rate of the IEEE 802.22 WRAN systems must be more
than 1.5-Mbps/subscriber at downlink and 384-kbps/subscriber
at uplink. The systems shall operate with minimum spectral efficiency per transmission link of 0.5 bps/Hz and a maximum goal
of 5 bps/Hz or better where propagation permits. The packet
error rate (PER) from the PHY layer to the MAC layer should

1549-7747/$25.00 2008 IEEE

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSII: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 55, NO. 8, AUGUST 2008

TABLE I
MULTIPATH PROFILES OF THE IEEE 802.22 WRAN REFERENCE CHANNEL
MODELS

Fig. 1. Block diagram of a MIMOOFDM system based on the Grassmannian

beamforming.

TABLE II
ILLUSTRATIVE SET OF THE OFDM SYSTEM PARAMETERS FOR THE IEEE
802.22 WRAN SYSTEM

very small Doppler spreads. To effectively improve the BER

performance and the spectral efficiency of the system considering these channel characteristics, we propose a closed-loop
MIMOOFDM transmission scheme. The proposed scheme
basically employs the Grassmannian beamforming [11] to
improve the system performance, while an antenna selection
algorithm, an extension of the feedback period in the time
domain, and subcarrier grouping considering channel property
of the IEEE 802.22 WRAN are combined to maintain the BER
performance and to further reduce the feedback information.
A. Grassmannian Beamforming
Fig. 1 shows a block diagram of a closed-loop MIMOOFDM
system based on the Grassmannian beamforming [11]. The
transmitter and the receiver preserve the same codebook
which contains
beam weight vectors for the Grassmannian
beamforming. In a given channel environment, the optimal
beam weight vector of the codebook set at the receiver is
selected as

be guaranteed to be less than 10% over 8000 packets. To support

various national policies for the frequency band of TV broadcasting, the system should contain a specification that can operate at various frequency bandwidths of 6, 7, and 8 MHz. The
system should operate by using fractional bandwidth at one TV
band to avoid interferers such as wireless microphones which
are occupying a part of one TV band. Also, the mode that can
together use the adjacent two or three TV bandwidths is considered as an important technique in the IEEE 802.22 WRAN,
when the adjacent two or three TV bands are not used by the
incumbent users [4].
The reference channel models for the IEEE 802.22 WRAN
are derived from a scenario that transmits the signals between
the fixed BS and CPEs in wireless broadband environments. The
WRAN channel models assume system environments whose
distance of signal transmission between the fixed BS and CPEs
is from a few tens of kilometers to 100 km. Table I summarizes
the WRAN reference multipath profiles determined by the IEEE
802.22 standard group [5]. Table II presents an illustrative set
of the OFDM system parameters for a system occupying one
7-MHz TV band. Meanwhile, when the adjacent two or three
TV bands are available, the fast Fourier transform (FFT) size
may be increased to 4096 or 6144 by using channel bonding to
effectively increase the data rates.
III. PROPOSED MIMOOFDM TRANSMISSION SCHEME FOR
IEEE 802.22 WRAN
As discussed in Section II, the channel environments for the
IEEE 802.22 WRAN exhibit large maximum delay spreads and

(1)
where and
denote the channel matrix and
a beam weight vector in the codebook set , respectively. In
the Grassmannian beamforming, the index for the optimal beam
weight vector , not the vector itself, is fed back from the receiver to the transmitter. Thus, the amount of feedback information can be reduced to
bits, and the MIMOOFDM
system using the Grassmannian beamforming provides a high
spectral efficiency by maximizing the channel gain and reducing
the feedback information.
B. Antenna Selection
In the MIMOOFDM system using the Grassmannian beamforming, several transmit antennas may not contribute to the performance enhancement of the system due to their poor channel
characteristics. The MIMO system without these antennas may
be sometimes desirable in terms of the spectral efficiency of the
system, since the overhead by the feedback information required
for each antenna acts as a serious burden for the overall spectral
efficiency. Consequently, the proposed MIMOOFDM system
performs the Grassmannian beamforming for the selected antennas with good channel characteristics to effectively reduce
the amount of the feedback information, while minimizing the
degradation of BER performance.
Consider a situation that the Grassmannian beamforming is
used only for the selected antennas out of all
transmit

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823

antennas. The number of the receive antenna is set to . The

for the th subcarrier is expressed as
channel matrix

..
.
(2)
denotes the channel response from the th
Here,
transmit antenna to the th receive antenna, and
is the
channel vector of the th transmit antenna. As an illustration to explain the proposed algorithm, we assume that three
transmit antennas are selected out of four transmit antennas
for the Grassmannian beamforming. In this case, we calculate
combinations of the selected channel vectors and
formulate the following channel matrices
for the selected channels:

