JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1, DECEMBER 2009, ISSN 2151-9617

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Sequence-conditioned channel estimation in ultra wideband time-selective fading channels
without receiver CSI
Nihar Panda1, Debabala Swain2, Siba P. Panigrahi3, S.M.Rout1, M.Singh1, P.K.Nayak1
1
KIST, 2CIT, 3KEC, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India

Abstract
This communication is an interim result while studying the behavior of estimation
techniques for ultra wideband channels. Initial results are encouraging and this work
shows a considerable increase in Bandwidth with expense of affordable loss in BER.
Key words: Channel estimation, Ultra wideband communication, fading channels
Introduction
The capacity of the multipath channel in the limit of infinite bandwidth is identical to the
capacity of the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, C  2 P /  2 log e , where
P is the average received power and σ2 is the received noise double-sided spectral
density.
When using spreading modulations, Médard and Gallager [1] show that direct-sequence
spread-spectrum signals, when transmitted continuously (no duty cycle) over fading
channels that have a very large number of channel paths, approach zero data rate in the
limit of infinite bandwidth. Telatar and Tse [2] show that over multipath channels, the
data rate in the limit of infinite bandwidth is inversely proportional to the number of
channel paths.
The rest part of paper is organized as the channel model is discussed in sec II, following
estimation strategy of this work symbol-by symbol soft decision metric (SbSSDM) is
generated and assumptions for this work is discussed in sec III. The work is simulated
and discussed in sec IV. The paper is concluded in sec V.
II. CHANNEL MODEL
The natural model for an ultra wide band channel is real, because there is no obvious
‘carrier frequency’ that defines the phase of complex quantities. The channel is composed
of Ĺ paths:
~
~ L
~
Y t    Am t X t   m t   Z t .......(1)
m 1
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Where each path has an amplitude Ãm(t) and a delay τm(t), X(t) is the transmitted signal,
Y(t) the received signal, and Z(t) is noise. In block-fading model: the channel remains
constant over coherence periods that last Tc, and changes independently between
coherence periods. The paths’ delays τm is in the range [0,Td], where Td is the delay
spread. The channel is assumed under spread, so the delay spread is much smaller than
the coherence period, and signal spillover from one coherence period to the next is
negligible.
Given the system’s finite bandwidth, the received signal is approximated within each
coherence period by
L
Y t    At X t  Dt / W   Z t ......(2)
t 1

The received signal Y t  is discretized by sampling at a rate 1/W. considering a double-

sided noise density σ2/2 the discretized and normalized signal is given by

L   2 PT
Yi  Gl XiDt  Zi  ,...i  0,...[TcW] 1....(3) with   2 c  LSNR..andK c  TcW
 t1  Kc  
The noise {Zi} is standard white Gaussian noise, The normalization requires that the path
gains Gt and the transmitted signal {Xi}are scaled so that the average power of ΣGtXi-Dt
equals θ .
The systems considered in this paper do not use channel information at the transmitter,
and the receiver knows the deterministic features of the channel, namely, the coherence
time, the delay spread, and the number of paths. The receiver sometimes has additional
knowledge, about the random features of the channel, in particular the path delays. The
assumptions on receiver knowledge of the channel are explicitly stated throughout the
paper.
Assumptions:
(1) {Gt} are independent and zero mean
(2) The assumptions we make of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) paths
that compose the channel ensure that the channel uncertainty is linearly dependent on
the number of paths.
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(3) Signal used is DSSS where, each transmitted symbol contains a random series of
i.i.d. Gaussian values with zero mean, and an average energy constraint* is
satisfied.(fig1)

III. SYMBOL-BY-SYMBOL SOFT-DECISION METRIC (SbSSDM)

When turbo-like codes are transmitted over time-selective fading channels
without receiver CSI, iterative decoding and estimation has to be performed on the factor
graph describing the code- and channel-imposed constraints. It is a well-known fact that
if the corresponding factor graph does not contain cycles, by applying an appropriate
message-passing algorithm (e.g., the sum-product or min-sum), optimal (in some well-
defined sense) detection is achieved after a finite number of iterations. The factor graph
of an LDPC code (or any linear code for that matter) operating over a time-selective
fading channel, modeled as a block-independent fading channel with block size ‘N’ is
illustrated in Fig. 2. It is assumed that the observation model for each block of length ‘N’
is exactly the one in (1), with Pk(.) denoting the message from the kth symbol to the
channel-constraint node, as shown in Fig. 2. The message qi(.) from the channel-
constraint node to the ith symbol implied by the sum-product algorithm can be expressed
as
qi a   CNq(c;0; Iq)CNzi ;aHck; N0
Cq
N

