In this Letter, a residual acoustic echo suppression method is proposed to enhance the speech quality of hands-free communication in an automobile environment. The echo signal is normally a human voice with harmonic characteristics in a hands-free communication environment. The proposed algorithm estimates the residual echo signal by emphasizing its harmonic components. The estimated residual echo is used to obtain the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) information at the acoustic echo canceller output. Then, the SIR based Wiener post-filter is constructed to reduce both the residual echo and noise. The experimental results confirm that the proposed algorithm is superior to the conventional residual echo suppression algorithm in terms of the echo return loss enhancement (ERLE) and the segmental signal-to-noise ratio (SEGSNR).

This paper presents a single-chip speech dialogue module and its evaluation on a personal robot. This module is implemented on an application processor that was developed primarily for mobile phones to provide a compact size, low power-consumption, and low cost. It performs speech recognition with preprocessing functions such as direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation, noise cancellation, beamforming with an array of microphones, and echo cancellation. Text-to-speech (TTS) conversion is also equipped with. Evaluation results obtained on a new personal robot, PaPeRo-mini, which is a scale-down version of PaPeRo, demonstrate an 85% correct rate in DOA estimation, and as much as 54% and 30% higher speech recognition rates in noisy environments and during robot utterances, respectively. These results are shown to be comparable to those obtained by PaPeRo.

Infrastructure wireless mesh network has been attracting much attention due to the wide range of its application such as public wireless access, sensor network, etc. In recent years, researchers have shown that significant network throughput gain can be achieved by employing network coding in a wireless environment. For further improvement of network throughput in one dimensional (1D) topology, Ono et al. proposed to use multiple antenna technique combined with network coding. In this paper, being inspired by MIMO network coding in 1D topology, the authors establish a novel MIMO network coding algorithm for a 2D topology consisting of two crossing routes. In this algorithm, multiple network coded flows are spatially multiplexed. Owing to the efficient usage of radio resource of network coding and co-channel interference cancellation ability of MIMO, the proposed algorithm shows an 8-fold gain in network capacity compared to conventional methods in the best-case scenario.

In this paper, the issue of carrier frequency offset (CFO) compensation in interleaved orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) uplink system is investigated. To mitigate the effect of multiple access interference (MAI) caused by CFOs of different users, a new parallel interference cancellation (PIC) compensation algorithm is proposed. This scheme uses minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion to obtain the estimation of interference users, then circular convolutions are employed to restore MAI and compensate CFO. To tackle the complexity problem of circular convolutions, an efficient MAI restoration and cancellation method is developed. Simulations illustrate the good performance and low computational complexity of the proposed algorithm.

In a Decode and Forward (DF) type of an OFDM-based Full Duplex Relay (FDR), the frequency-domain approach is more efficient than the time-domain approach for feedback interference cancellation. However, Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) and Inter-Carrier Interference (ICI) may occur due to timing mismatch between the feedback interference signal and the desired signal from the Base Station (BS). In this letter, the effects of a timing mismatch on synchronous types and asynchronous types of OFDM-based FDRs are investigated in uplink and downlink cases. A synchronization procedure and techniques for minimizing ISI and ICI in OFDM-based FDRs with a frequency-domain feedback interference canceller are proposed.

This letter proposes a windowing frequency domain adaptive algorithm, which reuses the filtering error to apply window function in the filter updating symmetrically. By using a proper window function to reduce the negative influence of the spectral leakage, the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the performance of the acoustic echo cancellation for speech signals.

Frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion can provide a better bit error rate (BER) performance than rake combining. However, the residual inter-chip interference (ICI) is produced after MMSE-FDE and this degrades the BER performance. Recently, we showed that frequency-domain ICI cancellation can bring the BER performance close to the theoretical lower bound. To further improve the BER performance, transmit antenna diversity technique is effective. Cyclic delay transmit diversity (CDTD) can increase the number of equivalent paths and hence achieve a large frequency diversity gain. Space-time transmit diversity (STTD) can obtain antenna diversity gain due to the space-time coding and achieve a better BER performance than CDTD. Objective of this paper is to show that the BER performance degradation of CDTD is mainly due to the residual ICI and that the introduction of ICI cancellation gives almost the same BER performance as STTD. This study provides a very important result that CDTD has a great advantage of providing a higher throughput than STTD. This is confirmed by computer simulation. The computer simulation results show that CDTD can achieve higher throughput than STTD when ICI cancellation is introduced.

