Performance Analysis of Ultra-Wideband MIMO-

OFDM System Based on Time Reversal

Yu Yang, Bing-Zhong Wang, Shuai Ding
Institute of Applied Physics
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
610054, Chengdu, China

Abstract-Time reversal (TR) technique has been announced A. Time Reversal Equivalent Channel
as a promising solution for future wireless communication owing The TR technique requires two steps. First the channel
to its competency to provide lower computational complexity and
higher throughput for the communication system. TR can exhibit impulse response (CIR) is assessed and preserved at the
remarkable performance especially in ultra-wideband (UWB) transmitter. In the second stage, the output of the transmitter is
system. In this letter, we theoretically analysis the performance the convolution of the desired transmitted symbol and the TR
of a MIMO-OFDM system combined with the TR technology pre-filter. Fig. 1 shows the data flow of the entire system. For
based on the UWB channel models. The simulation results the purpose of imitating a real-time operating system, here we
demonstrate that the UWB MIMO-OFDM system achieves
better performance with TR than without TR. bring in a typical indoor office UWB channel according to the
IEEE 802.15.3a Standard [11].
I. INTRODUCTION
N Streams TR Filter M Transmitter Channel N Receiver
In a conventional MIMO system, multi-channel effect will h11* (  t ) h11 ( t ) n (t )
cause inevitable severe inter symbol interference (ISI), and s1 (t)
h12* (  t ) x1 ( t ) h21 ( t ) y1 ( t ) detect s1 (t)
then receivers need complicated channel estimation and
h1N * ( t ) hM 1 (t )
equalization algorithms [1]. Through the application of TR
h21* (  t ) h12 ( t ) n (t )
technology which is used as a pre-filter at the end of the y 2 ( t ) detect s 2 (t)
s 2 (t) h22* (  t ) x 2 (t) h22 (t )
transmitter, the UWB system will achieve lower receiver
complexity and higher power efficiency [2] -[3]. Actually, TR h2 N* (t ) hM 2 (t )
hM 1* (t ) h1 N ( t )
signal processing makes use of the abundant multipath around n (t )
hM 2* (t ) h2 N (t )
the natural space and utilizes the channel itself as a spatial and s N (t) xM (t ) y N (t ) detect s N ( t )
temporal matched filter to effectively reduce the channel delay hMN * (t ) hMN (t )
spread, and then suppress the inter-symbol interference (ISI) Figure 1. Data flow of UWB MIMO-OFDM-TR system.
[4] -[5]. Due to the slowly changing property of a virtual indoor
Because of the high spatial resolution property [6], only the office environment, in a short time when the data are
intended location could receive the transmitted signal, which transmitted, the channel is regarded as unchangeable. The nth
provides sufficient secrecy for the data transmission with independent baseband signal stream after OFDM modulation
spatial selectivity [7]. In [8], the length of the cyclic prefix can be expressed as follows,
(CP) of OFDM-TR system has been investigated, and it is § t 1·
1 K
shorter than in a traditional OFDM system without TR. sn (t ) ¦U n,i rect ¨ T  2 ¸e j 2S fit
K i1
(1)
Several researchers have verified the feasibility of UWB © s ¹
MIMO-TR with simple pulse position modulation on the Where K denotes the number of subcarriers of OFDM, and
FPGA [9]. In UWB systems, OFDM presents a very good Un,i is the OFDM symbol of the ith sub-carrier which belongs
technical solution for the diverse set of high-performance to the nth data flow. Ts is the symbol cycle, fi =(i-1)Ts is the
short-range application that is eagerly anticipated for mobile frequency of the ith subcarrier, and the rectangle function is
applications [10]. Therefore, the specific transmission and ­ 0 if t ! 0.5
receiving scheme of the MIMO-OFDM-TR in UWB system rect (t) ® (2)
has been analyzed in this paper. ¯1 if t  0.5
The detailed contributions in this letter are summarized as The MhN MIMO channel matrix H consists of the channel
follows. We proposed a MIMO-OFDM-TR design in UWB responses between the transmitter and receiver antennas and
communication system, and proved the system has better can be expressed as follows
performance with TR than without TR. Also, an exact ª h11 1N º
h 1N
expression of the system capacity is derived. Herein, we H « » (3)
assume the synchronization is perfect and the CP length is « »
longer the channel delay spread. «¬ hM 1 hMN »¼

