ISBN: 978-88-900984-8-2

THIRD WORKSHOP ON POWER LINE COMMUNICATIONS, OCTOBER 1-2, 2009, UDINE, ITALY 1

An Oversampled Modulated Filter Bank Based Transmultiplexer With Precoding and Equalisation
Stephan Weiss, Paul Yarr, Waleed Al-Hanafy, Andrew Millar, and Chi-Hieu Ta
Centre for excellence in Signal and Image Processing Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering University of Strathclyde Glasgow G1 1XW, Scotland, UK stephan.weiss@eee.strath.ac.uk

Abstract This paper addresses an oversampled lter bank transmultiplexer applied to a power line commmunications scenario. We proposed structure has a low oversampling ratio and therefore introduces only a small amount of redunancy. Of particular interest are the possibility to iterate the lter bank in order to shorten the overall response, which is traded-off against the use of precoding or equalisation in order to target remaining ISI is only a low number of multiplexed bands are used. However, we demonstrate the iteration of the lter banks does not reduce the problme of timing synchronisation.

I. I NTRODUCTION RANSMULTIPLEXING using lter banks is one of the oldest multiplexing methods in telecommunications [1]. While the design of critically sampled structures, which are free of redundancy, was a break-through in terms of signal processing theory [2], [3], these systems loose their orthogonality when communicating over dispersive channels. This has been remedied by means of equalisation, which however requires cross-terms between subbands [4] equivalent to [5] for the dual operation of signal decomposition in order to achieve a meaningful performance. This can be addressed by oversampling [6], [7], leading to simplied transceiver structures [8]. Under the cost aspect, oversampled modulated lter banks (OSFB) that are derived by modulation from a prototype lowpass lter have been shown to be most efcient with implementations detailed in e.g. [9], [10]. Oversampling offers additional advantages in the presence of structured noise and interference [11], [12], and advantages over OFDM systems in terms of redundancy and resilience to synchronisation errors have been demonstrated [8], [13], [14], [15]. The aim of this contribution is rstly to demonstrate the use of an OSFB design in [16] for transmultiplexing with low interference between subbands, often referred to as inter-carrier interference. Secondly, to remove ISI within subbands due to a dispersive channel response, we will be investigate a number of non-linear precoding and equalisation methods [17], [18] in comparison to equalisation only [4], [21], [22]. Thirdly, we want to design OSFB and precoding/equalisation such that the errors encountered in these two system components are balanced. II. S YSTEM S ETUP A. Transmultiplexer The transmultiplexer system with a synthesis lter bank S as multiplexer, transmission over a dispersive channel with impulse response c[m], and an analysis lter bank A as demultiplexer is depicted in Fig. 1. The input to the multiplexer S is an N -element vector x[n] containing signals xi [n], i = 0 (N 1). The multiplexer output x[m] runs at a rate K > N higher than the input. The present approach utilises the analogy between such a transmultiplexer and the subband decomposition of signal into K subbands decimated by a rate N < K. As an example, Fig. 2 shows the different band allocations of xi [n], i = 0 . . . (N 1) in x[m] for a subband decomposition design [16] with N = 14 and K = 16, clearly showing the narrow guard bands due to oversampling.
x[n] x[m] u[n] . . . P
. . .

v[m] S c[m] A

y[n]
. W . u[n] . . . .

Fig. 1.

Overall transmultiplexer setup.

THIRD WORKSHOP ON POWER LINE COMMUNICATIONS, OCTOBER 1-2, 2009, UDINE, ITALY

The redundancy in an OSFB system is similar to an OFDM system, and targetted to suppress co-channel interference (CCI). The prototype lter stopband energy determines the level of CCI. If the prototype lter is designed sufciently selective to suppress CCI, then the near-perfect reconstruction condition for a concatenated multiplexer S and demultiplexer A reduces to a K-band design for the prototype lter [16], thus linking two performance criteria of the transmultiplexer directly to criteria that need to be traded-off in the prototype lter design. The multiplexers and demultiplexers can be iterated, thereby increasing the number of subbands. It should however be noted that the oversampling ratio K increases to ( K )M for a transmultiplexer based on an M -times iterated lter bank. N N The advantage of utilising more bands and a higher decimation ratio lies in the fact that the effective CIR length experience between input and output of the transmultiplexer reduces further. B. Filter Bank Performance To characterise the inter-symbol (ISI) and co-channel (CCI) interference at the kth demultiplexer output in the receiver, we require the impulse response measured from the jth multiplexer input to the kth output, which is assumed to be characterised by the response cj [n]. Therefore, assuming the reception of the desired symbol on the main cursor, ISI can be calculated as |ck [n]|2 maxn |ck [n]|2 n= . (1) ISIk = maxn |ck [n]|2 Similarly, co-channel interference between subbands is measured as
K1

|cj [n]|2 . (2)

