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THROUGHPUT ENHANCEMENT IN WCDMA USING THE GENERALIZED RAKE RECEIVER

Jay Kumar Sundararajan Vaibhav Maheshwari R. David Koilpillai Department of Electrical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Madras Chennai, India 600036

Abstract In a multipath fading channel, when there are many interfering CDMA signals, the multipath causes loss of orthogonality between different signals leading to intracell interference. The Generalized RAKE receiver, proposed recently in the literature, is based on the concept that this interference is not white but colored. Therefore, unlike the conventional RAKE receiver, GRAKE tries to match to the channel as well as whiten the interference. The GRAKE gives a typical improvement of 1-3 dB in SNR for a moderate increase in complexity. In this paper, we quantify the benets of using the GRAKE in place of the RAKE in a WCDMA downlink under realistic conditions as specied in the 3GPP standards. The comparison is made both in the presence and absence of channel coding. After performing channel coding, the block error rate and hence the system throughput is evaluated for both receivers in a 144 kbps test case. It is demonstrated that the GRAKE provides signicant improvement in BER performance, which translates to higher data throughput, as well as increased capacity.

Currently at MIT, USA; E-mail: jaykumar@mit.edu Currently at ETH, Zurich; E-mail: mvaibhav@ee.ethz.ch Currently at IIT Madras; E-mail: koilpillai@tenet.res.in

Index Terms Wideband CDMA, DS-CDMA downlink receivers, Generalized RAKE Receiver, Coloration of interference

I. I NTRODUCTION The RAKE receiver is equivalent to a matched lter receiver that matches to the multipath channel. Therefore it is the optimal solution in a situation where the only impairments to the transmitted signal are the multipath fading channel and receiver white noise. However, in realistic situations, one has to account for time-dispersive propagation environments. In general, channels are expected to appear more dispersive in third generation cellular systems than in second generation cellular systems, as the signal bandwidth in 3G systems is much higher. In particular, with the use of multi-code transmission and low spreading factors, the multipath channel causes loss of orthogonality between the signals of different CDMA signals. So this discussion becomes even more important in third generation systems which use CDMA and their evolutions such as HSDPA, cdma2000 and 1X-EV. In CDMA systems, the signals of all users are added up and sent over the same frequency band at the same time. So all of them pass through the same radio channel. There will be inter-symbol and multiple access interference caused by delayed replicas of the transmitted signal as well as the presence of many users in the system. Besides, there are signals from neighboring base stations which also produce interference. The interference gets distorted in the frequency domain due to the time dispersion and hence cannot be treated as white noise. The problem with RAKE receiver is that it assumes that such interference can be included under white noise. Actually, the interference is colored because of multipath as well as pulse shaping. Thus, in the presence of interfering signals, the RAKE receiver is not the best approach.

The Generalized RAKE (GRAKE) receiver [1] is a new receiver that accounts for these discrepancies in the RAKE. In the GRAKE, this idea is generalized in two ways:

The ngers can be placed in locations other than the channel taps The weights associated with the ngers need not be conjugates of the channel taps II. I NTERPRETATIONS OF THE GRAKE

An important property, specic to DS-CDMA systems, is that on the downlink, signals within the same cell are transmitted using orthogonal waveforms so that they will not interfere with one another. However, if the channel has multipath propagation, this orthogonality property no longer holds. Thus intracell interference can be mitigated by equalizing the dispersive channel. Intercell interference does not have this orthogonality property. So, the approach of equalizing the channel will not work here. Since the signal from the interfering base station goes through a different multipath channel as compared to the signal from the desired base station, the differences in spectral coloration must be exploited. Since the multipath channel gives multiple images of the signal, one image of the interference is used to cancel another image. The GRAKE receiver utilizes these propeties of interference and uses a model for the coloration of the interference to give a better downlink performance. It aims to achieve a trade-off between two goals:

To equalize the multipath channel to restore orthogonality of the intracell interfering signals

To use one image of the interference signal to cancel another image, thereby suppressing intercell interference

