Analysis and Mitigation of Asynchronous Interference in Coordinated Multipoint Systems

Abstract

Next generation cellular wireless networks need to achieve both high peak and average data rates. Also, they need to improve the fairness by providing more homogenous quality of service distribution over the entire cell area. Base station (BS) cooperation is one of the techniques which is used to achieve these requirements, especially the fairness requirement. It is able not only to mitigate inter-cell interference, but also to exploit this interference and to use it as a useful signal.

Although BS cooperation or what is called coordinated multipoint (CoMP) communications proves that it can achieve high gains in theory, there are some challenges that need to be solved in order for it to be widely deployed. One of the major challenges which prevents the CoMP concept from being widely deployed in new cellular systems is timing synchronization. This problem is particularly challenging when OFDM is employed which is the case in the uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) of WiMAX systems and in the DL of LTE systems. The problem is inherited from the limitations caused by integer time offsets in OFDM systems. In order to achieve the gains promised by CoMP systems, the user equipments' (UEs) signals in UL or the BSs signals in DL should be synchronized such that the time difference of arrivals do not exceed the cyclic prefix length of the transmitted signals.

In this thesis, we first provide a detailed mathematical analysis of the impact of integer time offsets on the performance of single-input-single-output (SISO) OFDM systems. In particular, closed-form expressions for the different types of interference caused by the integer time offset are derived. Furthermore, we derive exact closed-form expressions for the bit error rate (BER) and the symbol error rate (SER) of BPSK, QPSK and 16-QAM modulation for transmission over both AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels. The effect of the fractional carrier frequency offset (CFO) is taken into consideration in the derivations. For OFDM systems with a large number of subcarriers, an approximate method for evaluating the BER/SER is given.

Next, we generalized our expressions to be suitable for the single-input-multiple-output (SIMO) OFDM systems. The derived closed-form expressions for the interference and probability of error enabled us to investigate the timing synchronization problem of UL CoMP systems, where it is not possible for a UE to be synchronized to more than one BS at the same time. This synchronization problem imposes an upper limit on the percentage of cooperation which could occur in an UL CoMP system. By using geometrical and analytical approaches, we define this upper bound. Moreover, an MMSE-based receiver that mitigates the unavoidable asynchronous interference is proposed. Furthermore, a simple joint channel and delay estimation block is incorporated into the receiver to examine its performance with estimation errors. Finally, an iterative procedure is suggested to reduce the complexity of the proposed mitigation method. Numerical results are provided to show the accuracy of the derived expressions and the robustness of the proposed mitigation method.