(3)
The receiver decides the Grassmannian beam weight vector for
each selected channel matrix and evaluates maximum channel
gains for the channel matrices as
(4)
denotes the best Grassmannian beam weight
where
vector for each matrix
. Then, the receiver selects an
antenna combination that has the best channel gain as follows:

Fig. 2. Comparative examples of the CT and the FS antenna selection schemes.

account. Fig. 2 depicts comparative examples of the CT and the

FS schemes, where the number of transmit antennas and the
selected antennas are four and three, respectively.
C. Feedback Periodic Extension
In order to further reduce the feedback information, the proposed MIMOOFDM system introduces an extension of the
feedback period in the time domain. Since the coherence time
of the IEEE 802.22 WRAN channel is very large, the proposed
system only transmits the feedback information to the BS across
over several OFDM symbols. The maximum ETP (ExTension
Period) value
is calculated by considering the coherence time of the given channel as
(6)
and
denote the coherence time of the
where
channel and the OFDM symbol duration including the cyclic
prefix (CP), respectively. Since the coherence time
is
calculated by the maximum Doppler frequency
as
(7)

(5)
denotes the beam weight vector from the Grasswhere
mannian codebook.
In the proposed system, the number of selected transmit
antennas must be determined to maximize the spectral efficiency
under the given channel condition. Thus, the tradeoff between
PER performance and feedback amount should be considered.
Moreover, performance degradation due to antenna correlation
effects as well as pilot overhead for the channel estimation are
also essential factors to be considered for the antenna selection.
The antenna selection algorithms may be classified into CT
(CounT) and FS (Full Search) schemes. The CT scheme
finds the most frequently selected antenna combination for
all of the subcarriers and utilizes the beamforming algorithm
for this combination. The CT scheme is suboptimal since a
same antenna combination is applied to all of the subcarriers
regardless of different channel characteristics of different subcarriers. On the other hand, the FS scheme selects the optimal
antenna combination for individual subcarrier and utilizes the
beamforming using the optimal combination for each subcarrier. The MIMOOFDM systems utilizing the FS scheme is
optimal, however, it requires formidable amount of the feedback information for the selected antenna combination for each
subcarrier. Hence, the spectral efficiency by the FS scheme is
significantly reduced if we take this feedback information into

and
have

is 2.5 Hz for the channel Profile C in Table I, we

s

(8)

Consequently, the maximum ETP value

tained for the OFDM symbol duration of

can be obs as
(9)

that is, the reporting period of the feedback information for the
beamforming and the antenna selection can be extended up to
1250 OFDM symbol durations in the proposed MIMOOFDM
system. Meanwhile, an access channel band is selected by monitoring the idle frequency bands in the spectrum sensing procedure. In the specification of the IEEE 802.22 WRAN, the spectrum sensing period is 5 ms. Also, the beam weight vector is decided again when the selected band is changed. Hence, it is impractical that the ETP value is larger than the spectrum sensing
period. To this end, the realistic ETP value is set to be smaller
than 16, considering both the symbol duration and spectrum
sensing period of the IEEE 802.22 WRAN.
D. Subcarrier Grouping
As explained in the previous subsection, reduction of the
feedback information using the feedback period extension is

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSII: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 55, NO. 8, AUGUST 2008

somewhat restricted in closed-loop MIMOOFDM systems.

For this reason, we employ the sub-carrier grouping to more
effectively reduce the feedback information. In the subcarrier
grouping, adjacent subcarriers in the frequency domain are
grouped together by considering the coherence bandwidth of a
given channel. The systems utilizing the sub-carrier grouping
transmit the feedback information for the representative subcarrier of the group. Generally, the representative subcarrier may
be that located at the center of the group. The GSC (Grouped
Subcarrier) value which is the number of subcarriers per a
group is calculated by considering the coherence bandwidth of
the given channel as
(10)
Fig. 3. Comparison of BER performances of the FS and the CT schemes.

and
denote the coherence bandwidth
where
of the channel and subcarrier spacing, respectively. Since the
coherence bandwidth for each correlation is calculated by rms
delay spread
as
%
%
and

(11)

is 2.765 s for the channel Profile A in Table I, we have

kHz
kHz

%
%

(12)

As a result, the GSC value can be obtained for the subcarrier

spacing of
kHz as
%
%

(15), we easily observe that the amount of the feedback information should be significantly reduced to effectively improve the
spectral efficiency of the closed-loop MIMOOFDM system, as
in the proposed system.