Another interpretation of the GRAKE is that it is a whitening matched lter. This is essentially an application of the matched lter theory for colored noise [7]. The structure is similar to that of the conventional RAKE receiver. Assuming that the nger locations

have been chosen, the weights are decided using a maximum likelihood formulation. For this, the interference at the output of the ngers is modeled as colored noise. If J is the number of ngers chosen, then a J x J noise correlation matrix R is formed where the (i, j )th entry is the correlation between the noise terms on the ith and j th ngers. The ML formulation results in the decision variable:z = cH R1 x where c is the vector of channel coefcients, x is the vector of nger outputs and R is the noise correlation matrix described above. There is a trade-off between matching to the channel and whitening with an aim to maximise the overall signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). It can be shown that the R matrix can be factorized into one term corresponding to the pre-whitening lter and another corresponding to the matching operation [2]. III. T HE MATHEMATICAL FORMULATION The notation followed here is the same as that used in [1] A. The system model The transmitted signal for user k is

xk (t) =

Ek
i=

sk (i)ak,i (t iT )

(1)

where Ek is the average symbol energy, T is the symbol duration, sk (i) is the ith symbol, ak,i (t) is the user symbol-period-dependent spreading waveform which is expressed as: 1 ak,i (t) = N
N 1

ck,i (j )p(t jTc )

j =0

(2)

The data symbol is assumed to have unit energy. The transmitted signal passes through an L-tap multipath channel whose baseband equivalent impulse response is given by:
L1

g ( ) =
l=0

gl ( l )

(3)

Assuming there are K users totally, the received signal is expressed as

K 1 L1

r(t) =
j =0 l=0

gl xk (t l ) + n(t)

(4)

The GRAKE receiver structure consists of a bank of J GRAKE ngers, each correlating to a different delay of the received signal. Let the delay of the j th nger be dj . For a given symbol, say symbol 0 of user 0, the correlator output (after despreading) corresponding to this delay is:

y (dj ) =

r(t)a0,0 (t dj )dt

(5)

These correlator outputs are combined through a weighted summation to produce a decision statistic: z=
j =1 J wj y (dj ) = wH y

(6)

where w = [w1 , w2 , , wJ ]T is the vector of combining coefcients and y = [y (d1 ), y (d2 ), , y (dJ )]T is the vector of correlator outputs.

B. Calculating the combining weights If the correlator output vector can be expressed as : y = hs0 (0) + u (7)

then the combining weights are calculated using the following equation which is derived using the ML formulation: w = Ru 1 h (8)

where Ru = E [uuH ] is the noise correlation matrix of vector u (which is assumed to be a complex-valued Gaussian noise vector with zero-mean). The computation of the h vector and the noise correlation matrix is as described

in [1]. The correlation in the noise terms is a result of several factors inter-symbol interference, intracell interference and white noise. Each of these contribute to the noise correlation matrix. Once Ru has been found, it is inverted and multiplied with h vector, as in eqn. (8) to get the GRAKE weights. These are then used as the combining coefcients during maximal ratio combining. IV. S IMULATION A. Transmitter 1) Physical Channels incorporated: The following physical channels have been incorporated in the simulation as mentioned in [3]: 1) DPCH: Downlink Physical Channel 2) P-CPICH: Primary Common Pilot Channel 3) PICH: Paging Indicator Channel 4) P-CCPCH: Primary Common Control Physical Channel 5) SCH: Synchronization Channel 6) OCNS:Orthogonal Channel Noise Source The spreading factors and format details of these channels have been specied in [4]. The OCNS is used to simulate the effect of the DPCHs of other users within the same cell. 2) Power Allocation for the various channels: The relative powers of the various physical channels has been xed according to the Table C.3 in specication [3]. The DPCH power is assumed to be -12 dB with respect to the total power. The total power for all the OCNS signals put together is calculated by subtracting the power of all the other channels from the total transmitted power. Note that the SCH and P-CCPCH are time-multiplexed. Therefore, while subtracting the powers of the other channels, the power of SCH and P-CCPCH are not subtracted separately, but only once commonly.
SETUP

Fig. 1.