 p s CNz ;s Hc ; N dc......(4a)

k1,ki sk A
k k k k k 0

 N 
   pk sk  CNq(c;0; Iq)CNnz;SHc; N0IN dc...(4b)
s:si a k1,ki 
Cq

 N 
 
   pk sk CNn z;SHHHSH  N0IN ..........
..(4c)
s:si a k1,ki 

Where [x]k denotes the kth element of vector x. The exact evaluation of the
expression in (4a) has linear complexity in ‘N’ but, because of, the required integration
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has infinite complexity. If one performs the integration explicitly, as in (4c), however, the
complexity is exponential in ‘N’. A similar observation can be made for the message
implied by the min-sum algorithm. If we choose to average over the fading parameter
explicitly, and maximize over the unwanted part of the data sequence, the resulting
message is of the form
 N 

qi a  max  pk sk CNn z; SHHH S H  N0I N ....(5a)
s:si a

k 1,k i 

maxCNn z; SHH S  N0I N ps
H H 1
 ..................5b
s:si a pi a

or in logarithmic domain
qi (a )  SbS i (a)  ln pi (a )....(6)
With the symbol-by-symbol metric SbSi(.) defined as
SbSi (a )  max ln Ec p zs; c  ps .....(7 a )
s:s i  a

 max ln  p  zs  p ( s ) ............................(7b)

s:si  a

 max L( s )...........................................(7c)
s:si  a

Where L(s) is the metric defined as:


Ls   ln ps   z H SHH H S H  N 0 I N 
1
z
It should be noted that the above-defined metrics are optimal in the sense that, when the
max-sum algorithm is run over the entire graph shown in Fig. 2 and no cycles are present;
the MAPSqD estimate is guaranteed to be found after finite iterations.
Alternative form of the metric
SbS i a   max max Ls,  ............(8)
s:si  a 

SbS i a   max max Ls,  

s:si  a 

 max max  L j s j ,  ........................(9a )

N

 s:si  a
j 1

Also,  
max L j s j ,  ...(9b)
N
 max  Li a,    

 j 1, j 1
sj

 
 L sˆ  ,  ........(9c)
N
 max  Li a,    j j

 j 1, j 1 
As the parameter λ takes values in the parameter space A=Cq, the sequences considered
in the above metric can be collected in a sufficient set
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Ti (a)  sˆ1,...,sˆi1(),a, sˆi1(),...sˆN ()A....(10)

It is evident that there is a simple way to construct Ti(a) from T: each sequence from T is
copied to Ti((a) by first changing the ith symbol to a . The expression for SbSi(a)can now
be rewritten as
SbS i a   max max Ls,  ............(11)
sTi  a  

The above equations indicate that to compute SbSi(a) , ‫׀‬T‫ ׀‬sequences must be examined.
Therefore, to generate the values SbSi(a) for all i ε{1,….N} and aε A, ‫׀‬T‫(׀‬N(M-1)+1)
sequences must be tested. Since it was shown earlier that ‫׀‬T‫ ׀‬is O(N2q) is , and that it can
be constructed with complexity O(N2q), it follows that the complexity of producing
SbSSDMs is O(N2q+1).
IV. Simulation results & discussion:
Simulations were carried on using MATLAB using DSSS signals and SbSSDM
metric as explained above. The result was compared with existing result for a linear
coded signal. Channel capacity is increased to ultra bandwidth region at expenses of a
higher bit error rate (BER) of around 8% at low values of SNR as shown in fig.3.
V. Conclusion:
As compared to existing detection scheme, along with and in absence of data
detection, advantage of this work is that more number of channel paths or channel
capacity in terms of bandwidth increased to ultra bandwidth range. However, initial
results shows, a compromise has to be made for higher BER. More extensive paper is
under preparation.
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Fig.3. BER Vs SNR(dB) for with linear & spreading codes(spectrum) under similar environment.

Reference
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IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 840–852, Apr. 2002.
[2] ˙I. E. Telatar and D. N. C. Tse, “Capacity and mutual information of wideband
multipath fading channels,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 1384–1400,
Jul. 2000.
[3] R. S. Kennedy, Fading Dispersive Communication Channels. New York: Wiley ,
1969.
[4] T. Kailath, “Correlation detection of signals perturbed by a random channel,” IRE
Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. IT-6, no. 3, pp. 361–366, Jun. 1960.
[5] R. Palanki, “On the capacity achieving distributions of some fading channels,” in
Proc. Allerton Conf. communication, Control, and Comuting, Monticello, IL, 2002.