Non-Coherent Detection in Multi-Antenna Fading Channels

Lizhong Zheng

Department of EECS University of California Berkeley

Channel Model
Independent gain between each pair of transmit and receive antennas. All the parameters evolving with time. And could be modeled as invariant in a coherence time Tc, which decides the speed that the channel is evolving.
N Tran. antennas N Recv. antennas

All the transmit antennas can cooperate with each other. So we can do coding over different antennas. The receiver decode with the output from all receive antennas. Typical channel: Rayleigh Fading.

Training and Feedback

Training Sequence data

Tc

In slow fading channels (indoor systems), we can send a training sequence at the beginning of each coherence time, so the receiver can estimate the channel parameters, and then communicate with these estimations. If coherence time Tc >> N, we can send long enough training such that receiver know the channel accurately. With the assumption of perfect knowledge of the channel, the capacity is known to increase linearly with N, for fixed total power.

Fast fading channels

The time needed to estimate channel parameter is proportional to N, so we can not increase the number of antennas arbitrarily. When N is close to Tc, the perfect knowledge assumption fails. For outdoor system (mobile) or high carrier frequency , the channel is changing fast, Tc is small, there is not enough time to do a good estimation of the channel. We use information theory to study the optimal way to code over coherence times, add in structure in the code words so we can estimate the channel and communicate simultaneously.
Code Word
Data 0101

Code Word coding Code Word

Tc

Transmit Antennas

Single Antenna Channel Capacity

In narrow band applications, we can assume high SNR. For the case with 1 transmit antenna and 1 receive antenna, with high SNR, we can compute the capacity, which is achieved by sending the signal vectors of dimension Tc to be uniform in all directions, but with constant norm. Information theory suggest to encode all information in the direction of code words, which is not affected by fading. Constellation No information is conveyed by the Map norm of code word, so we need not to estimate the channel gain at all. And only do a non-coherent detection is optimal. All constellation points are in the surface of sphere of dimension Tc.

Non-Coherent Detection
With information theory, we maximize the mutual information without any assumption of knowledge of the channel parameters, or training structure. Instead, we optimize over all input distributions, so that is a more general result than channel estimating and tracking. In fading channel, the signal is only affected by the fadings in some directions, in other directions, there is only additive noise. So to receive information in these directions, we do not need to estimate the channel parameters. On the other directions, we can also compute the optimal input distribution and design optimal receiver. The decomposition of the signal space decompose the communication in fading channel into two different channels, and to use each channel, we can achieve the capacity with no prior knowledge of the channel parameters.

Multi-Antenna Capacity
For N transmit antenna, N receive antenna system, the total number of degree of freedom is N Tc, and the number of degree of freedom with no fading is (Tc N ) N , so the capacity increases with SNR as function .
(Tc N ) N log( SNR)

If Tc is close to N, the capacity no longer increase linearly with N. For any given Tc, we can always compute the optimal number of antennas used to maximize capacity in high SNR, which is approximately Tc/2. In real system, where the SNR is finite, the information conveyed by norms is not negligible, so we want to compute the optimal input norm distribution.

Achieve the Capacity

To achieve the capacity we can modulate the two parts of information (subspace and norm) independently.
Source 1

subspace

Channel

Subspace detection

Source 2

Norm

Norm detection

The subspace detection is given by : X = arg min [min( SVD( X T Y )]

X

Conclusions and Open Issues

For multiple antenna fading system with high SNR, we have found the way to compute channel capacity, without any assumption of knowledge on the channel parameters, or any training structure. The limit of increasing the number of antenna with given coherence time Tc is around Tc/2. The optimal input distribution of norms, or a suboptimal distribution that achieves the coherent part of capacity with small difference. The connection between existing channel estimation and tracking algorithms and the optimal input distribution in Shannon capacity sense. Need simulation to see how well is the high SNR approximation works in real system, and comparison of performance to the training scheme.