Radio Enabling Techniques for IMT-Advanced (4G)

and beyond: WINNER+ Project

Afif Osseiran#1, Mauro Boldi*, Jose F. Monserrat^, Jaakko Vihriälä&, Antti Tölli%, Alexandre Gouraud$
#
Ericsson AB, Stockholm, Sweden
1
Afif.Osseiran@ericsson.com
*
Telecom Italia Lab, Italy
^Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
&
Nokia Siemens Networks, Finland
%
University of Oulu, Finland
$
Orange Labs, France

Abstract— Enabling radio innovation techniques for IMT-
Advanced and beyond investigated in the WINNER+ project are
summarized in this paper. These techniques survey five
innovation areas: Advanced Antenna Systems (AAS), Advanced
Radio Resource Management (ARRM), Network Coding,
Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) transmissions and Spectrum
Technologies. In AAS, under the framework of cellular multiuser
MIMO systems, the proposals focus on how to make the channel
state information (CSI) available at the transmitter, to reduce the
pilot overhead and to utilize the acquired CSI for efficient
downlink precoding. Within CoMP transmissions, coordinated
scheduling and/or beamforming and joint processing are briefly
presented and analysed. In ARRM carrier aggregation is
described. In network coding the application of non-binary codes
is presented. Concerning spectrum technologies special attention
is given to the co-existence of macro-layer and femto-layer and
consequently how to coordinate the interference.
I. INTRODUCTION
The race towards International Mobile Telecommunications
(IMT)-Advanced is progressing rapidly. At the 3GPP, the
Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced Study Item was
launched in May 2008 and is being finalized early 2010. In
IEEE 802.16 standard, IEEE 802.16m is the IMT-Advanced
candidate. It is described in the System Description Document
(SDD) and was already finalized in September 2009. Both
LTE-A and IEEE 802.16 were submitted to ITU (International
Telecommunication Union) as IMT-A technology candidates.
The final evaluation results was submitted to ITU for Radio
(ITU-R) in June 2010. Consequently ITU-R is expected to
announce the accepted terrestrial radio interface technologies
through a Circular Letter in October 2010.
The CELTIC WINNER+ (Wireless World Initiative New
Radio) [1] project has contributed to the definition of IMT-
Advanced technology proposals and beyond, especially the
3GPP LTE-Advanced. WINNER+ maintains the technological
development path by targeting IMT-Advanced technologies
and their evolutions. The first phase of the project saw the
development of innovative techniques integrated with the
overall system functionalities [2]. In the second and final
phase of WINNER+, we pursued the development of
promising AAS, ARRM, CoMP, Network Coding and
Spectrum innovations techniques that may be applied in the
future IMT-Advanced standards within the scope of the LTE-
Advanced development process. The main goal is to
harmonize the innovations within a WINNER+ and select the
most promising techniques in order to allow:
• System Integration and evaluation of innovations
in areas with high potential of exploitation in
IMT-Advanced;
• Harmonization of innovations in the pre-
standardization phase;
• Participation in the evaluation of selected
technology proposals and strong contribution to
ITU-R WP5D.
The evaluation of IMT-Advanced toward ITU-R WP5D
group was successfully completed [11]. Further some of the
selected techniques for IMT-Advanced techniques were
evaluated in depth, for more details see [7].
This article provides an overview of the WINNER+ most
promising techniques within the above stated innovation areas
of ARRM, CoMP, Network Coding, and Spectrum
innovations. The remainder of this paper outlines the main
techniques associated with each area.
II. ADVANCED ANTENNA SYSTEMS
The spectral efficiency of multiantenna transmission can be
significantly increased if channel state information (CSI) is
available at the transmitter, allowing the system to effectively
adapt to the radio channel and take full advantage of the
available spectrum. Providing full CSI feedback may cause an
excessive overhead, and hence quantized instantaneous and/or
statistical CSI are preferable in practice. A simple alternative
in using time division duplex (TDD) system where the same
carrier frequency is alternately used for transmission and
reception, and thus the CSI can be tracked at the transmitter
during receive periods, provided that fading is sufficiently
slow and the radio chains are well calibrated.
The innovations introduced in WINNER+ project [7] focus
mostly on seeking for system performance improvements
from advances in the acquisition of channel state information
at transmitter (CSIT) – short term or long-term – via new

