OFDM based Adaptive Beamforming for Hybrid Terrestrial-Satellite Mobile System with Pilot Reallocation

Ammar H. Khan, Muhammad A. Imran, Barry G. Evans

Centre for Communication Systems Research (CCSR) University of Surrey, United Kingdom, GU2 7XH Email: {A.H.Khan, M.Imran, B.Evans}@surrey.ac.uk
AbstractNext generation networks will have to provide global connectivity to ensure success. Both satellite and terrestrial networks cannot guarantee this on their own. This incapability is attributed to capacity coverage issues in densely populated areas for satellites and lack of infrastructure in rural areas for terrestrial networks. Therefore, we consider a hybrid terrestrialsatellite mobile system based on frequency reuse. However, this frequency reuse introduces severe Co-Channel Interference (CCI) at the satellite end. To mitigate CCI, we propose an OFDM based adaptive beamformer implemented on-board the satellite with pilot reallocation at the transmitter side. Results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional approach.

I. I NTRODUCTION In the recent years, demand for high rates has been on the rise. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has been extensively studied as a solution due to its higher bandwidth efciency and robustness against Inter Symbol Interference (ISI) in multi-path environment. Furthermore, the combination of OFDM with advanced antenna systems is being viewed as the architecture for the next generation high capacity communication networks. However high data rates alone do not guarantee an efcient communication network. An omnipresent high quality service is the essence of a successful communication network. Future networks will have to incorporate global connectivity to ensure success. However, such coverage is not viable through stand-alone terrestrial networks due to the lack of infrastructure in rural areas. Neither can satellite networks guarantee this due to reduced signal penetration and capacity coverage issues in densely populated areas. This motivates existence of a hybrid architecture where users are served via terrestrial mobile networks in urban areas, while satellite provides service in rural areas. The end-user will use the same terminals for both the networks thus enabling transparent service provisioning. Enabling such transparency will require a powerful satellite end in order to ensure required link margin. Furthermore, in this system terrestrial and satellite networks can reuse the spectrum dedicated to each other. Thus, this transparent and complimentary architecture offers lower cost, higher data rates and increased overall capacity. However frequency reuse induces severer CCI which is fundamental impediment to the realisation of high capacity communication

systems. In relation to our system, the nature of hybrid architecture causes a considerable increase in dynamic CCI from mobile to satellite in the uplink scenario and thus CCI would dominate the system performance. A similar hybrid architecture with frequency reuse concept has been pursued by Mobile Satellite Ventures (MSV) [1] based on Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). The CCI induced due to frequency reuse is mitigated using ground based beamforming. However MSV architecture does not seamlessly blend with the existing terrestrial mobile infrastructure and fails to exploit this advantage. Moreover, the demand for high data rates has driven research for 4th Generation (4G) networks. These networks such as 3GPP LTE are based on OFDM and hence for hybrid terrestrial-satellite network to offer 4G services, the underlying technologies must be similar. Broadly two classes of OFDM based adaptive beamforming are present in the literature; time domain [2] and frequency domain [3]. However most of the work in literature relates to terrestrial systems and assumes AWGN channel conditions. Others using practical channel models are not related to mobile satellite scenario [4][7]. There is some work in satellite scenarios but focused on CDMA based system [1], [8], [9]. With regards to interference management, most satellites like Inmarsat-4 [10] use ground based non-adaptive beamforming. Such an architecture is suitable for broadcasting applications but will not be compatible in a two-way interactive communication scenario. Hence adaptive beamforming on-board the satellite becomes essential in a two-way mobile satellite scenario in order to handle dynamic CCI in the hybrid framework. To alleviate performance degradation due to frequency selective channel, adaptive beamforming would have to be followed by channel estimation. However for accurate estimation, the signal at the output of the beamformer must be interference free. This interference free signal is not available to the channel estimation block until the beamformer converges. Training symbols may be used to assist beamformers convergence, however this would reduces the overall throughput. We propose an architecture where dispersed pilots from OFDM symbols are repositioned to form a preamble at the transmitter side without affecting data throughput. Beamforming is then initiated at the receiver end using preamble, while channel

