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Abstract—This paper investigates the combination of beam- considered across the subcarriers, there is no guarantee that the
forming and channel state information (CSI) smoothing for beamformer will be smooth since the optimum beamforming
OFDM. While both can offer significant performance gains, care solution is not unique. In this paper we will investigate the
must be taken when using both of them at the same time. Two
different sets of beamforming weights can produce the same use of orthogonal iterations [4] to compute the beamforming
beamforming gains but be unsuitable for CSI smoothing due to weights, which not only results in a smooth beamformer but
sudden changes in the frequency domain. By using orthogonal also low complexity due to its incremental approach. This
iterations to compute the beamforming weights, it is shown technique is an improvement over the smooth beamformer in
that a smooth beamformer is produced which is suitable for [3], which, in addition to its inferior performance, is in practice
CSI smoothing at the receiver. An additional benefit of this
technique is that the beamforming weights are easy to compute limited to a two-antenna system. In short, this paper offers two
by exploiting the frequency correlation of the channel. The insights to beamforming with receiver CSI smoothing:
performance is evaluated for an OFDM system based on the • It is not necessary to compute the exact eigenmodes to
IEEE 802.11n draft standard for which the gains are quantified. get the most out of beamforming. It is a flat optimum, so
We also present results obtained from a hardware test bed, which
verify the performance of the proposed smooth beamforming if the beamformer is near enough to the optimal solution,
technique. essentially all the benefits from the beamforming can be
had.
Index Terms—Beamforming, channel estimation, OFDM,
• This observation can be used to efficiently compute the
MIMO, SVD, eigenvectors.
eigenmodes using orthogonal iterations, since it will be
shown that only one iteration is sufficient. This also
I. I NTRODUCTION ensures a smooth beamformer, facilitating CSI smoothing
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1134 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO. 3, MARCH 2009
TABLE I
singular vectors corresponding to the J largest singular values B EAMFORMING WEIGHT COMPUTATION USING ORTHOGONAL ITERATIONS
of Hk and they span the dominant subspace. Hence the task
of the beamformer is to compute the right singular vectors 0 = IM ×J
1) Initialise V
of the channel. In this paper, we propose to compute them 2) for k = 1 : K
3) Ak = HH k Hk
incrementally, from the first subcarrier to the last. Due to the 4) Vk = V k−1
frequency correlation, the singular vectors change gradually 5) for i = 1 : Nit
across frequency so we are essentially faced with a subspace 6) B = Ak V k
7) "Skinny" QR decomposition B = V k Rk with V
k ∈ CM ×J
tracking problem [5], which appears in applications such as (orthonormal columns) and Rk ∈ CJ ×J (upper triangular)
adaptive antenna array processing [6]. Note that we do not 8) end
consider power or bit loading as that does not affect the 9) If required, compute squared singular values as
2 = diag (R ) , 1 ≤ j ≤ J
σk,j
calculation of beamforming weights or CSI smoothing. 10) end
k
C. CSI smoothing
We assume that the data packet contains a time-multiplexed [4]. The orthogonal iteration algorithm is similar to the method
preamble from which the MIMO channel is estimated, al- of QR-iterations but it only computes the dominant subspace
though it is also possible to use scattered pilots embedded [4].
in the data packet. The least squares (LS) estimate is obtained We can now devise two variants of the SVD calculation:
on a per-tone basis by simply dividing the received value (i) compute it from "scratch" by starting from the identity
by the pilot value; however, it is possible to improve this matrix, Q(0) = IM×J ; (ii) start with the matrix computed on
initial estimate by exploiting the frequency correlation of the previous subcarrier. We call the former non-incremental
the channel. Hence we apply an FIR filter to smooth the and the latter incremental computation. Since the channels on
channel and use the 2P + 1 nearest subcarriers, which means two consecutive subcarriers are likely to be highly correlated,
P subcarriers on each side. At the band edges and around it can be expected that the incremental approach would
the DC subcarrier, the nearest active subcarriers are used. A be advantageous. The complete algorithm for incrementally
Wiener filter is designed to minimise
the mean-squared error computing beamforming weights is summarised in Table I. For
2
the non-incremental approach, line four would be changed to
(MSE) of the channel estimate, E Hk − Hk , and can k = IM×J . It should be noted that we constrain the diagonal
V
be computed from the frequency correlation of the channel elements of Rk in the QR-decomposition to be real and
and the noise variance. The filter only acts in the frequency positive in order to maintain smoothness between subcarriers.