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signaling and estimation solutions. The framework of cellular
multiuser MIMO systems is considered, where a base station
employing an antenna array communicates with user terminals,
each equipped with one or more antenna elements. The
framework of the presented solutions consists of spatial user
multiplexing or scheduling, and beamforming by means of
linear transmit precoding. The problem of acquiring the CSIT
consists of multiple tasks, such as pilot signal design, channel
state and quality estimation, as well as feedback signal design.
All these aspects were addressed in order to enhance the
system performance. The innovations can be grouped into
four main categories presented. Each subgroup includes a
multitude of proposals of which a more detailed description
can be found in [7]. The performance gains and the applicable
scenario of the proposed innovations are summarized in
TABLE I.
TABLE I
ADVANCED ANTENNAS CATEGORIES
Applicable to Expected performance
FDD/TDD
Applicable to
UL/DL
Enhancements for FDD (and TDD) Improved spectral efficiency
codebook based multi- downlink for cell-edge users
antenna transmission
Feedback methods for FDD (and TDD) Improved spectral efficiency
multi-user MIMO zero- downlink in environments with high
forcing antenna correlation
Resource allocation TDD downlink Highly increased overall
schemes for TDD and uplink performance if accurate CSI
systems available
Coding and decoding Any duplexing Provides diversity, coding,
mode and link and decoding gain for point-
to-point links
III. COORDINATED MULTI-POINT TRANSMISSIONS
CoMP transmission and reception is one of the most
promising techniques currently proposed in order to increase
the data rates especially of the cell edge users. CoMP refers to
a system where the transmission and/or reception at multiple,
geographically separated antenna sites is dynamically
coordinated in order to improve system performance (see Fig.
1 for a schematic representation of a CoMP scenario). At a
high level, downlink coordination schemes can be divided into
two categories: coordinated scheduling/beamforming (CB
CoMP) and joint processing transmission (JP CoMP). In the
first category the data to a single user equipment (UE) is
instantaneously transmitted from a single transmission point,
while in the joint processing/transmission category the data to
a single UE is simultaneously transmitted from multiple
transmission points so that the received signal quality and/or
cancel actively interference for other UEs. It can be noted that
in the case of coordinated beamforming the requirements on
the link coordination and on the backhaul are significantly
reduced.
On the other hand, within the framework of CoMP the best
performances are from JP CoMP schemes (in case of prefect
CSI), especially in conjunction with a proper selection of the
cells to be conveniently gathered in a cluster where the
scheme is applied. Indeed, from a practical point of view, one
of the major drawbacks related to joint processing is its high
complexity, in particular regarding the backhaul and signaling
overhead. In order to reduce these complex requirements,
clustering solutions that restrict joint processing techniques to
a limited number of BSs (statically or dynamically) have been
proposed, and constitute an important achievement of the
project.
user&control data exchange
v
Fig. 1 Schematic representation of a CoMP scenario.
In a first approach, a single and static cluster of BSs is
considered. In this case, a user-centric partial joint processing
(PJP) scheme is proposed to reduce both the inter-base
information exchange and the feedback from the users
compared to a fully centralized approach. The average sum-
rate per cell for cell border users can be increased by a factor
ranging from 2 to 4 depending on the different configurations
of PJP with respect to the uncoordinated case.
In a second step, focus is cast on a multi-cluster level and a
dynamic and network-centric clustering approach including
issues of user scheduling. A star topology is requested with a
master central unit. Based on the CSI and on the scheduling
requirements, the central unit jointly creates the clusters of
collaborating BSs, schedules the users in these clusters and
calculates the beamforming coefficients and the power
allocation. In this approach, substantial gains are obtained
with respect to a static clustering scenario. As an example, for
cell edge users the throughput could be doubled.
A dynamic clustering technique is combined with multi-
antenna receivers in another proposed solution, with, in
addition a concept for a scalable CSI feedback. The basic idea
is to enable each user to generate and provide CSI feedback
by selecting a preferred receive strategy. Each user can choose
its desired receive strategy according to its own computational
capabilities and knowledge of the CSIs at the receiver
including interference, independently from other users. This
allows to benefit from two major advantages: first, the
multiple receive antennas are efficiently used for suppression
of external interference at the user side. Second, by reducing
the number of data streams per user, the system can serve
instantaneously a larger set of active users. With this approach
the sector spectral efficiency could be increased by a factor of
1.5-2 also with very small clusters.