978-1-4244-3559-3/09/$25.00 c 2009 IEEE

IWSSC 2009

Gateway Link Desired Signal Interference Signals

me Ti

Frequency

Pilots

Modulated Data

Gateway

(a) Conventional scheme

BTS Satellite Rural Coverage Terrestrial Urban Coverage

Ti me
L L

BTS

Frequency

(b) Proposed scheme Fig. 1. Hybrid system scenario Fig. 3. Schematic of pilot allocation in proposed and conventional schemes

estimation as well as decoding of desired user data only begins after this preamble period. The rest of the paper is organised as follows: Section II describes the hybrid system scenario and the proposed OFDM system model with joint beamforming and channel estimation. Section III presents the results and performance analysis and Section IV concludes the paper. The following notations will be used throughout the paper. A and A denote a matrix in time domain and frequency domain respectively. a represents a vector whereas a(n, m) represents an element at the nth row and mth column of matrix A. A represents a set and \ represents set difference. II. H YBRID T ERRESTRIAL -S ATELLITE S YSTEM M ODEL In this section, we discuss the hybrid architecture and the system model devised to investigate the system performance. A. Hybrid System Scenario The hybrid architecture introduced earlier is expected to offer global coverage via combining terrestrial and satellite networks. Fig. 1 depicts the devised system scenario with hybrid framework. We focus on the mitigation of CCI induced by mobile terminals from the perspective of a Geostationary (GEO) satellite. With respect to the system, a link between mobile and satellite is modelled as Single Input Multiple Output (SIMO). Total users were J, with 1 desired user denoted as d being served by the satellite and rest being served by BTSs. After signal passes through wireless channel, beamforming is applied at the satellite end to mitigate CCI. Due to onboard implementation and mild satellite channel environment, we employ less complex time domain beamforming. We also assume no time or frequency offsets exist in the system. B. OFDM System Model with Pilot Reallocation Fig. 2 illustrates the block diagram of the proposed OFDM based hybrid architecture. Random source data is QPSK modulated and interspersed with pilots at known locations. In conventional architecture depicted in Fig. 3(a), pilots are uniformly dispersed over all OFDM symbols. However in presence of interference this will result in poor channel estimation until

beamformer converges. To address the problem we propose pilot reallocation scheme depicted in 3(b) where predened number of pilots from every symbol are dispersed to form a preamble. This enables the beamformer at the receiver to converge prior to any channel estimation processing. Mapping of modulated data and pilots for lth OFDM symbol, where l = 1, 2, . . . , L , L + 1, . . . , L, is presented in (1)(4). L represents the preamble size in number of OFDM symbols and N represent the total number of sub-carriers. K represents the sub-carrier locations whereas I represents the pilot locations such that |I| = N for l L and |I| = P for l > L where P represents number of pilots in each OFDM data symbol. xp (n) j xq (n) j where K = {1, 2, . . . , N } I K {1 , 2 , . . . , P } 1<lL lL l>L (3) X(n, j) X(n, j) nI n (K \ I) (1) (2)

(4)

Here xp (n) and xq (n) are column vectors representing pilots j j and data of j th user respectively, whereas X represents a matrix of mapped data and pilots for all users; j = 1, 2, . . . , J. If in conventional scheme total P pilots per symbol were transmitted, then the preamble size can be expressed as: L = (P P ) L N P (P P ) 0 (5)

The output vector of the data and pilot mapping process for the j th user can be expressed as: xj X(n, j) nK
T

(6)

x where xj = [(1, j), x(2, j), . . . , x(N, j)] and ()T denotes the transpose operation. This is then transformed into the time domain which can be expressed as:

User J User j+1 User j Source Data S/P QPSK Modulator Pilot Insertion

~ xj

xj Cyclic Prefix Extension

xj

IFFT

hJ [k] hj+1 [k] hj [k] xj [k] Wireless P/S Channel To Reciever

~ re Source Data P/S QPSK De-Modulator Channel Estimation

~ r Adaptive Beamformer

V Cyclic Prefix Removal

yj[k] Noise

FFT

S/P

Noise

Noise

Fig. 2.