(13)

Note that the number of subcarriers per a group for the beamforming can be varied from 2 to 20 subcarriers in the proposed
MIMOOFDM system.
Meanwhile, the spectral efficiency is used to evaluate transmission effectiveness of wireless communication systems. The
spectral efficiency
for a closed-loop MIMOOFDM system
which requires the feedback information is calculated as

(14)
and
denote the number of data subcarriers for
Here,
one OFDM symbol and the number of transmitted bits per one
subcarrier and code rate of channel coding, respectively. Also,
PER in (14) means PER performance of the system, while
denotes the number of subcarriers for the feedback overhead,
which is represented as
(15)
are the number of bits and the code rate for one
where and
subcarrier to transmit the feedback information, respectively. In
addition,
is the codebook index (in bits) for the Grassmannian beamforming, and
denotes the number of bits representing which antenna combination is selected. From (14) and

IV. SIMULATION RESULTS

For the simulation to analyze the BER performance and the
spectral efficiency of the proposed system, we considered the
IEEE 802.22 WRAN multipath Profile A in Table I and the
OFDM system parameters given in Table II. The CP duration
was set to 64 s, and we have assumed that the channel state was
perfectly known to the receiver. In addition, we have assumed
transmit antennas and one receive antenna configuration
for all of the systems.
Moreover, to determine the antenna selection scheme, we
compare the BER performance according to
of the CT
and the FS schemes when
and uncoded QPSK
modulation is utilized. As shown in Fig. 3, it is observed that
the CT scheme with small feedback achieves good performance
comparable to the FS scheme requiring a huge amount of feedback. For this reason, we have utilized the CT scheme as the
antenna selection scheme in the proposed system throughout all
of the simulations.
In all of the simulations, the proposed system utilized the
Grassmannian beamforming and the antenna selection scheme
where number of the selected antennas was set to 3, and the
index size
of the codebook was 3 b. In addition,
and
in the proposed system were assumed to be 2 (corresponding
to QPSK modulation) and 1/5 to make sure that the feedback
channel was sufficiently robust to the channel errors. In order
to analyze the spectral efficiency of the proposed scheme according to various ETP and GSC values, we have evaluated the
PER performance for various ETP and GSC values.
Fig. 4 compares the BER performance according to
of the proposed MIMOOFDM and well-known open-loop
space-time block coding (STBC) [8] MIMOOFDM systems
when uncoded QPSK modulation is utilized. Here, the solid
lines denote the BER curves of the proposed scheme with
various ETP/GSC values of 8/8, 8/16, and 16/16. In the figure,
we observe that the proposed MIMOOFDM system achieves
significant BER performance improvement of 24.5 dB at

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825

TABLE III
MCS ACCORDING TO DATA RATES FOR THE IEEE 802.22 WRAN SYSTEMS

Fig. 4. Comparison of BER performance of the proposed closed-loop

MIMOOFDM and open-loop STBC MIMOOFDM systems.

Fig. 6. Comparison of spectral efficiency performance of the proposed and

STBC MIMOOFDM systems considering the MCS of the IEEE 802.22
WRAN.

Fig. 5. Comparison of spectral efficiency performance of the proposed and

STBC MIMOOFDM systems.

over the open-loop STBC scheme whose STBC

rate is 1/2 and 3/4.
Fig. 5 compares the spectral efficiency of the proposed
scheme and the STBC scheme with the same system configuration considered for Fig. 4. The spectral efficiency is
calculated by (14), assuming one packet is equivalent to one
OFDM symbol to evaluate the PER. Note that an open-loop
MIMOOFDM system such as the STBC system considered
in this paper does not have the feedback information, and
thus
in (14). We observe from the figure that the
proposed scheme employing the Grassmannian beamforming,
the antenna selection, the ETP, and the GSC significantly
improves the spectral efficiency and clearly outperforms the
STBC scheme when the ETP and GSC become large.
The IEEE 802.22 WRAN system utilizes a modulation
and coding set (MCS) to support various data rates as given
in Table III [2]. Fig. 6 shows the spectral efficiency of the
proposed and the STBC schemes for ETP/GSC values of 8/8
and 16/16, considering the MCS in Table III. It is revealed that
the proposed MIMOOFDM scheme achieves approximately
1.52 times superior spectral efficiency to the STBC scheme
region.
for the whole
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have proposed a closed-loop MIMOOFDM
transmission scheme for the IEEE 802.22 WRAN systems. The

proposed scheme is a discreet combination of the Grassmannian beamforming, the antenna selection, the feedback period
extension, and the subcarrier grouping scheme by exploiting the
system configuration and the channel characteristic of the IEEE
802.22 WRAN systems. The end result is that the proposed
scheme achieves significant BER and spectral efficiency performance improvement over the open-loop STBC MIMOOFDM
systems, even considering the feedback burden of the proposed
scheme imposed on the spectral efficiency.
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