Operations performed in throughput simulation

3) Channel Coding: The throughput simulation is performed for the test case given in Appendix A.3.3 in [3]. This is a 144 kbps. The slot format structure and all other parameters are given in [4]. Each block of data bits is transmitted over 2 radio frames. The raw data bits are subjected to several operations before being placed in the frame. These operations have been shown in Figure 1. The full details of this sequence of steps are available in the 3GPP specication [5]. 4) Convolutional Coding: The block of 2904 bits, that results after 8 zeros have been appended, is sent through a rate 1/3 convolutional encoder with a memory of 8

bits. The initial state of the encoder is the all-zero state. The resulting bit sequence has a length of 8712. 5) Modulation and Spreading: The bits of all the physical channels are modulated using Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK). The complex symbol is then spread using the channelization code that has been assigned to the particular channel resulting in complex-valued chips whose number depends on the spreading factor. The chips of all the channels are added and then ltered through a pulse shaping SRRC lter with roll-off factor chosen to be 0.22 as per the WCDMA specications [6]. The chip sequence, after spreading, is multiplied with a scrambling code. The scrambling sequence varies from symbol to symbol.

B. Channel Prole used The following is the channel prole that we have used in the simulations (Table 1). It is based on an example in [1]. The multipath fading channel has been normalized in such a manner that the sum of squares of the magnitude of the various taps is unity on the average. This is achieved by dividing each tap by the square root of the sum of squares of the nominal channel tap magnitudes. Note that the chip period in the WCDMA system is 260.4 nanoseconds. Delay (in nanoseconds) 0 260.4 520.8 780.3
TABLE I C HIP - SPACED C HANNEL

Gain (in dB) 0 -1.5 -3.0 -4.5

V. R ECEIVER A. Channel Estimation The received signal is correlated with a known version of the pilot channel (P-CPICH) to get the estimates of the channel. A chunk of the pilot channel of length equal to 5120 chips is used to do the correlation. The chunk is chosen such that its center point corresponds to the time instant at which the channel impulse response has to be found. Exact knowledge of the channel tap delays is assumed. Now the pilot chunk is positioned at these delays and the correlation with the received signal is computed at these delays. Thus, the channel coefcients are found. The estimates of the channel taps are divided by the norm of the pilot chunk used for the correlation in order to normalize them. It is assumed that the channel remains constant for half a slot (1280 chips). At the Doppler frequency that has been used in our simulation, this is a reasonable assumption. After half a slot, the channel estimates are updated. For this, a new pilot chunk is selected from the known pilot signal, with its center point at the new time instant corresponding to the next half-slot. The correlation is then performed as described in the previous paragraph. B. Finger Placement The location of ngers need not coincide with the actual channel taps in the case of GRAKE receiver. However, there is no closed form expression to nd out exactly where to place them. It has been observed that the performance of the GRAKE is very sensitive to the nger locations. The methods suggested in [1] involve a brute force search among all possible potential combinations of nger delays in order to nd the one which gives maximum SNR. However, this method has a very high complexity. The method used in our simulation is described here. Symmetrical nger placement algorithm [2]: First

of all, GRAKE ngers are placed at the actual channel tap locations. The algorithm

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tries to cancel the interference on a channel tap by placing extra GRAKE ngers in symmetrical places around that path. This is done on the channel taps in decreasing order of their energy. It is ensured that none of the new ngers is too close to already existing ngers, so that the diversity is utilized best. The total number of GRAKE ngers is limited to twice the number of RAKE ngers as it is found that using more ngers doesnt enhance the performance further signicantly [1]. This is a sub-optimal algorithm but is found to work well. For each nger, the received signal is tapped at the correct position corresponding to the nger delay. This segment of the signal is passed through a receive lter which is matched to the SRRC lter used in the transmitter. The output of the lter is then downsampled to one sample per chip. We assume that the ideal sampling point is known. The estimated chip sequence is then subject to descrambling and despreading and then maximal ratio combining is performed. Subsequently, Viterbi decoding is performed for decoding the convolutional coding. This is done blockwise. The block is tested using the CRC. If the block fails the CRC test, a block error is recorded. In this manner the block error rate (BLER) can be found. The throughput is then computed for the given BLER value using the following formula. Throughput = (1 BLER) 100% VI. R ESULTS Channel prole : Chip-spaced channel Test case : 144 kbps test case Finger placement strategy : Symmetrical nger placement For the throughput simulations, the same simulation model is used except that channel coding blocks are included in the model. Rate 1/3 convolutional coding is performed followed by puncturing as described in Section IV-A.3. (9)

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Fig. 2.