OFDM system model

xj = FH xj where, 1 1 F = . . . 1 1 .. . 1

(7)

V = AY H + B

(11)

ej2(1)(1)/N . . . ej2(N 1)(1)/N

ej2(1)(N 1)/N . . . ej2(N 1)(N 1)/N

Here, b(s, n) is an element of B and represents the noise at the sth antenna elements and nth sub-carrier. Noise is modelled as independent and identically distributed gaussian with zero mean and 2 variance. Similarly v(s, n) and a(s, j) represents the array output and array response respectively. The array response a(s, j) can be mathematically expressed as: a(s, j) = e(j2(s1)da sin(j )/) (12)

(8) F represents the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) operation and ()H denotes the Hermitian transpose. After transformation to the time domain, a cyclic prex is appended where last G elements of the OFDM symbol are copied to the start. Using (7), this can be mathematically represented as: xj = IN,G H F xj IN (9)

where s = 1, 2, . . . , S are the total number of satellite antenna elements. da is the inter-element spacing, j is the Direction-of-Arrival (DOA) of the j th user and is the carrier wavelength. We model a linear array of antenna elements hence da = /2. The output of the array is processed by the beamformer to mitigate CCI, which can be expressed as: r = wH V (13)

Here xj = [x(N G + 1, j), x(N G + 2, j), . . . , x(N 1, j), x(N, j), x(1, j), x(2, j) . . . , x(N, j)]T is the nal OFDM symbol in time domain to be transmitted. IN,G denotes the last G rows of identity matrix IN which is of size N . This is followed by Parallel-to-Serial (P/S) conversion and then transmission over multi-tap time selective wireless channel, whose effect can be presented as: yj [k] = xj [k] hj [k] (10)

where r = [r(1), r(2), . . . , r(N )] is the weighted output of beamformer and w = [w(1), w(2), . . . , w(S)]T are the applied complex weights. This is followed by Serial-to-Parallel (S/P) conversion and transformation of r to the frequency domain, which can be mathematically expressed as: = FrH r (14)

where k and denote the time index and time convolution operation respectively. C. Joint Adaptive Beamforming and Channel Estimation At the satellite antenna elements, the signal from desired and CCI sources is received. The received signal matrix for lth OFDM symbol after cyclic prex removal can be expressed as:

The proposed architecture utilises one weight per antenna element in a multi-path fading environment. Channel estimation thus becomes essential before is decoded since different r fading exists across OFDM sub-carriers. Several channel estimation techniques can be employed [11], however we employ the Least Squares (LS) algorithm. Representing the channel transfer function at pilots positions, we get: r h(n) = diag{d (n)}1(n) x nI (15)

Estimation is not performed for preamble period and hence (15) is only valid for l > L . h(n) represents the channel estimates at pilot sub-carriers for the desired user and diag{} represents a matrix formed by putting elements of a vector at the diagonal entries of the matrix with zeros at all off-diagonal entries. Estimates h(n) are then linearly interpolated at n (K \ I) and the output can be expressed as h. This is then used to cancel the channel effect, which can be expressed as: r e = diag{h}1 r l>L (16)

10

3 kmph, Conventional 3 kmph, Proposed 60 kmph, Conventional 60 kmph, Proposed

BER

10

The data sub-carriers in e can be decoded directly. For the r next OFDM symbol, computation of new complex weights is required. This computation is performed using Mean Squared Error (MSE) based adaptive algorithm which takes error between transmitted and received pilot sequence of the desired user as an input. This error vector can be expressed as: = (n) xd (n) e r nI (17)

10

8 10 12 Desired User SNR (dB)