domain, hence it is applied on a per-antenna basis. Since the
channel frequency correlation is not known, we use the generic IV. C ONVERGENCE A NALYSIS
design described in [7]. It should be pointed out that different
filters could be used for the different streams since they exhibit As long as two sets of beamforming weights span the same
different frequency correlation as noted in [3]; however, we subspace, they will have the same effect on the beamforming,
use the same filters in this paper and leave the filter design i.e., the same performance. Hence the convergence of the
for future studies. orthogonal iterations can be analysed by studying the distance
The beamforming will make the frequency correlation of between the actual and estimated dominant subspaces. If X
the beamformed channel different from the original channel. and Y are matrices with orthonormal columns, the distance
There is also a risk that beamforming will introduce "dis- between the subspaces they span can be defined as [4]
continuities" in the channel; the singular value decomposition
d (X, Y) XXH − YY H (5)
(SVD) is not unique since it may produce two sets of singular 2
vectors that span the same space but are different. Hence where 0 ≤ d (X, Y) ≤ 1. From the algorithm in Table I and
it is crucial to maintain some kind of smoothness of the using the analysis of orthogonal iterations in [4, Sec. 8.2.4],
beamformers, which means coupling the beamforming weight we then have
computation on different subcarriers.
d Vk , V k−1
k ≤
λJ+1
d Vk , V λ (6)
III. B EAMFORMING W EIGHT C OMPUTATION 2 J
1 − d Vk , Vk−1
The right singular vectors of H are the same as the
eigenvectors of A = HH H and eigenvectors of Hermitian where λj is the jth largest eigenvalue of Ak , i.e., λJ is the
matrices can be found by using orthogonal iterations [4] from smallest eigenvalue of the dominant subspace and λJ+1 is the
an initial matrix Q(0) ∈ CM×J with orthonormal columns and largest eigenvalue of the complementary subspace. If Ak =
performing the iterations Ak−1 + Ek , the perturbation analysis of eigenvectors [8] says
B(i) = AQ(i−1) , i = 1, 2, · · · (3) that
Ek Vk−1 F
B(i) = Q(i) R(i) : QR decomposition (4) d (Vk , Vk−1 ) ≤ . (7)
λJ − λJ+1
It can be shown that R(i) converges to a diagonal matrix Combined with the triangle equality
containing the eigenvalues of A and that Q(i) converges to an
k−1 ≤ d (Vk, Vk−1 ) + d Vk−1, V
d Vk, V k−1 (8)
orthonormal basis for the dominant subspace of dimension J
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO. 3, MARCH 2009 1135
1
d(V ,V ) = 0.05
k−1 k−1
0.2
0.9 d(Vk−1,Vk−1) = 0.1
d(V ,V ) = 0.2 0.18
k−1 k−1
0.8
0.16
M aximum λJ +1 /λJ
Subspace distance
0.7 0.14
0.12
0.6
0.1
0.5
0.08
0.4 0.06
0.04
0.3
0.02
0.2 0
0 0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.1 0 5 10 15 20
Ek Vk−1 F /λJ Subcarrier index
Fig. 1. The maximum eigenvalue ratio that will ensure a reduction in Fig. 2. Convergence of the orthogonal iterations (N = M = 3, J = 2,
subspace distance as a function of the perturbation of the channel matrix. AR(1)-process with correlation coefficient 0.99).
we then have correlation coefficient 0.99. The convergence rate is high and
Ek Vk−1 F
k−1
+ d Vk−1, V we will show in the next section that the error floor does not
λJ −λJ+1 λJ +1
k ≤
d Vk , V . degrade the BER performance noticeably. Although not shown
2 λJ
Ek Vk−1 F k−1 here, the convergence of the singular values follow a similar
1− λJ −λJ+1
+ d Vk−1, V
pattern and are virtually indistinguishable from the actual ones
(9) after only a few subcarriers.