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 IV. NETWORK CODING
Network coding (NC) is currently emerging in multi-hop or
multi-user wireless networks as a new class of information
processing and transmission techniques. Compared to
traditional routing techniques, network coding allows
information processing in the intermediate nodes.
Performance gains in e.g., energy-efficiency, fairness,
robustness, or coverage are obtained. Though network coding
was originally proposed for error-free computer networks, the
principles of network coding can be applied also to implement
wireless communications. An illustration of network coding in
a bidirectional scenario is shown in Fig.2.
In WINNER+ we proposed and investigated the
performance of non binary network coding in cooperative and
multiple-relay scenarios. In addition we investigated the relay
selection and user grouping in a relay multiple access scenario.
A+
B
B
A+
Carrier aggregation is one of the main factors of the success
of the next 4G technologies. This concept implies transmitting
data on multiple contiguous or non-contiguous sub-bands,
called component carriers. Each component carrier occupies
up to 20 MHz of bandwidth in which it can be transmitted
information towards LTE or LTE-Advanced mobiles. In
WINNER+ the concept of carrier aggregation has been deeply
assessed from different points of view; specifically from
physical layer, MAC layer and signaling. Three are the main
conclusions drawn. Regarding channel coding, transport block
segmentation should be avoided as much as possible, since it
naturally entails some degradation in the system performance.
The improvement achieved with low density parity check
(LDPC) code is, in most cases, limited to 0.5 dB. Provided
that LDPC are not backward compatible, its inclusion in next
generation networks seems not justified. Second, from the
scheduling perspective, a significant advantage of non-
contiguous carrier aggregation over contiguous aggregation
has been observed, mostly due to the higher spectral diversity
of the former strategy. The disadvantage regards hardware
redundancy, i.e. the employment of more than one physical
(and possibly MAC) layer processing chains. Third, with
regards to CQI signaling in CA, from the point of view of the
CQI reporting procedure in a bandwidth aggregation scenario,
the research proposes a method to define the CQI report
granularity in the time domain and in the frequency domain
depending on the carrier the UE is using aiming to save uplink
bandwidth without degrading the system performance.

VI. SPECTRUM TECHNOLOGIES

Fig. 2 An example of three phases’ bidirectional network coding.
Flexible spectrum use (FSU) and spectrum sharing are
promising candidates for increasing spectral efficiency of a
The multiple-user multiple-relay (MUMR) using non- cellular network on the system level. An important technique
binary network coding consists of several users have in the area of FSU is that of femtocells which are low-cost,
independent information to be transmitted to a common base low-power, short-range, plug-and-play base stations, which
station (BS), with the help of multiple relays. In fact the non can be used for offloading traffic from the macro cells, thus
binary codes are used on the top of channel codes to rebuild resulting in throughput gain.
source information from the minimum possible set of coded Due to their uncoordinated nature, minimal changes are
blocks. Further the used linear non binary network codes are needed in the macro network. On the other hand, if some
asymptotically optimal in terms of diversity (diversity order 3), amount of coordination is allowed, the performance can be
see [7]. improved by more advanced interference control and channel
In a multi-cell network coding wireless relaying system the allocation methods. This would affect both macro- and
introduction of adequate joint or disjoint user grouping and femtocells; decreased femto-to-macro interference would
relay selection allows exploit fully the system performance [9]. increase macro cell throughput, and more optimal channel
In fact the usage of user grouping and relay selection for allocation in the femtocell would improve its performance.
Network Coding improves the cell throughput by 70%. Since femtocells are deployed by the end users, their
placement can be modeled as a random drop, example of
V. ADVANCED RADIO RESOURCE MANAGEMENT which is given in Fig. 3. Femtocells are represented by circles,
Due to the huge complexity of the WINNER+ system, the macro eNB’s by triangles and UE’s by dots.
innovative algorithms related to resource allocation are Interference caused by the femtocell is illustrated in Fig. 4.
referred to as Advanced Radio Resource Management The most detrimental interference is the femto-to-macro
(ARRM) techniques. Four main ARRM concepts were interference, caused by femto base station (HeNB in 3GPP
identified [3]: Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) Systems, terminology) DL transmission to the macro UE (MUE) DL
Cross-layering for QoS, Carrier Aggregation (CA) and reception. The MUE in the cell edge may receive weak signal
Enhanced Single Frequency Network (SFN) Multicasting. from the eNB, and a nearby HeNB may cause unacceptable
This section focuses only on CA given its special relevance. level of interference. On the other hand, also macro-to-femto