14

16

18

20

Fig. 4. BER vs desired user SNR for two schemes with change in mobile speed, Antenna elements = 3, Rice factor (K-factor) = 10 dB. TABLE I RURAL C HANNEL PARAMETERS Tap Index 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Delay [ns] 0 195.3 260.4 846.3 1171.9 1953.1 2734.3 Power [dB] -91.9 -106.3 -110.1 -112.5 -110.2 -112.5 -112.5

The error obtained is in the frequency domain whereas beamforming is performed in time domain. Hence a frequency-totime transform is used to convert error vector for the lth OFDM symbol to frequency domain, which can be presented as: e = FH p e (18)

For l L , this transform matrix is equal to (8). However for l > L it can be presented as: 1 .. . 1
)(1)/N

e2(1 )(1)/N Fp = . . . ej2(1 )(N 1)/N

ej2(P . . . ej2(P

)(N 1)/N

(19) After the calculation of the error vector, we implement the Least Mean Square (LMS) algorithm [12] to update the complex weights of the beamformer. The weight updation is performed until all OFDM data symbols of the desired user have been decoded. w[l + 1] = w[l] + 2V[l]e[l] (20)

Here represents the LMS adaptive step size which controls the algorithm convergence. The convergence also depends on interference scenario and channel conditions. III. P ERFORMANCE A SIMO OFDM system with per link one transmit and 3 receive antenna elements was modelled. Total subcarriers in an OFDM symbol are taken as 32. Both proposed and conventional schemes having pilots at {1,11,22,32} and {1,8,16,24,32} respectively were implemented. Moreover, unless mentioned otherwise, L throughout is taken as 10, 000 which using (5) yields L = 357 OFDM symbols; thus fair comparison is established with no pilot overhead. Signal bandwidth was taken as 5 MHz with centre frequency being 3

GHz. One desired user was at 40 azimuth while interference users were located at -70 , -35 , 65 and 80 azimuth. The multi-path phenomena is modelled as linear Finite Impulse Response (FIR) lter whereas time selectivity is modelled using Jakes model [13]. The channel parameters used are specic to mobile satellite scenario and were measured as part of the EU project MAESTRO [14]. In the rst scenario, performance of the two schemes was studied with different mobile speeds in rural environment. The channel parameters used are tabulated in Table I. It should be noted that we assume an uncoded system as well as a wide range of interference locations for the purpose of analysis. Fig. 4 presents the results in terms of achieved Bit Error Rate (BER). We observe a signicant difference in performance amongst proposed and conventional schemes even though the proposed scheme has one less pilot in OFDM data symbols as compare to conventional scheme. This performance improvement is attributed to superior CCI mitigation due to preamble and then channel estimation processing on CCI mitigated signal. It is interesting to note that improvement is also observed at 60 kmph speed, however less in terms of gain. One would expect that with lesser pilots in OFDM data symbols and more Inter Carrier Interference (ICI), the proposed scheme would not provide gain. However, simulation results show that pilot reallocation scheme still exhibits better performance in terms of BER. The performance of proposed

10

9 Rural, Conventional Rural, Proposed Urban, Conventional Urban, Proposed 8 7 6 BER Gain (dB) 5 4 3 2 1 Mobile Speed = 60 kmph Mobile Speed = 3 kmph

BER

10

10

8 10 12 Desired User SNR (dB)

14

16

18

20

100

200

300 Preamble Size (OFDM Symbols)

400

Fig. 5. BER vs desired user SNR for two schemes in different environments, Mobile speed = 3 kmph, Rural K-factor = 10 dB, Urban K-factor = 7 dB. TABLE II U RBAN C HANNEL PARAMETERS Tap Index 1 2 Delay [ns] 0 130.2 Power [dB] -91.8 -100

Fig. 6. BER Gain vs preamble size with different mobile speeds, Antenna elements = 3, SNR = 20dB.