To ensure that the distance
between
the actual
and estimated
subspaces is reduced, d Vk, V k < d Vk−1, V k−1 , we
need V. S IMULATION R ESULTS
Ek Vk−1 F k−1
λJ+1
+ d Vk−1, V Our simulations are based on the IEEE 802.11n system
λJ 1− λ λJ+1
J draft [9] and we consider the 20 MHz bandwidth mode with
2 λJ K = 64 subcarriers, a cyclic prefix of 16 symbols, 100
1 − Ek Vk−1 F + d V
λ k−1, Vk−1 J+1
byte packets and a preamble for channel estimation. All the
λJ 1− λJ
impairments such as frequency offset, phase noise and non-
< k−1 .
d Vk−1, V (10) linear PAs, as defined in [10], are applied and an MMSE
decoder is used at the receiver. Cyclic delay diversity (CDD)
From (6), it is clear that the subspacedistance at subcarrier is used but it is important to note that it must be removed
k depends on the starting point, i.e., d Vk, V k−1 , and the before CSI smoothing is applied, otherwise it will not work.
Feedback CSI is provided to the transmitter with the same
convergence rate λJ+1 /λJ < 1. Hence given the previous SNR as the forward link, the channel coefficients are quantised
subspace distance d Vk−1, V k−1 and the magnitude of the
with 6 bits per real and imaginary part and the feedback
perturbation Ek Vk−1 F /λJ , from (10) we can compute the delay is 5 ms. Simulations not shown here indicated that a
maximum eigenvalue ratio that will ensure that the subspace 2P + 1 = 7-tap CSI smoothing filter was a good trade-off
distance is reduced. In Figure 1, this is plotted against the between performance and complexity, and was hence used
perturbation for some initial distance values. As can be seen, for the simulations. The filter was designed as described in
the larger the perturbation is, the smaller the eigenvalue ratio Section II-C, assuming a uniform power-delay profile equal
must be to ensure a distance reduction. This is natural since to the cyclic prefix (16 symbols) and an SNR of 30 dB; this
the eigenvalue ratio determines how quickly the orthogonal resulted in the coefficients
iterations converge and hence a smaller ratio can allow for a
larger perturbation.
Similarly
the larger the previous subspace wk = {0.03 + 0.05j, 0.01 − 0.01j, 0.23 − 0.21j, 0.46,
distance, d Vk−1, Vk−1 , the larger the eigenvalue ratio can 0.23 + 0.21j, 0.01 + 0.01j, 0.03 − 0.05j} . (11)
be since it is easier to reduce the distance in this case.
It should be noted that the above analysis only shows As the most challenging case is a high data rate in a frequency-
when a subspace distance reduction is guaranteed. Viewing selective channel (which can make CSI smoothing difficult),
the channel as a stochastic process across the subcarriers, we use 64QAM modulation and a rate 2/3 convolutional code
the subspace distance might actually increase occasionally in channel model D unless otherwise noted. The IEEE 802.11n
due to a large change between subcarriers but on average it channel models cover six fundamental cases, ranging from
will decrease until it reaches an equilibrium. In Figure 2 the model A (frequency-flat) to model F (150 ns RMS delay
average subspace distance is shown for an AR(1)-process with spread) with different spatial correlations [11].
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1136 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO. 3, MARCH 2009
0
10 3
Singular value 1
Singular value 2
2.5
Magnitude
PER
1.5
−2 0.5
10
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 0
10 20 30 40 50 60
Number of iterations Subcarrier index
Fig. 3. PER as a function of the iterations in the orthogonal iterations Fig. 4. Singular values of a channel realisation as a function of frequency.
algorithm (SNR = 20 dB).
