European Journal of Scientific Research ISSN 1450-216X Vol.70 No.1 (2012), pp. 38-45 EuroJournals Publishing, Inc.

. 2012 http://www.europeanjournalofscientificresearch.com

Low Complexity Downlink Channel Estimation using CSI Reference Signals for LTE-Advanced Systems
N. Amutha Prabha VIT University, Vellore, Tamil Nadu E-mail: namuthaprabha@gmail.com V. Manikandan Coimbatore Institute of Technology Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu E-mail: manikandan@cit.edu.in Tel: +91-9486750593 Abstract This paper proposes a robust channel estimation algorithm for the OFDMA LTE system. In this work, we nullify the subcarriers in the guard band, which can be used in multipath delay locations. This avoids overlapping of interferer channels and results in highly excellent performance rate and also enables flexible subcarrier allocation with very low complexity. Simulation result shows that the proposed estimator outperforms the conventional channel estimators significantly and allows for supporting high rate users. The estimated signal is equalized in order to provide more prominent result. Keywords: OFDMA, LTE, channel estimation, equalization, guard band.

1. Introduction
Nowadays, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) is considered as a powerful multiuser communication scheme for the high speed wireless communication systems. It requires a robust channel estimation and adaptive transmission to satisfy the tremendous growth in demand for capacity due to its multipath propagation. This provides highly flexible subcarrier allocations to avoid interference within the intracells and to reduce interference with the intercells mainly in LTE [2] and WiMAX systems [3]. Channel estimation is a critical technique for receiver in the LTE system. Accurate channel status information obtained through channel estimation is needed for coherent demodulation and space-time decoding. This paper analyzes several channel estimators namely least square estimator (LSE), Minimum Mean Square Estimator (MMSE). We implemented an effective the channel estimation in LTE system called an adaptive beam forcing estimator and analyze the particular application combined with the downlink physical channel. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than the conventional algorithms with low implementing complexity. The maximum signal to noise ratio (MaxSNR) interference rejection method with single antenna interference cancellation was partially described in [8] and multiple receivers in reuse-1 OFDM system was discussed in [6]. In [4] the same method is applied with known pilot symbols and previously estimated channel coefficients and the loss of sub channel leads to inter-carrier interference [5].In [7], the suppression of the errors occurs in channel estimation was investigated. Here, the

Low Complexity Downlink Channel Estimation using CSI Reference Signals for LTE-Advanced Systems

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analysis made by calculating Bit Error Rate for various SNR and it is shown that raw BER performance in a co-channel interferer scenario is affected by a floor close to 10-1. It will be shown next, how by increasing the receiver complexity, this floor can be removed. The work is to replace the channel estimation and equalize the signal where the system complexity gets reduce to a maximum extent. The errors get nullified by the detecting in the direction of the arrival estimation by correcting a phase angle. Since the error reduction is made at the earlier stage, we used a simple equalizer rather than going for a feedback decision equalizer.

2. System Model
2.1. Overview As the number of the mobile users increases day by day, there occurs scarcity of radio bandwidth resources, their usage becomes insufficient. Thereafter, a promising approach is developed to maximize the performance to bring advances in the communication technology. Thus OFDMA technology emerges. The radio channels in mobile radio systems are usually multipath fading channels, which causes intersymbol interference (ISI) in the received signal [9, 10]. To remove ISI from the signal, many kinds of equalizers can be used. The system model has been described. A channel estimation should performed at each antenna head of the enodes (eNBs) for all the users being served. This becomes a difficult task if the users are situated at different distances from the same eNB. The received signal levels of uplink transmissions users must have a perfect synchronization. To attain it, we define a pilot sequences. This enables mobile terminals to distinguish stronger interference channels with an increasing length of the correlation window utilized for the estimation process. The system model has been described.
Figure 2.1: Block Diagram of LTE OFDMA System

2.2. CSI Reference Signal The Channel State Indication (CSI) is considered as a reference signals. These signals can be transmitted on one, two, four or eight antenna ports using p = 15 , p = 15,16 , p = 15,...,18 and p = 15,...,22 , respectively. CSI reference signals are defined for f = 15 kHz only. Sequence generation is based on the reference signal rl ,ns (m) and it is defined by
1 1 max,DL 1 (12 c(2m)) + j (12 c(2m+1)) , m = 0,1,..., NRB 2 2 The pseudo-random sequence c(i ) generator shall be initialised with rl,ns (m) =

(2.1) (2.2)

c in it = 2 1 0 ( 7 ( n s + 1 ) + l + 1 ) ( 2 N

c e ll ID

c e ll + 1 ) + 2 N ID + N CP

40 slot.