and National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan for supporting him to undertake this work. Also, this work was partially conducted under the SATNEX II EU project to whom due acknowledgment is made. R EFERENCES
[1] P. D. Karabinis, Systems and methods for terrestrial reuse of cellular satellite frequency spectrum, USA Patent 6 684 057, January 27, 2004. [2] C. K. Kim, K. Lee, and Y. S. Cho, Adaptive beamforming algorithm for OFDM systems with antenna arrays, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 10521058, Nov. 2000. [3] H. Matsuoka and H. Shoki, Comparison of pre-FFT and post-FFT processing adaptive arrays for OFDM systems in the presence of cochannel interference, in Proc. 14th IEEE on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications PIMRC 2003, vol. 2, 710 Sept. 2003, pp. 16031607. [4] Y.-F. Chen and C.-S. Wang, Adaptive antenna arrays for interference cancellation in OFDM communication systems with virtual carriers, vol. 56, no. 4, pp. 18371844, July 2007. [5] M. Lei and H. Harada, Fast-convergence SMI adaptive beamforming based on frequency-to-time pilot transform for OFDM system, in Proc. WiCOM 2006.International Conference on Wireless Communications, Networking and Mobile Computing, 2224 Sept. 2006, pp. 15. [6] C.-H. Peng, K.-C. Huang, C.-Y. Chi, W.-K. Ma, and T.-H. Tsai, A blockby-block blind post-FFT beamforming algorithm for multiuser OFDM systems based on subcarrier averaging, in Proc. IEEE 8th Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications SPAWC 2007, 1720 June 2007, pp. 15. [7] H. Liu and Q. Feng, A blind adaptive beamforming for OFDM system, in Proc. Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering, 14 May 2005, pp. 12081211. [8] P. D. Karabinis, S. Dutta, and W. W. Chapman, Interference potential to MSS due to terrestrial reuse of satellite band frequencies. [Online]. Available: www.msvlp.com [9] D. Zheng and P. D. Karabinis, Adaptive beam-forming with interference supression in MSS with ATC. [Online]. Available: www.msvlp.com [10] Inside the Inmarsat-4 satellites. [Online]. Available: www.inmarsat.com/About/Our satellites (accessed on: 11 June 2009) [11] S. Colieri, M. Ergen, A. Puri, and B. A, A study of channel estimation in OFDM systems, in Proc. VTC 2002-Fall Vehicular Technology Conference 2002 IEEE 56th, vol. 2, 2428 Sept. 2002, pp. 894898. [12] S. Haykin, Adaptive Filter Theory. Prentice, 1996. [13] D. N. C. Tse and P. Viswanath, Fundamentals of Wireless Communication. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005. [14] Deliverable D8-3 EC FP6/IST MAESTRO. [Online]. Available: http://maestro.g.fr/ (accessed on: 16 April 2009)

scheme highlights the importance of CCI mitigation and how system performance can be improved if channel estimation is done on interference mitigated signal. Fig. 5 represents the result for both schemes in rural and urban environments. The channel parameters used for the urban case are tabulated in Table II. It can be seen that the proposed scheme outperforms conventional approach in both rural and urban environment. However, the BER performance gain is lesser in the case of urban due to severer channel conditions. Fig. 6 depicts the BER gain achieved by the proposed technique against preamble size for 3 kmph and 60 kmph mobile speeds in rural environment. To investigate this, pilot locations in the OFDM data symbols were kept same for the proposed scheme, while the preamble size was varied. It was observed that the performance gain increased as a function of preamble size hence verifying that preamble can play a crucial role in the interference mitigation process of the beamformer. The gain reduces with increase in speed, however the proposed scheme still performs better. IV. C ONCLUSION In this paper, an adaptive beamformer with pilot reallocation at the transmitter side was proposed. By induction of preamble, the proposed architecture reduces CCI signicantly in the preamble phase and hence outperforms the conventional approach. Simulation results verify that even at higher speed, the proposed approach shows promising results without increase in total number of transmitted pilots. ACKNOWLEDGMENT Ammar H. Khan would like to thank Centre for Communication Systems and Research (CCSR), United Kingdom