A. Computer simulations seeking, and that the singular values are plotted merely as a
First we will investigate the impact of the incremental representation of these subspaces. Requiring the beamformer
computation and the number of orthogonal iterations, Nit , per to have maximum smoothness means that tracking of a par-
subcarrier. In Figure 3, the packet-error rate (PER) is shown ticular subspace, which initially was the dominant one, may
as a function of Nit when using M = N = 3 antennas become a weaker one, i.e., corresponding to a smaller singular
and J = 2 data streams. With per-tone channel estimation, value. This corresponds to the solid line in Figure 4. This is
more iterations do not improve performance except for the not a problem when J = M , i.e., the number of streams equals
non-incremental approach (initialise the eigenvectors as the the number of transmit antennas, since all singular vectors are
identity matrix instead as the eigenvectors on the previous used for beamforming. On the other hand, if J < M the J
subcarrier), where one iteration is not enough. When CSI dominant singular vectors should be chosen, which means that
smoothing is used, the non-incremental orthogonal iterations the tracking method in [3] might pick weaker singular vectors
produce a beamformer that is not smooth and its performance and not achieve the full beamforming gains. This problem
is actually worse than using per-tone channel estimation. With can be solved by sorting the calculated singular values and
incremental computation, however, there is a gain, although it always choosing the singular vectors corresponding to the
decreases with the number of iterations until it also performs largest ones. This corresponds to switching from the solid line
worse than per-tone estimation. This might seem counterintu- to the dashed line in Figure 4 when they cross over. However
itive but from the results for the per-tone channel estimation this might mean that some smoothness is lost since there is
it is obvious that one iteration is enough to produce a good an abrupt change from one subspace to another. Hence there
beamformer. With more iterations, the beamforming weights is a trade-off between beamforming and CSI smoothing.
will differ more between two neighbouring subcarriers and Our proposed algorithm solves the smooth beamforming
hence CSI smoothing will suffer. Therefore the best choice is problem by being a dominant subspace tracker. By using
to use only one iteration, which also keeps the complexity to a only one iteration per subcarrier, smoothness is ensured (no
minimum. For the rest of the paper we will use one iteration sudden changes can appear). Although it doesn’t compute
per subcarrier, Nit = 1, when computing the beamforming the actual dominant subspace on each subcarrier due to the
weights. That makes the complexity of this algorithm very frequency-selective channel, it is close enough to get all the
low since it only involves two matrix multiplications (HH k Hk beamforming gains. Hence we can achieve the full benefits
and Ak V k−1 ) and a QR decomposition per subcarrier. of beamforming and CSI smoothing while also offering a
The orthogonal iteration method is now compared to the simple implementation. In Figure 5, all the above schemes are
technique in [3]. That algorithm is based on finding the unitary compared for a system with M = N = 2 antennas and J = 1
rotation between the two SVDs on consecutive subcarriers. stream: (i) orthogonal iterations, as proposed in this paper;
By parameterising a 2 × 2 unitary matrix with one variable (ii) the method in [3] with smoothness requirements; (iii) the
(other degrees of freedom can be ignored due to the nature of method in [3] with sorting of the singular values. When per-
the problem), the rotations are found by solving a non-linear tone channel estimation is used, schemes (i) and (iii) perform
equation. As there are two solutions, the one maintaining the identically. The performance of scheme (ii) is degraded since
most smoothness is chosen. However, as the singular values of the smallest singular vector is sometimes used. With CSI
the channel matrix vary across the frequency band, they might smoothing at the receiver, the performance of schemes (i) and
change order. This is illustrated in Figure 4 where two singular (iii) improve although the orthogonal iterations outperform
values are plotted as a function of frequency. Note that they the method in [3] with sorting. This is due to producing a
each correspond to a singular vector, which is what we are smoother beamformed channel. It should also be pointed out
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO. 3, MARCH 2009 1137
0 0
10 10
Orthogonal iterations, per−tone est.
[3] with smoothness, per−tone est.
[3] with sorting, per−tone est.
Orthogonal iterations, CSI smoothing
[3] with smoothness, CSI smoothing
[3] with sorting, CSI smoothing
Full SVD, known channel
Packet−error rate
Packet−error rate
−1
10 −1
10
No BF, per−tone
BF, per−tone
No BF, CSI smoothing
−2 BF, CSI smoothing
10
8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 −2
SNR [dB] 10
10 12 14 16 18 20
SNR [dB]
Fig. 5. PER for three different beamforming computation methods and two
channel estimation techniques (M = N = 2 antennas and J = 1 data Fig. 7. PER on the hardware platform with beamforming and CSI smoothing
stream. turned on and off.
0
10
ensuring that received signals were subject to all practical
OFDM impairments. Within the receiver, frame detection,
synchronisation and automatic gain control (AGC) were im-
plemented on the FPGA with all further processing being
conducted in software on a host PC. This allows for the rapid
Packet−error rate
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1138 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 8, NO. 3, MARCH 2009
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