CCIk =

j=0,j=k n=

maxn |ck [n]|2

These two measures will permit to assess the transmultiplexer performance. C. Precoding and Equalisation In presence of a dispersive channel, such as the power line communications channel characterised in Fig. 3 [23], yi [n] are corrupted. The corruption by CCI would require cross-terms between subbands and is therefore computationally prohibitive. CCI can be sufciently suppressed by selecting a high enough stopband attentuation in the prototype lter design of the transmultiplexer. The corruption by ISI needs to be addressed by means of an equaliser or precoder, which can operate independently in individual subbands provided that CCI is sufciently low. III. R ESULTS Results are derived from a power line communications channel measurement reported in [23], with a complex valued impulse repsone of 80 coefcients length over a bandwidth of 30MHz. As an example for a transmultiplexer, Fig. 2 shows the lter bank response of a system multiplexing K = 14 signals onto an N = 16 fold upsampled signal. It is evident that the allocated frequency bands, each with a bandwidth of 2 are separated by narrow guard bands of width N2 . For an K K ideal channel, the reconstruction error of this system is -65dB. Applying the lter bank by itself as a transmultiplexer, the CCI averaged over the N = 14 different subbands with K = 16 different synchronisation delays in the receiver is -69dB. If the PLC channel of Fig. 3 is included, the CCI drops to -63dB, since higher gain in some frequency bands will create an increase in CCI to subbands which experience a low channel gain. The effective channel length for on of the subbands is shown in Fig. 4 for the case of the above lter bank. If the PLC channel is included for the transmission of the multiplexed signal, the length of the resulting impulse response is
0 10 20 log |H (ej)| 20 30 40 50 60 70 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 angular normalised frequency / (2 ) 0.8 0.9 1

Fig. 2.

Power spectral density of x[m] with K = 14 and N = 16.

10

THIRD WORKSHOP ON POWER LINE COMMUNICATIONS, OCTOBER 1-2, 2009, UDINE, ITALY

10 0 |C(ej)| 20 log
10

10 20 30 40

0.1

0.2

0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 normalised angular frequency / (2)

0.8

0.9

Fig. 3.

Magnitude response of a measured PLC channel [23].

1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0

2 |ci[n]| 1 0
0 5 10 15 20 25 discrete time index n 30 35 40

|ci[n]|

10

20 30 discrete time index n

40

50

Fig. 4. Fig. 5.

(left) transmultiplexer response for N = 14 and K = 16 with ideal channel (blue) and PLC channel (red). (right) transmultiplexer response for N = 196 and K = 256 with ideal channel (blue) and PLC channel (red).

approximately 5 coefcient, i.e. signicantly shortened by about a factor of K with respect to the original response. If the lter banks are iterated to provide a multiplexing of N 2 = 196 subband onto a signal at K 2 = 256 times the symbol rate, for an arbitrary subband, the impulse responses in Fig. 5 can be measured, where the PLC channel impulse response is further reduced. It appears that by raising the number of frequency bands, the effective channel impulse response can be reduced to an extend that an equaliser may not be required anymore. If all K possible time shifts for synchronisation in the receiver are considered for the basic lter bank with N = 14 inputs and oversampling by a rate of K = 16, for the ideal channel the ISI presented in Fig. 6 can be measured. It is evident that the ISI performance degrades with the system is poorly synchronised, with the ISI and main cursor at approximately equal strength at the worst synchronisation point, when transmitter and receiver are a half-symbol period apart. The synchronisation problem is worse when transmitting over the dispersive PLC channel above, with the ISI measurements for all N = 14 subbands and all possible K = 16 time shifts characterised in Fig. 7, as it is clear that different subbands require different synchronisation, with no overall optimum. This is a result of the non-constant group delay of the PLC channel with would favour individual adjustments for different subbands. However, since all subbands are multiplexed and synchronised jointly, no individual adjustments are possible unless performed at the multiplexed subband outputs. This fact does not change for higher number of subbands and underlines the requirement of equalisation or precoding when addressing transmultplexers that are designed to yield low CCI at a very low oversampling ratio. IV. C ONCLUSIONS We have utilised a lter bank design previously employed for subband decomposition with low oversampled ratio as a transmultiplexer for powerline communication with low redundancy. The construction of the transmultiplexer does not require any prior knowledge of channel state information, and the prototype lters stopband attenuation will dene the

0 -10 -20

4 2 0

ISI / [dB]

ISI / [dB]
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16

-30 -40 -50 -60

-2 -4 -6 -8 -10 -12 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16

timing offset

timing offset

Fig. 6.

(left) ISI for K = 14, N = 16 for transmission over ideal channel. The lter bank is only synchronised for n = 0.

Fig. 7. (right) ISI for K = 14, N = 16 for transmission over PLC channel. The subband-dependent group delay of the PLC channel means that if the demultiplexer is synchronised for one band, it may not be for the others.

THIRD WORKSHOP ON POWER LINE COMMUNICATIONS, OCTOBER 1-2, 2009, UDINE, ITALY

achievable level of co-channel interference. Inter-symbol interference is dependent on synchronisation, which was shown to vary for the presented type of transmultiplexer. While increasing the number of subbands by e.g. iteration of lter banks can reduce the effective channel lengths, synchronisation is an issue and can result in a rather inefcient shortening of the effective channel. Therefore, precoding or equalisation of the remaining ISI-inducing effective channel impulse response is required. Since timing synchronisation is an issue that is best addressed individually for subbands, a fractionally spaced equaliser may appear advantages, since it can best lock onto the most appropriate sampling points. This may be suitably combined with a reduced decimation in the demultiplexing lter bank in the receiver. R EFERENCES
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