N. Amutha Prabha and V. Manikandan where ns is the slot number within a radio frame and l is the OFDM symbol number within the

At the start of each OFDM symbol where 1 for normal CP N CP = (2.3) 0 for extended CP are considered and the cyclic prefix can be considered as either of the above condition. These signals can be mapped to resource elements as frames. From the CSI reference signal transmission, the sub frames are configured and the reference signal sequence rl ,ns ( m) shall be mapped to complex( p) valued modulation symbols ak ,l which can be used as reference symbols on antenna port p according

to the given relation,

a k( ,pl ) = w l " rl , n s ( m ')

where
0 fo r p {1 5,1 6 } , n o rm al cyclic p refix 6 fo r p {1 7 ,1 8 } , n o rm al cyclic p refix 1 fo r p {1 9, 2 0 } , n o rm al cyclic p refix 7 fo r p {2 1, 2 2 } , n o rm al cyclic p refix k = k '+ 1 2 m + 0 fo r p {1 5,1 6 } , ex ten d ed cyclic p refix 3 fo r p {1 7 ,1 8 } , ex ten d ed cyclic p refix 6 fo r p {1 9, 2 0 } , ex ten d ed cyclic p refix 9 fo r p {2 1, 2 2 } , ex ten d ed cyclic p refix l " CSI reference signal configurations 0-19, normal cyclic prefix l = l '+ 2l " CSI reference signal configurations 20-31, normal cyclic prefix l " CSI reference signal configurations 0-27, extended cyclic prefix

(2.4)

(2.5)

(2.6)

1 wl = l" ( 1) l " = 0,1

p {15,17,19, 21}

p {16,18, 20, 22}

(2.7)

DL m = 0,1,..., N RB 1
DL N max,DL N RB (2.8) m ' = m + RB 2 CSI can be used a data for transmission in the OFDMA uplink system with K subcarriers to obtain perfect user synchronization. As we assumed perfect synchronization and that the channels from all users to the base station remains constant within one symbol, the maximum delay is suggested to be shorter than the normal cyclic prefix length in the receiver side. The demodulated base station receive signal is given by

y (n) = h(n; l )u ( n l ) + w(n), n N cp , N 1 ,

l =0

(2.9)

where u(n) represents the transmitted sample at time n and w( n ) the Additive White Gaussian Noise with zero mean and variance 2. The received samples corresponding to the cyclic prefix is deleted and the input-output time domain relation in the matrix-vector form can be expressed as (2.10) y = Hu + w . Then after the cyclic prefix removal, Fourier transform is performed on the received samples and expressed in frequency domain as Y = Hs + W (2.11)

Low Complexity Downlink Channel Estimation using CSI Reference Signals for LTE-Advanced Systems

41

The invariant channel coefficient corresponding to each path H can be estimated and these estimated channels are equalized to recover the transmitted symbols [1]. If H exceeds the maximum possible number of training sequences N in the transmission, it leads to channel estimation. In our paper, we use a arrival of beam forcing technique and once the detection are known the detector (equalizer) uses it to derive the transmitted data which is thereafter decoded to get the message data.

3. Channel Estimation in LTE

The different types of channel estimation techniques are considered and explained.
3.1. Least-Squares Estimator

The Least-Squares (LS) channel estimator for subcarriers on which pilot symbols are located, is given by LS = X H y (3.1) h p p P And the remaining channel coefficients are obtained by linear interpolation.
3.2. Minimum-Mean-Square-Error Estimator

The Minimum-Mean-Square-Error (MMSE) channel estimator performs better than the LS estimator, but it requires higher computational complexity due to the second order statistics of the channel and the noise. By filtering LS estimator, MMSE channel estimate can be obtained and expressed as 1 LS h =R R + 2I h (3.2)
MMSE h , hP

hp , h p

where the Rhp ,hp is the autocorrelation matrix of the channel at the pilot symbols position and Rh,hP is the cross correlation matrix between the channel at the data symbol positions and the channel at the pilot symbol position.
3.3. Proposed Algorithm

Insertion of pilot sub carriers in the time-frequency grid is carried by channel estimator. The estimates on the pilot subcarriers are then interpolated over data subcarriers. As the desired pilot subcarriers and the interferer of the base stations (BS) overlap, the edge of the cell is severely corrupted. In order to combat the interference on these pilot carriers, the use of pilot sequences gives some co-channel interference (CCI) mitigation, but such scheme fails when interference is strong. In this method, the interferer is suppressed in multipath-delay domain and the improved channel estimator is defined. In order to reduce the interference, a direction of arrival estimator is used to suppress the occurrence of the interference mainly in the sub carriers. The kth sub carrier equation can be represented as Yn (k ) = H n (k ) X n (k ) + Vn (k ) (3.3) where
H (1) (k ) H (1)i ,n (k ) X d ,n (k ) H n (k ) = (2)d ,n , X n (k ) = (2) H d , n (k ) H i , n ( k ) X i ,n (k )

(3.4)

and

Vn (1) (k ) Vn (k ) = (2) (3.5) Vn (k ) To nullify the interference at the downlink end, an estimator is to be used and an estimate of the desired signal is expressed as

42
( k ) = G H ( k )Y ( k ) X d ,n n n

N. Amutha Prabha and V. Manikandan (3.6)

By which the interferer is suppressed in multipath delay and yields high performance rate.