RAKE vs GRAKE: Raw Bit Error Rate

The rst plot (Figure 2) shows the raw BER between the point after the channel coding and before the decoding. The second plot (Figure 3) compares the informationbit error rate. In this plot, the SNR values correspond to the SNR per information bit with rate R = 2904/8464 coding. This is related to the actual SNR per channel bit in the following manner. SNR per information bit = SNR per channel bit k n (10)

where k/n is the effective rate of the code after puncturing. In this simulation, this corresponds to a 4.646 dB difference between the SNR per channel bit and the SNR per information bit. The third plot (Figure 4), gives the comparison of the throughput obtained by using the RAKE and the GRAKE. This gure shows that the RAKE reaches an error oor due to which, the throughput cannot go higher than about 88% even for

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Fig. 3.

RAKE vs GRAKE: Information Bit Error Rate

high SNR. However, the GRAKE enhances the throughput at low SNR values and is able to reach close to full throughput at high SNR values. VII. C ONCLUSIONS We have demonstrated that the generalized RAKE receiver gives a signicant performance gain over the RAKE receiver in terms of raw bit-error rate, information bit-error rate as well as throughput of the system. For an information bit-error rate of 1%, the RAKE requires 8 dB SNR per bit, whereas the GRAKE gives 1% error rate at 6 dB itself. Thus there is a gain of 2 dB. This gain translates into a lower block error rate for the GRAKE case. In turn, there is an enhancement of throughput. For a throughput of 80 %, the GRAKE gives a gain of about 5.5 dB. Moreover, the throughput of RAKE saturates at about 88% whereas the GRAKE gives a throughput

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Fig. 4.

Throughput of the system

of almost 100 % for high SNR. This is because, even when the white noise is almost absent, the RAKE is till affected by interference and therefore, the RAKE performance reaches an error oor. This effect can be seen from the raw-bit-error rate plot of the 144 kbps test case plots. At the same time, it is to be noted that the performance gains are sensitive to the accuracy of channel estimation as well as the nger placement strategy used. Future work can include a detailed study of these effects. Further investigation is necessary on what kind of nger placement strategies work best and whether there is a simple way to nd the optimal location of the ngers. These aspects are critical in order to obtain the promised enhancement in performance of the GRAKE over the coventional RAKE receiver.

VIII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank Dr. Gregory Bottomley of Ericsson Research, USA, for useful discussions related to this work. R EFERENCES
[1] Bottomley, G.E.; Ottosson, T., Wang, Y.-P.E. A generalized RAKE receiver for interference suppression, IEEE J. Selected Areas Comm. 18, 8 (August 2000), 1536-1545. [2] Kutz G and Amir Chass, On the Performance of a Practical Downlink CDMA Generalized RAKE Receiver, IEEE 56th Vehicular Technology Conference, VTC Fall 2002. [3] UE radio transmission and reception (FDD). 3GPP TS 25.101, V5.5.0 (2002-12). [4] Physical channels and mapping of transport channels onto physical channels (FDD). 3GPP TS 25.211, V 3.3.0 (2002-06). [5] Multiplexing and channel coding (FDD). 3GPP TS 25.212, V3.3.0 (2002-06). [6] Spreading and modulation (FDD). 3GPP TS 25.213, V3.3.0 (2002-06). [7] S. M. Kay, Fundamentals of statistical signal processing. Volume 2: detection theory, Prentice Hall, 1998. [8] Jay Kumar Sundararajan, Throughput Enhancement in WCDMA using The Generalized Rake Receiver, B.Tech. project thesis, IIT Madras, 2003.

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