Study of Frequency-Spatial Diversity in

MIMO-OFDM System
Project in EE 359 Wireless Communications, Winter 2008-2009

Ryan P Peng ryan.p.peng@intel.com

Project proposal:

INTRODUCTION
The wireless channel suffers from attenuation due to destructive addition of multipath of
propagation and interference from other users or other resource[1][2]. The modern digital
is designed to combat this challenge by enabling receiver to recovery the transmitted
information from replicas across temporal, frequency or spatial domain. This multi-
dimensional diversity is provided by natural of propagation media, and utilized by
smartly designed communication structure:

Temporal Diversity: use channel coding to add redundancy and implement and
interleaver to spread the replicas to multiple coherent time.

Frequency Diversity: Replicas of information are sent through different frequency

components, belonging to different coherent bandwidth. In the context of OFDM, the
previous study in MC-OFDM [3] and SCBT [4] utilize the spreading codes along the
OFDM tones and combine the replicas in despreading process. Notice that any channel
coding can be applied on the frequency dimension to receive the frequency diversity as
long as the coded symbols or bits are crossing multiple diversity bandwidths.

Spatial Diversity: The signals received by antennas separated by certain distance behave
uncorrelated scattering . Under uniform scattering assumption, this distance can be as
short as .4 wavelength. MIMO technique is the most popular technique to collect spatial
diversity where antennas are spatially separated by a distance relatively to the signal
wavelength.

Given fast data-rate transmission, it is reasonable to model the channel statistics as static
or quasistatic over an OFDM symbol [5]. Under this consideration, we will only focus on
study in frequency-spatial diversity provided by uncorrelated scattering multipath
propagation during the period of transmitting an OFDM symbol.
 OVERVIEW
Conventional Space-Time coding allied on flat-fading channel signal carrier transmission
has been well-studied [4][5]. In mentioned context, the received symbol could be written
as:

Mt
r j [n] = ∑ hi , j [n]ci [n] + w j [n]
i =1

where r j [n] is the received symbol at receiver antenna j , j ∈ [1, Mr ] at moment of nTs .
hi , j [n] is the complex path gain from Tx antenna i to Rx antenna j. It can be considered as
a constant during the symbol time, therefore it’s a quasistatic flat fading channel, whose
amplitude following either Rayleigh or Rician (not considered in this study) distribution.
ci [n] is the modulated symbol from antenna i, with average energy of the constellation.
w j [n] is complex AWGN with variance N 0 / 2 in real and imag dimension.

In the concept multicarrier system, the received symbol that is modulated to the kth tone
will be in the form of frequency domain equivalent representation[2] as:

Mt
y j [n, k ] = ∑ λi , j [k ]xi [n, k ] + z j [n, k ]
i =1

where xi [n, k ] is the transmitted symbol modulated in the kth tone of the nth OFDM
symbol. λi , j [k ] is the k th eigenvalue of the channel matrix H i , j [n] w.r.t. the eigenvector
of Fourier transform vector. This structure implicate fading in each subcarrier behave flat
fading, and it’s quasistatic during one OFDM symbol period. Focusing on one OFDM
symbol period, the above equation can be simplified to

Mt
y j [ k ] = ∑ λi , j [ k ] x i [ k ] + z j [ k ]
i =1

A conceptual figure can be drawn like

  ...
 x [k ] * e j 2πk / N
IFFT  1
 j 2π ( k +1) / N
 x1[k + 1] * e
 ...
Space-Time
Code

 ...
 x [k ]e j 2πk / N
IFFT  2
 j 2π ( k +1) / N
 x2 [k + 1]e
 ...

Compare this equation with the single carrier flat fading one, one can easily conclude that
the any coding applied on the time domain in the single carrier context should find a
equivalent analogy on the frequency domain in OFDM representation. A plenty of space-
frequency codes have been studied in literature [6][7][8][9][10].

In this study, we will study in the diversity provided by several promising frequency-
space code in the context of OFDM-MIMO system. The full diversity across frequency
and spatial can be collected by using coding scheme that use the symbols from all tones
as input and distribute them to all tones on all antennas jointly[8][10]. In [10], the author
extended the coding criterion from (10) in [5] to (13) in [10]. The maximum achievable
diversity order of a frequency-space coded OFDM system has upper bound as MtMrL.
To achieve this, for the l th tap in the channel impulse response, error matrix
D l (C − E) T must has rank of Mt; additionally, the fading correlation matrix between two
propagation path between Tx antenna and Rx antenna has to have rank of Mr. A number
of space-time codes will be tested in this project in frequency-space domain.

WORK PLAN
In this project, MIMO-OFDM model will be first built up with no diversity consideration.
Quasistatic Selective Rayleigh fading will be designed as channel model. By applying the
existing space-time codes including Alamouti code and SCTC onto the OFDM tones, the
diversity and coding gain achieved by these codes will be tested. Finally, we will build up
a conceptual frequency-space coder as introduced in [8], in which antennas will be
treated as additional OFDM tones and orthogonality will be kept by IFFT/FFT processing.
 REFERENCES
[1] A.Goldsmith, “Wireless Communications”, 1st Edition/Dec, 2005
[2] John G. Proakis, Digital Communications, 4th ED. Mc Graw Hill,Inc, 2001, ch. 8.
[3] Ryan Peng, Report on “Performance of OFDM-CDMA System in Frequency Domain Equivalent Model”, a course project in
spread-spectrum, EE, University of Florida
[4] Ryan Peng, Report on “Performance of Single Carrier Block Transmission in MB-OFDM system based on PHY of EMCA 368”,
project report submitted on Aug 14th, 2007, NXP semiconductors.
[5] V. Tarokh, N. Seshadri, A.R. Calderbank, “Space-Time Codes for High Data Rate Wireless Communications: Performance
Criterion and Code Construction” IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. 44, no. 2, March 1998, pp. 744-765.
[6] D Gesbert, M. Shafi, Da-shan Shui, P.J.Smith, and A.Naguib “From Theory to Practice: An Overview of MIMO Space-Time
Coded Wireless Systems” IEEE Trans. on Selected Areas in Comm, vol. 21, no. 3, April 2003, pp. 281-302.
[7] Ye Li, Jack H. Winters, and Nelson R. Sollenberger “MIMO-OFDM for Wireless Communications: Signal Detection With
Enhanced Channel Estimation”, IEEE Trans. on Comm, vol. 50, no. 9, September 2002, pp. 1471-1477.
[8] A. F. Molisch, Moe Z. Win, and Jack H. Winter, “Space-Time-Frequency (STF) Coding for MIMO-OFDM Systems”, IEEE
Communications Letters, vol. 6, no. 9, September 2002, pp. 370-372.
[9] R. S. Blum, Q. Yan, Y. Li, and J. H. Winters “Improved Techniques for 4 Transmit and 4 Receive Antenna MIMO-OFDM for
Wireless Communications”, IEEE.2001
[10] Helmut Bölcskei, and Arogyaswami J. Paulraj “Space-Frequency Coded Broadband OFDM Systems”, IEEE.2000