This paper evaluates the performance of a pilot-assisted fine carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation scheme for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in time-varying channels. An analytical closed-form expression of the mean square error (MSE), of the post-FFT based CFO synchronization scheme, is presented in terms of time-variant fading channels. To verify our analysis in this paper, simulations are carried out within the framework of mobile WiMAX systems.

In this letter, we propose a simple distributed space-frequency code with both timing errors and multiple carrier frequency offsets (CFO) in asynchronous cooperative communications. By employing both the Alamouti coding approach and the transmit repetition diversity technique, full diversity gain can be achieved by the fast symbol-wise maximum likelihood (ML) decoding at the destination node. Analysis and simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

One of the major drawbacks of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is their vulnerability to synchronization errors. To remedy the inter-carrier interference (ICI) effect caused by carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation errors, this paper proposes a weighted linear parallel ICI cancellation (WLPICIC) equalizer. The optimal weights in the WLPICIC scheme are derived in closed-form expressions by maximizing the average signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) at the WLPICIC output of each sub-carrier. The simulation results show that the WLPICIC equalizer significantly improves the performance of OFDM systems with frequency estimation errors in both AWGN channels and frequency selective fading channels.

A low peak-to-average-power-ratio (PAPR) transceiver with a time-frequency cyclic shift orthogonal keying (TF-CSOK) technique is proposed for the uplink multi-carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) system over multiple access interference (MAI) and multipath interference (MPI) channels. The low complexity structure of the TF-CSOK MC-CDMA system is designed to involve the FCSOK and TCSOK techniques to combat MPI and MAI effects, respectively. In particular, at the besestation, the multiuser detector employs the maximum likelihood (ML) rule and the TFSOK despreading and demapping techniques to acquire the M-ary modulation gain and diversity gain. Simulation results show that the multuser receiver has the robustness against strong MAI. Moreover, it outperforms the conventional single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) system and the conventional MC-CDMA system under MAI and MPI environments.

In this letter, we propose a novel frequency-domain equalization (FDE) scheme for single-carrier multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems over time-varying channels. Based on frequency-domain decision-feedback equalization (FD-DFE), we design a feedforward filter with constraint such that the equalization can be easily realized segment-by-segment with the help of the overlap-save (OLS) method. Since the segment length and block length can be designed independently, our proposal sets relatively short segment length to obtain good performance in time-varying environments, and very long block length to achieve high spectral efficiency. Furthermore, we present two scenarios in the design of filters for MIMO systems.

Broadband wireless technology that enables a variety of gigabit-per-second class data services is a requirement in future wireless communication systems. Broadband wireless channels become extremely frequency-selective and cause severe inter-symbol interference (ISI). Furthermore, the average received signal power changes in a random manner because of the shadowing and distance-dependant path losses resulted from the movement of a mobile terminal (MT). Accordingly, the transmission performance severely degrades. To overcome the performance degradation, two most promising approaches are the frequency-domain equalization (FDE) and distributed antenna network (DAN). The former takes advantage of channel frequency-selectivity to obtain the frequency-diversity gain. In DAN, a group of distributed antennas serve each user to mitigate the negative impact of shadowing and path losses. This article will introduce the recent advances in FDE and DAN for the broadband single-carrier (SC) transmissions.

Effects of atomic hydrogen annealing (AHA) on the film properties and the electrical characteristics of pentacene organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) are investigated. The surface energy of SiO2 surface and grain size of pentacene film were decreased with increasing AHA treatment time. For the treatment time of 300 s, pentacene film showed the (00l) and (011') orientation and high carrier mobility in spite of small crystal grain.

We propose a time-frequency interleave (TFI) structure of single carrier (SC) frequency domain equalization (FDE) to combat spectral nulls of wireless channels. Permuted copies of block data are transmitted in the TFI-FDE, providing the same diversity order as maximal-ratio receiver combining. The spectral nulls are compensated by uncorrelated spectral components of the same channel. It shows 4 dB diversity gains at BER of 10-2 over an indoor channel. The TFI-FDE is computationally-efficient in combination with fast Fourier transform. This TFI-FDE fits SC systems with single antenna. It needs no channel state information at the transmitter.