II. SYSTEM MODEL

‹,(((
 The transmitted symbol is separated into N sub-streams, at the same time, spatial focusing will suppress inter-stream
then the transmitted signal from the mth antenna is interference.
N In this paper, we simulate a UWB MIMO-OFDM-TR
xm (t ) ¦ s (t ) … h
n 1
n mn

( t ) (4) system with two TX antennas and two RX antennas. Then the
number of channels in this simulation will be four. Owing to
Where hmn (t) is an element of matrix H, which can be
the space limitations, in Fig. 2 we only present the response of
expressed as a tap delay line model
L h11 and h21 . Fig. 3 shows the autocorrelation of h11 ,
hmn (t ) ¦ Dmn ,lG {t  W l } (5) autocorrelation of h21 , cross-correlation of h11 and h21 , and the
l 1
sum of autocorrelation h11 and h21 .
ሺ∙ሻ* denotes the conjugate operator and ٔ indicates the
convolution operation. L is the biggest channel delay length. 24 Autocorrelation of h11 24 Autocorrelation of h21
αmn,l is the delay amplitude of each path, τl is the delay time 20 20

of each path. 16 16
12 12
Then, the received signal of the assigned antenna ni is 8 8
M 4 4
yni (t ) ¦ P0 xm (t ) … hmni (t )  n(t ) 0 0

Amplitude
m 1 0 1000 2000 0 1000 2000
M N (a) (b)

¦¦
m 1 n 1

P0 sn (t ) …hmn ( t ) … hmni (t )  n(t ) 24
20
Cross-correlation of h11 and h21 24
20
h11+h21-sum of Autocorrelation

M
(6) 16 16

¦
m 1
P0 sni (t ) … R auto
(hmni ) 12
8
12
8
4 4
M N
¦ ¦ 0 0
P0 sn (t ) … hmn ( t ) … hmni (t )  n(t ) 0 1000 2000 0 1000 2000
m 1 n 1, n z ni (d)
(c) Sampling Point
Here, Rauto ሺ∙ሻ indicates the autocorrelation of the signal, and Figure 3. Time reversal equivalent channel. (a) Autocorrelation of h11; (b)
n(t) means the additive Gaussian white noise vector whose autocorrelation of h21; (c) cross-correlation of h11 and h21; and (d) the sum of
autocorrelation of h11 and h21 .
variance is σ2n . The corresponding output SINR (signal to
interference plus noise ratio) γ for the system at the nominated B. UWB MIMO-OFDM-TR System
receiver ni in the presence of the multiple interferers is In a conventional MIMO-OFDM system, inevitable ISI
M 2 with the addition of complicated channel estimation and
P0 ¦ R auto (hmni )
Jn i 1
(7) equalization will make the realization more difficult.
M M
i
P0 ¦ ¦ hmn* ( t ) … hmni (t )  V n 2
2
In our simulation, the channel coding is linear interleaver,
m 1 n 1, n z ni and the transmitter employs equal gain allocation (EGA) and
the receiver adopts equal gain combining (EGC) scheme.
h11 Generally speaking, the sum of all autocorrelation is much
0.6 bigger than the sum of cross-correlation on the condition that
all channels are statistically uncorrelated. Due to the spike-like
0.0
impulse of the TR equivalent channel, after the signal passed
Normalized Amplitude

