In this paper, we study and propose an inter-cell co-channel interference (CCI) mitigation method for pilot signals using cyclic shift Zadoff-Chu (CS-ZC) sequences for SC-FDMA-based uplink without tight scheduler coordination among cells. Firstly, we investigate the issue of severe detection performance degradation created by the lack of orthogonality among the pilot signals without alignment of the allocated frequency resource positions among cells when using the conventional CS-ZC sequences generation scheme. Secondly, we identify the primary factor causing the issue. Thirdly, we propose a frequency-dependent CS-ZC sequence generation scheme by allocating the same spectrum elements of the ZC sequence to the overlapped subcarriers among cells to mitigate the inter-cell CCI of the pilot signals without alignment of the frequency resource positions among cells. Finally, we confirm the validity of the proposal using uplink data BLER evaluation under a multipath fading condition by computer simulation compared to the conventional method, and show that the proposal achieves around 0.9 dB and 0.6 dB better performance at 10% BLER than the conventional method for 1 RB and 2 RBs frequency offsets in 3 RBs transmission bandwidth, respectively.

Hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) is employed for the Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA) downlink. The base station not only decodes the ACK/NACK signals from the user equipment (UE), but also detects a termination of the transmission (DTX) of the ACK/NACK signals caused by the mis-detection of the downlink control information (DCI) at the UE side. Since ACK/NACK signals from UEs are multiplexed by CDMA, there are sometimes severe inter-code interference (ICI) effects, which significantly degrade the performance of ACK/NACK signals. In order to mitigate such ICI effects, in [1],[2], we proposed a novel phase rotation scheme on the constellations of the uplink ACK/NACK signals, and confirmed the effects on the ACK/NACK bit error rate performance; however, the previous paper did not analyze the effects of the phase rotation on the DTX detection performance. Hence, in this paper, we further analyze the effects of the phase rotation for the ACK/NACK signals in conjunction with a new DTX detection scheme which utilizes equalizer outputs, and investigate the performance of the proposed scheme by means of computer simulations.

Hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) is employed for the Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA) downlink. Each user equipment (UE) sends its ACK/NACK corresponding to the downlink data reception to the base station via a physical uplink control channel (PUCCH). The ACK/NACK signals from the UE are first code spread by the cyclic shift (CS) sequences, and then code spread again by the orthogonal cover (OC) sequences. The ACK/NACK signals from each UE are multiplexed by means of code division multiple access (CDMA), however, it is difficult for the conventional PUCCH code design to satisfy the required bit error rate (BER) of 10-3 [1] in fast-fading environments because of inter-code interference (ICI) among the OC sequences. Therefore, resource management of PUCCH is required depending on the mobility of the UEs to maximize the performance of the ACK/NACK signals and the capacity of PUCCH simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel code design for PUCCH, which can suppress the effects of ICI among the OC sequences, and thus can simplify the resource management of PUCCH. The simulation evaluations confirm that the proposed code design can significantly improve the performance of the ACK/NACK signals via PUCCH in fast-fading environments, and any complicated resource management based on the mobility of the UEs are not necessary.

Hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) is employed for the Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA) downlink. The ACK/NACK signals from each user equipment (UE) are multiplexed by code division multiple access (CDMA) and transmitted via a physical uplink control channel (PUCCH). The ACK/NACK signals are code spread by the cyclic shift (CS) sequences made from zero auto-correlation (ZAC) sequences; however, the orthogonality of these sequences is not guaranteed depending on the propagation channels; moreover, the amount of inter-code interference (ICI) depends on the delay spread of the channel and the transmitting timing control error of each UE. In the conventional PUCCH structure, ICI between two ACK signals does not degrade their detection performance, whereas ICI between an ACK signal and a NACK signal degrades the detection performance. This causes a serious gap between the detection performances of ACK and NACK signals, because generally in a PUCCH, there are more ACK signals than NACK signals. In this paper, we propose a novel phase rotation scheme on the constellations of ACK/NACK signals that can resolve this issue, and the simulation evaluation results confirm the benefits of the proposed phase rotation scheme.

In this study, we investigate the use of scheduling algorithms to support coordinated multipoint (CoMP) operation for Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced systems studied in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). CoMP, which improves cooperative transmission among network nodes (transmission points: TPs) and reduces or eliminates interTP interference, enabling performance improvements in cell edge throughputs. Although scheduling algorithms in LTE systems have been extensively investigated from the single cell operation perspective, those extension to CoMP where each user equipment (UE) has multiple channel state information (CSI) feedbacks require further consideration on proportional fairness (PF) metric calculation while maintaining PF criteria. To this end, we propose to apply a scaling factor in accordance with the number of CSI feedbacks demanded for the UE. To evaluate the benefits of this scaling factor, multicell system-level simulations that take account of channel estimation errors are performed, and the results confirmed that our improved algorithm enables fairness to be maintained.