Carrier frequency offset may distort the orthogonality of the subcarriers in OFDM systems and it must be estimated and compensated to maintain the system performance. A blind carrier frequency offset estimator based on the histogram of the received signal's phase is proposed in this letter. The proposed estimator can operate under additive white Gaussian noise and multipath channels without known training signal, redundant guard interval, and virtual carrier. Compared to subspace-based blind estimators, the proposed estimator can provide better mean-square-error performance.

Proportional fair scheduling attains a graceful trade-off between fairness among users and total system throughput. It is simple to implement in single carrier transmission systems, while changes to a prohibitively complex combinatorial problem for multi-carrier transmission systems. This letter addresses a couple of conditions that approximate multi-carrier proportional fair scheduling (MCPF) as carrier-by-carrier proportional fair scheduling (CCPF), which has much lower complexity than MCPF. Numerical results show that the proportional fairness metric of CCPF approaches to that of MCPF for those conditions.

One-tap frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion can significantly improve the bit error rate (BER) performance of single-carrier (SC) transmission in a frequency-selective fading channel. However, a big performance gap from the theoretical lower bound still exists due to the presence of residual inter-symbol interference (ISI) after MMSE-FDE. In this paper, we point out that the frequency-domain received SC signal can be expressed using the matrix representation similar to the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiplexing and therefore, signal detection schemes developed for MIMO multiplexing, other than simple one-tap MMSE-FDE, can be applied to SC transmission. Then, for the reception of SC signals, we propose a new signal detection scheme, which combines FDE with MIMO signal detection, such as MMSE detection and Vertical-Bell Laboratories layered space-time architecture (V-BLAST) detection (we call this frequency-domain block signal detection). The achievable average BER performance using the proposed frequency-domain block signal detection is evaluated by computer simulation.

Multipath is one of the major error sources that deteriorates tracking performance in global navigation satellite system (GNSS). In this letter, the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm is used to estimate multipaths which are highly correlated with the line of signal (LoS) signal. The estimated multipaths are subtracted from the received signal such that the autocorrelation function of the received signal is restored to optimize the tracking performance. The performance of the proposed technique is verified via computer simulations under the multipath environment of GNSS.

In this paper, we propose a new differential MIMO single-carrier system with frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE) aided by the insertion of cyclic prefix. This block transmission system not only inherits all the merits of the SISO SC-FDE system, but is also equipped with a differential space-time block coding (DSTBC) such as to combat the fast-changing frequency selective fading channels without the needs to estimate and then compensate the channel effects. Hence, for practical applications, it has the additional merits of decoding simplicity and robustness against high mobility transmission environments. Computer simulations show that the proposed system can provide diversity benefit as the non-differential system does, while greatly reducing the receiver complexity.

In this letter, a derivative constraint minimum output energy (MOE) receiver is proposed the offers enhanced robustness against carrier frequency offset (CFO). A theoretical analysis of the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) is presented to confirm its efficacy. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed receiver basically offers the same performance as an optimal receiver with no CFO present.

This letter addresses the edge effect on a windowed discrete Fourier transform (WDFT)-based channel estimator for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with virtual carriers in non-sample spaced channels and derives a sufficient condition to reduce the edge effect. Moreover, a modified WDFT-based channel estimator with multi-step linear prediction as an edge effect reduction technique is proposed. Simulation results show that it offers around 5 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain over the conventional WDFT-based channel estimator at bit error rate (BER) of 10-3.