-0.6
through the equivalent channel, at the receiver only a
threshold decision is needed to detect the signal. This
h21 advantage can be used to simplify the receiver design and
0.6 vastly reduce the terminal devices cost. The spatial focusing
property is extremely vital for TR since only the intended
0.0 location can receive the signal and the received signals of
other user are overwhelmed by noise.
-0.6

0 700 1400
III. SYSTEM CAPACITY ANALYSIS
Sampling Point
In this MIMO-OFDM-TR system, if we consider the TR
Figure 2 Channel Response of h11 and h21.
equivalent channel, then according to the Shannon’s Theorem,
From (6), we can see that at the intended receiver all we can get [12]
autocorrelation products add up coherently at the focal time.
C log2 (det[ I  U H H H ]) bits/ s/ Hz (8)
The corresponding equivalent channel is symmetric and with
very high power at the focusing time and a very low power out Where ρ indicates the signal to noise ratio (SNR) and I
of the focusing time. In other words, the resulting equivalent denotes the unit matrix. H is the channel matrix, C is the
channel is compressed in time, which will reduce the ISI, and channel capacity, (∙)H indicates the conjugate and transpose of
a matrix.
 As for the TR equivalent channel, that is G=HH H, by using
the singular value decomposition, we can get H=UΣVH , where
U and V are unitary matrixes, Σ is a diagonal matrix whose
elements are the singular values λi . G=HH H=VΣH ΣVH which
means that the equivalent channel are the squared singular
values of the propagation matrix. Then we substitute G into
Equation (9) and it comes into
C log2 (det[ I  UG H G]) log2 (det[ I  UV 6H 66H 6V H ]) (9)
Then Equation (10) can be expressed as
¦
min( M , N )
C i 1
log2 (1  Oi 4 )
This formula implies that each significant eigenvalue of the
TR operator adds an independent propagation “channel”
which contributes to increase the capacity.
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
In this section, we conduct a series simulation to evaluate
the performance of MIMO-OFDM-TR system. Specifically,
the results demonstrate the excellent performance of MIMO-
OFDM-TR system.
0
10
-1
10
10
-2
Bit Error Rate
-3
10
10
-4
-5
10
10
-6
1 2 3 4
SNR(dB)
Figure 4. BER figure. SISO-OFDM-AWGN means a SISO-OFDM system
adds an AWGN channel. SISO-OFDM-TR means a SISO-OFDM system
adds an TR equivalent channel with AWGN. MISO-OFDM-TR indicates two
TX antennas and one RX antenna with TR and AWGN channel. MIMO-
OFDM-TR means the average BER of two RX antennas. MIMO-OFDM two
TX antennas and two RX antennas with the modeled channel, and the BER is
the average value of two RX antennas.
Figure 5. Simulation results of image transmission. (a) Initial picture before
transmission (b) Received picture after transmission.
Fig. 4 shows the bit error rate (BER) performance of several
systems with or without TR. With TR technique, the ISI of the
system can be ideally mitigated and the BER performance
comparison mentioned above are somewhat biased in favor of
the TR. Furthermore, through the comparative result, we have
highlighted the advantage of TR concerning its simplicity in
the deployment without compromising the system
performance.
Fig. 5 shows the picture transmission simulation result, we
first extract the three original colors of the picture and then
transmit them through two TX antennas, finally detect them
independently and comprise them into a colorful picture.
In the simulation here, it adopts linear interleaver, the
symbol modulation method is 16 QAM. The FFT transform
point on every transmitting antenna is 256, including 200 data
(10) points and 56 pilot points. Data can be separated into 8 frames,
the 1-5 and 21-22 points are the pilot symbol, the 6-20 and 23-
32 points are the data symbols. Timing synchronization and
the detection of data frame is completed by the pilot symbols.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (Grant No. 61331007, No. 6136116608,
and No. 61401065) and the Specialized Research Fund for
Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (Grant No.
20120185130001).
SISO-OFDM-AWGN
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