A 0.13-µm CMOS 2.4-GHz low-noise balun-mixer is proposed, where a noise-canceling transconductance stage is adopted for low-noise characteristics. A current-bleeding circuit with an LC resonator is also adopted to further improve the noise figure of the proposed balun-mixer, without additional DC power consumption. The measured results show a DSB NF of 5.5 dB over output IF frequency ranges of 10 to 100 MHz, a conversion gain of 19 dB, and an input P1 dB of -16 dBm. The proposed balun-mixer is implemented in 0.13-µm CMOS technology and consumes only 4.5 mA from a 1.5-V supply voltage.

A simple and novel residual acoustic echo cancellation method that employs binary masking is proposed to enhance the speech quality of hands-free communication in an automobile environment. In general, the W-disjoint orthogonality assumption is used for blind source separation using multi-microphones. However, in this Letter, it is utilized to mask the residual echo component in the time-frequency domain using a single microphone. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of the echo return loss enhancement and speech enhancement.

Threshold-based ordered successive interference cancellation (OSIC) detection algorithm is proposed for per-antenna-coded (PAC) two-input multiple-output (TIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Successive interference cancellation (SIC) is performed selectively according to channel conditions. Compared with the conventional OSIC algorithm, the proposed algorithm reduces the complexity significantly with only a slight performance degradation.

To attain good performance in an acoustic echo cancellation system, it is important to have a variable step size (VSS) algorithm as part of an adaptive filter. In this paper, we are concerned with the development of a VSS algorithm for a recently proposed subband affine projection (SAP) adaptive filter. Two popular VSS algorithms in the literature are the methods of delayed coefficients (DC) and variable regularization (VR). However, the merits and demerits of them are mutually exclusive. We propose a VSS algorithm that is a hybrid of both methods and combines their advantages. An extensive study of the new algorithm in different scenarios like the presence double-talk (DT) during the transient phase of the adaptive filter, DT during steady state, and varying DT power is conducted and reasoning is given to support the observed behavior. The importance of the method of VR as part of a VSS algorithm is emphasized.

This Letter proposes an optimal gain filter for the perceptual acoustic echo suppressor. We designed an optimally-modified log-spectral amplitude estimation algorithm for the gain filter in order to achieve robust suppression of echo and noise. A new parameter including information about interferences (echo and noise) of single-talk duration is statistically analyzed, and then the speech absence probability and the a posteriori SNR are judiciously estimated to determine the optimal solution. The experiments show that the proposed gain filter attains a significantly improved reduction of echo and noise with less speech distortion.

An adaptive beamforming method for the rejection of coherent interference signals is presented which exploits forward and backward correlations. The proposed method, in which the effective degree of freedom of the beamformer is increased by virtue of its use of both types of correlation, can cancel more coherent interference signals and provide better performance than the existing one that uses the forward correlation only.

An interference cancellation (ICAN) scheme for mobile communication radio repeaters is presented. When a radio repeater has a gain that is larger than the isolation between its transmit and receive antennas, it oscillates due to feedback interference signals. To prevent feedback oscillation of a radio repeater, we first formulate a feedback oscillation model of the radio repeater and then derive an ICAN model from that model. From the derived ICAN model, we show that the stability and the signal quality of the repeater depend on the repeater's gain and delay, the propagation delay on feedback paths, feedback channel characteristics, and the capability of the feedback channel estimation algorithm. It is also shown that the stability condition of the repeater does not guarantee the quality of the repeater's output signal. To guarantee repeater's stability and signal quality, an ICAN scheme based on an iterative algorithm is subsequently proposed. The simulation results confirm the relationship between the stability and signal quality of the repeater and the impact of the aforementioned factors. Using the proposed ICAN scheme, a mean error vector magnitude (quality indicator) of about 6.3% for the repeater's output signal was achieved.