4. Results and Discussion

To evaluate the performance analysis of the proposed adaptive beamforming technique, simulation is carried out with respect to bit error rate under high noise with different channel scenarios and variation in SNR. As the part of simulation, the bit error rate performance for various SNR is simulated for QPSK, QAM and 16-QAM was made. For all users, AWGN and Rayleigh fading with uniform delay and Doppler shift were simulated. An analysis was made for LSE, MMSE estimator and adaptive beamforming technique and with different modulated data at receiver side. The corresponding graph was obtained in terms of Binary error rate (BER) for varying SNR values for all the estimators. It is seen that our scheme significantly outperforms the conventional methods. This helped in finding out the better estimator technique. Then data was fed into two equalizers, MLSE and ZFE, were also analyzed. Similar graphical outputs were obtained for both the equalizers and hence any simple equalizer technique can be used by direction of arrival estimation, since the noise gets nullified to the maximum extent compared to the conventional estimators available. Finally the frame analyzer was called to compare the performance of two equalizers in terms of number of error bits. The system parameters considered for the simulation are listed in Table-1
Table 1

Simulation Parameters
Value 1024 600 80 MIMO QPSK, 16-QAM, 64-QAM Extended Vehicular A Model

Parameter FFT size Number of modulated sub-carriers Cyclic prefix Transmission mode Modulation scheme Channel type

Figure 5.1: BER performance of channel estimation for QPSK modulation under AWGN channel.
SNR V/S BER FOR A QPSK RECEIVERS UNDER AWGN BER WITH MMSE ESTIMATOR BER WITH LSE ESTIMATOR BER WITH ADAPTIVE BEAMFORCING

10

-1

10 Bit Error Rate

-2

10

-3

10

-4

10

-5

10 Eb/No, dB

15

20

25

Low Complexity Downlink Channel Estimation using CSI Reference Signals for LTE-Advanced Systems
Figure 5.2: BER performance of channel estimation for QPSK modulation under Rayleigh fading channel.
SNR V/S BER FOR QPSK RECEIVERS UNDER RAYLEIGH FADING BER FOR ADAPTIVE BEAMFORCING BER FOR MMSE BER FOR LSE ESTIMATOR

43

10

-1

10 Bit Error Rate

-2

10

-3

10

-4

10

-5

10 Eb/No, dB

15

20

25

Figure 5.3: BER performance of channel estimation for 16-QAM modulation under AWGN channel.
10
-1

SNR V/S BER FOR 16-QAM UNDER AWGN

Bit Error Rate

10

-2

BER FOR MMSE ESTIMATOR BER FOR LSE ESTIMATOR BER FOR ADAPTIVE BEAMFORMING TECHNIQUE

10

-3

10

15 SNR in DB

20

25

30

Figure 5.4: BER performance of channel estimation for 16-QAM modulation under Rayleigh fading channel.
SNR V/S BER FOR 16-QAM UNDER RAYLEIGH FADING

10

-1.2

10 Bit Error Rate

-1.3

BER FOR MMSE ESTIMATOR BER FOR LSE ESTIMATOR BER FOR ADAPTIVE BEAMFORMING TECHNIQUE

10

-1.4

10

-1.5

10

-1.6

10

15 SNR in DB

20

25

30

44

N. Amutha Prabha and V. Manikandan

Figure 5.5: BER performance of channel estimation for 64-QAM modulation under AWGN channel.
SNR V/S BER FOR 64-QAM UNDER AWGN 0.07 BER FOR LSE ESTIMATOR BER FOR ADAPTIVE BEAMFORCING TECHNIQUE BER FOR MMSE ESTIMATOR

0.06

0.05 Bit Error Rate

0.04

0.03

0.02

0.01

10

15 SNR in DB

20

25

30

Figure 5.6: BER performance of channel estimation for 64-QAM modulation under Rayleigh fading channel.
SNR V/S BER FOR 64-QAM UNDER RAYLEIGH FADING 0.065 0.06 0.055 0.05 Bit Error Rate 0.045 0.04 0.035 0.03 0.025 0.02 BER FOR LSE ESTIMATOR BER FOR ADAPTIVE BEAMFORCING TECHNIQUE BER FOR MMSE ESTIMATOR

10

15 SNR in DB

20

25

30

The entire graph concludes that direction of arrival of beam forcing technique is a better estimation technique than the other two existing estimators under selective frequency fading channels. As Eb/No increases, the bit error rate decreases which states that at higher interference scenario the rate reduces in the proposed method and improves the performance rate of the system. Due to this performance, we need not put more impact on the equalizer. Any simple equalizer can be used.

5. Conclusion
This paper presents several approaches of how to model channel estimation in simulations. The Binary Error Rate (BER) was calculated as a part of channel estimation and the corresponding graphs were obtained for different modulation techniques in OFDMA system. Simulation results show that the proposed method has better performance, in terms of complexity and performance rate compared to the conventional methods and it is more robust at high speed mobility.

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References
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