3
interference is a problem from the femtocell point of view; a
nearby MUE causes interference to the femtocell.
An obvious method to decrease interference is to limit
transmission power of FUE and HeNB, but even this does not
decrease the interference to and acceptable level.
The femtocell innovations in WINNER+ can be divided
into two categories: coordinated and uncoordinated.
1400
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
0
0 500 1000 1500
Fig. 3 An example of a femtocell deployment.
In the coordinated approach, the interference from the
macro network to the femtocell is avoided by extending the
intercell interference coordination (ICIC) mechanism to the
femtocells [4]. This method is used to deny the HeNB’s use of
physical resource block (PRB) which would cause high
interference to the macro network. Game theoretical approach
[7] is then used to further optimize the resource usage for
those PRB’s where interference is on an intermediate level.
Even though this method is called “coordinated”, the nature of
the femtocells is still uncoordinated; their deployment is done
by the end user, in a plug-and-play fashion, and the network
has no control over the femto BS locations.
MUE
HeNB
FUE
FUE
HeNB
eNB
Interference
Usefull signal
Fig. 4 Femtocell interference.
In the uncoordinated case, there is no signalling between
macro and femto networks. Instead, femto-to-macro
interference is avoided by using TDD on UL band in the
femtocell [4], [7]-[8]; this way, when the distance to the
nearest macro BS is large enough, the femtocell does not
cause any interference if the transmission powers in the
femtocells are kept low enough. The distance is estimated by
measuring the path loss from the macro BS.
VII. CONCLUSIONS
This paper described briefly the most important selected
techniques for IMT-Advanced technologies in the following
innovation areas within WINNER+: advanced antenna
schemes (AAS), coordinated multipoint (CoMP) systems,
advanced RRM (ARRM), network coding and spectrum
technologies. These techniques improve substantially the
system performance. For instance CoMP allows lifting the cell
edge spectral efficiency while being sensitive to channels
impairments. Uncoordinated femtocell deployment is another
technique which can be used to lift the system throughput.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This article has been written in the framework of the
CELTIC project CP5-026 WINNER+. The authors would like
to acknowledge the contributions of their colleagues.
REFERENCES
[1] WINNER Project IST 2004-507581, WINNER II Project IST-4-027756
and WINNER+ Project CELTIC CP5-026, http://projects.celtic-
initiative.org/winner+/
[2] A. Osseiran et al., Radio Innovation Areas for IMT-Advanced &
Beyond: WINNER+ System Concept, Proc. of ICT Mobile Summit
2009, Santander, Spain, June 2009
[3] Celtic CP5-026 WINNER+, Intermediate Report on System Aspect of
Advanced RRM, Deliverable D1.5, November 2009,
http://projects.celtic-
initiative.org/winner+/deliverables_winnerplus.html.
[4] Celtic CP5-026 WINNER+, Intermediate Report on Flexible Spectrum
Use, Deliverable D1.6, November 2009, http://projects.celtic-
initiative.org/winner+/deliverables_winnerplus.html
[5] Celtic CP5-026 WINNER+, Intermediate Report on Advanced Multiple
Antenna Systems, Deliverable D1.7, November 2009,
http://projects.celtic-
initiative.org/winner+/deliverables_winnerplus.html
[6] Celtic CP5-026 WINNER+, Intermediate Report on Coordinated
Multipoint and Relaying in the Framework of CoMP, Deliverable D1.8,
November 2009, http://projects.celtic-
initiative.org/winner+/deliverables_winnerplus.html.
[7] Celtic CP5-026 WINNER+, Final Innovation Report, Deliverable D1.9,
April 2010, http://projects.celtic-
initiative.org/winner+/deliverables_winnerplus.html.
[8] Celtic CP5-026 WINNER+, Initial Report on Flexible Spectrum Use,
Deliverable D1.2, January 2009, http://projects.celtic-
initiative.org/winner+/deliverables_winnerplus.html
[9] Celtic CP5-026 WINNER+, concepts in Peer-to-Peer and Network
Coding, Deliverable D1.3, January 2009, http://projects.celtic-
initiative.org/winner+/deliverables_winnerplus.html
[10] Celtic CP5-026 WINNER+, Enabling Techniques for LTE-A and
beyond, Deliverable D2.2, July 2010, http://projects.celtic-
initiative.org/winner+/deliverables_winnerplus.html
[11] Celtic CP5-026 WINNER+, Final conclusions on end-to-end
performance and sensitivity analysis, Deliverable D4.2, July 2010,
http://projects.celtic-
initiative.org/winner+/deliverables_winnerplus.html