The observed phenomena in actual sound and electromagnetic environment are inevitably contaminated by the background noise of arbitrary distribution type. Therefore, in order to evaluate sound and electromagnetic environment, it is necessary to establish some signal processing methods to remove the undesirable effects of the background noise. In this paper, we propose noise cancellation methods for estimating a specific signal with the existence of background noise of non-Gaussian distribution from two viewpoins of static and dynamic signal processing. By applying the well-known least mean squared method for the moment statistics with several orders, practical methods for estimating the specific signal are derived. The effectiveness of the proposed theoretical methods is experimentally confirmed by applying them to estimation problems in actual sound and magnetic field environment.

Multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) is a promising wireless access technique for the next generation mobile communications systems, in which broadband packet data services will dominate. Hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) is an indispensable error control technique for high quality packet data transmission. The HARQ throughput performance of multi-code MC-CDMA degrades due to the presence of residual inter-code interference (ICI) after frequency-domain equalization (FDE). To reduce the residual ICI and improve the throughput performance, a frequency-domain soft interference cancellation (FDSIC) technique can be applied. An important issue is the generation of accurate residual ICI replica for FDSIC. In this paper, low-density parity-check coded (LDPC-coded) MC-CDMA HARQ is considered. We generate the residual ICI replica from a-posteriori log-likelihood ratio (LLR) of LDPC decoder output and evaluate, by computer simulation, the throughput performance in a frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel. We show that if the residual ICI is removed, MC-CDMA can provide a throughput performance superior to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM).

Eigen-beamforming (EB) transmission for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is an effective means to maximize the receiver signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in a noise-limited environment, but suffers a performance degradation when strong interference signals exist. In this letter, we propose an interference cancellation method for EB signals by constructing a new receive beamforming vector which jointly utilizes the EB matrix and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) spatial demultiplexing. The proposed method is shown to outperform the conventional EB receiver in the entire cell range, with a significant increase in the effective signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) near the cell boundary.

The performance of an analog winner-take-all (WTA) circuit is affected by the corner error and the offset error. Despite the fact that the corner error can be reduced with large transconductance of the transistor, the offset error caused by device mismatch has not been completely studied. This paper presents the complete offset error analysis, and proposes low offset design guidelines and an offset cancellation scheme. The experimental results show good agreement with the theoretical analysis and the drastic improvement of the offset error.

In this paper, performance of a novel interference cancellation technique for the single user detection in a direct-sequence code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) system has been investigated. This new algorithm is based on the Cycle-and-Add property of PN (Pseudorandom Noise) sequences and can be applied for both synchronous and asynchronous systems. The proposed strategy provides a simple method that can delete interference signals one by one in spite of the power levels of interferences. Therefore, it is possible to overcome the near-far problem (NFP) in a successive manner without using transmit power control (TPC) techniques. The validity of the proposed procedure is corroborated by computer simulations in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and frequency-nonselective fading channels. Performance results indicate that the proposed receiver outperforms the conventional receiver and, in many cases, it does so with a considerable gain.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), which uses a number of narrowband orthogonal sub-carriers, is a promising transmission technique. Also multi-carrier code division multi-access (MC-CDMA), which combines OFDM and frequency-domain spreading, has been attracting much attention as a future broadband wireless access. It was shown that MC-CDMA has lower channel capacity than OFDM, due to inter-code interference (ICI) resulting from orthogonality distortion caused by frequency-selective fading. Recently, many ICI cancellers have been proposed to mitigate the effect of ICI. In this paper, we derive a channel capacity expression for MC-CDMA assuming perfect ICI cancellation taking into account both frequency diversity gain and space diversity gain and compare it to that of OFDM. Furthermore, we derive a channel capacity expression for the case of imperfect ICI cancellation to discuss the impact of the residual ICI.