Error-propagation is an important issue and should be carefully coped with in the decision-feedback equalizers (DFE). Ignoring the impact of error-propagation often leads to impractical laboratory results. In this paper, we investigate two novel layered space-frequency equalizers (LSFE) for single-carrier multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where the recently proposed frequency-domain equalizer with time domain noise-predictor (FDE-NP) is adopted at each stage of the LSFE. We first derive the partially-connected LSFE with noise predictor (PC-LSFE-NP) which has exactly the same mean square error (MSE) as the conventional LSFE under the assumption of perfect feedback. However, if error-propagation is considered, the proposed PC-LSFE-NP can achieve better performance than the conventional LSFE due to the more reliable feedback output by the decoders. To reduce the interference from the not yet detected layers in the feedback section, we then introduce the fully-connected LSFE with noise predictor (FC-LSFE-NP), in which all layers are implicitly equalized within each stage and their decisions fed back internally. The powerful feedback filter of FC-LSFE-NP brings significant performance superiority over the conventional LSFE and PC-LSFE-NP with either perfect or imperfect feedback. Moreover, we propose a simple soft-demapper for the equalizers to avoid information loss during decoding, and thus, further improve the performance. Finally, we compare the performance of (PC/FC)-LSFE-NP with the existing schemes by computer simulations.

The dynamic channel allocation (DCA) scheme in multi-cell systems causes serious inter-cell interference (ICI) problem to some existing calls when channels for new calls are allocated. Such a problem can be addressed by advanced centralized DCA design that is able to minimize ICI. Thus, in this paper, a centralized DCA is developed for the downlink of multi-cell orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems with full spectral reuse. However, in practice, as the search space of channel assignment for centralized DCA scheme in multi-cell systems grows exponentially with the increase of the number of required calls, channels, and cells, it becomes an NP-hard problem and is currently too complicated to find an optimum channel allocation. In this paper, we propose an ant colony optimization (ACO) based DCA scheme using a low-complexity ACO algorithm which is a kind of heuristic algorithm in order to solve the aforementioned problem. Simulation results demonstrate significant performance improvements compared to the existing schemes in terms of the grade of service (GoS) performance and the forced termination probability of existing calls without degrading the system performance of the average throughput.

We perform error probability analysis of the uncoded OFDM fixed gain Amplify-and-Forward (AF) relaying system with subcarrier permutation (SCP). Two SCP schemes, named: the best-to-best SCP (BTB SCP) and the best-to-worst SCP (BTW SCP) are considered. Closed-form expressions for the bit error rate (BER) of the above SCP methods are derived. Numerical results manifest that these SCP schemes may outperform one another, depending on the average channel conditions of the links involved. That is, BTB SCP is better at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values, while BTW SCP prevails in the medium and high SNR regime. Thus, it could be concluded that OFDM AF relaying systems may switch from the BTB SCP to BTW SCP in order to achieve optimum BER performance. Moreover, using the derived end-to-end SNR probability density functions (PDF), tight upper bounds for the ergodic capacities of both SCP schemes are obtained.

A new mixed-voltage I/O buffer for low-voltage low-latency operation is proposed in this paper. The proposed buffer adopts a novel delay-based timing-control scheme to efficiently avoid problems like gate-oxide stress and hot-carrier degradation. The proposed timing-control scheme also allows the buffer to have a lower latency for transmitting data by avoiding the use of timing-critical circuits like series-connected transmission gates (TGs) and triple-stacked transistors. The latency for receiving data at low supply voltage is also reduced by employing a variable stacked transistor gate-biasing scheme. Comparison results in an 80-nm CMOS process indicated that the proposed mixed-voltage I/O buffer improved up to 79.3% for receiving the external data and up to 23.8% for transmitting the internal data at a supply voltage of 1.2 V.

We have been considering the architecture of the future carrier network which will be the successor to Next Generation Network (NGN). Our assessments have clarified the key problems that will arise in the era when NGN has matured. Based on our studies, we define the vision and the architecture that can solve these problems. This paper provides a snapshot of our work in order to contribute to research on the New Generation Network and beyond.