Multi-user detection in OFDM space time block code

for high rate uplink application

M.J. Syed, V. Meghdadi, G. Ferr,
J.P. Cances, J.M. Dumas
University of Limoges, ENSIL-GESTE
Parc ESTER B.P 6804, 87068 LIMOGES Cedex (France)
{syed, meghdadi, ferre, cances, dumas}@ensil.unilim.fr
G.R.M. Khani
Laboratoire des Signaux et Systmes (L2S),Suplec
3 rue Joliot-Curie, 91190 Gif-sur-Yvette (France)
gholam-reza.mohammad-khani@lss.supelec.fr


Abstract -In this paper, we propose a multi-user detector for
space-time uplink transmission in multi-carrier CDMA systems
using a new combination of STBC, OFDM and CDMA spreading.
To achieve high rate, CDMA spreading codes are shared between
a few users and we use linear STBC decoding to further separate
users. The OFDM codewords are built from chips issued from
different symbols. The STBC encoder and decoder are placed at
the last stage of our multi-user transmitter and receiver
respectively. We show that the system is particularly easy to
implement when exploiting the space diversity after CDMA
detection. Besides, the performance is comparable to the case of a
single user STBC system. The proposed system allows very high
rate multi-user system compared to conventional CDMA system
or combined array-processing technique previously proposed.
Keywords-STBC, uplink multi-user detection, multi-carrier,
OFDM, CDMA, linear decoding, high rate, overloaded systems
I. INTRODUCTION
Space-time coding (STC) techniques, including space-time
trellis coding (STTC) and space-time block coding (STBC)
integrate the techniques of antenna array spatial diversity and
channel coding and can provide significant capacity gains in
wireless channels. A lot of papers ([1]-[3]) have investigated
their use particularly for the case of wireless flat-fading
channels. However, many wireless channels are frequency-
selective in nature, for which the STC design problem becomes
a complicated issue. On the other hand, the orthogonal
frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) technique transforms
a frequency-selective fading channel into parallel correlated
flat-fading channels. Stamoulis et al. have shown that a multi
user STBC system under a flat fading environment is feasible
and that a simple linear processing technique can be used as
long as the receiver has at least the same number of antennas as
the number of users [4]. This can be generalized to a frequency
selective channel with aid of OFDM system or with frequency
equalizer techniques (FDE). It has been shown that the
decoding problem for a STBC system over a frequency
selective channel can be uncoupled into K individual multiple
users STBC systems over a fading channel with K the number
tones in the FDE [5]. The inconvenience of the systems in
[4][5] is the number of antenna constraint at the receiver. In
practice, the number of antenna deployable over a site is limited
due to space constraint. Furthermore, in order to have
uncorrelated channel between the antennas, a minimum
separation distance between antennas must be respected.
Besides, the increase of the number of receive antenna to cope
with more users is without any diversity gain.
It is therefore natural to consider another multiple access
technique such as CDMA. Liu et al. have proposed a
generalized complex STBC design with precoders particularly
for MC-CDMA uplink application [6]. The main drawback of
this system is that a set of different subcarriers is allocated to
each user. Another STC multi-carrier CDMA system has been
proposed by Yang et al with different spreading signature for
each transmit antenna [8]. Baum et al proposed a downlink
cyclic prefixed single carrier CDMA in [9] to make use of the
efficient (FDE) and MMSE techniques. Vook et al extended
this idea with antenna diversity [10]. Other STBC - CDMA
based system with MMSE filtering techniques have been
proposed by Auffray et al. [11]
We propose an uplink multi carrier CDMA based multi-user
system with antenna diversity over frequency selective channel,
particularly suitable for high rate application, combining linear
decoding technique and CDMA. Our proposed system can be
viewed as an extension of MC-DS-CDMA techniques with
antenna diversity and OFDM cyclic prefixing. The system is an
adaptation from the multi-user space frequency uplink system
proposed in [12]. We show that our transmitter and receiver
architecture is particularly easy to implement. High rate system
can be achieved with high number of users since our
architecture allows spreading code sharing between users. The
number of receiver antenna needed is at least the same as the
maximum number of users sharing the same spreading code.
This can drastically reduce the spreading code length and the
number of required receiver antenna. Our proposed system is a
flexible tradeoff between CDMA based systems [6]-[11] and
array processing techniques [4][5]. Compared to [6][7], each
user in our system occupies all subcarriers available to transmit.
The first stage of the proposed receiver is to uncoupled the
users via the spreading code and the second stage separate the
users using linear processing. The complexity of the decoder is
low and highly parallelizable. In quasi-synchronous system as
in micro cell environment, we show that with orthogonal
spreading code such as Walsh Code, we can achieve the same
performance as the single user STBC system over fading
channel.
This paper is organized as follows. In section II, we
describe the transceiver structure for non-overloaded system.
IEEE Communications Society / WCNC 2005 438 0-7803-8966-2/05/$20.00 2005 IEEE
Section III is devoted to the case of overloaded systems.
Computer simulations are exhibited in section IV whereas the
main conclusions are given in section V.
II. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
In this section, we will first present a simple system where
different spreading codes are allocated to each user.
A. Transmitter
We limit our scope to two transmit antennas system as
generalization to N antennas is straightforward. The transmitter
model for any user u is represented in Figure 1. The system
functions in blocks of 2K symbols. K denotes the number of
tones in the OFDM modulation. Let
1 2
u u,q u,q
,
(
=

b b b the 2K
symbols to be sent by user u with
( ) ( )
{ } 1 2
1
p p p
u,q u,q u,q
p ,
b b K

(
=

b . The index
p
q represents
invariantly symbols for any timeslot within a STBC codeword.
The 2K symbols are rearranged to form two vectors of K
symbols using the serial to parallel converter (S/P). On each
branch of S/P output, the 2 symbols are spreaded using a code
of size .

Figure 1. Transmitter Model
If we note
( )
p p
u,q u,q K K
diag )

= B b and
( ) ( ) 1
u u u
c c ( =

c the spreading code of user u, the
spreading operation can be modeled by a matrix multiplication

p p
u,q u,q u
K
= s B C (1)
with
u
C is K matrix, with each line of the matrix
contains the spreading code of the user u. Each line in
p
u,q
s
represents the sequence to be sent over a distinct sub carrier and
each column indicates the time of transmission. IDFT is then
applied to each column of each matrix
p
u,q
s , to form OFDM
codewords of K tones

p p
*
u,q u,q
= X Q s (2)
Q is a KK DFT matrix with
( )
2
1
j mn K
m,n
Q / K e

= .
{ }
1 2
u,q u,q
, X X represent a STBC codeword. Our STBC
construction differs slightly from the symbol based STBC
system proposed in [1]-[3] or vector based STBC system as in
[5]. We send two matrices at each STBC time slot, and the
matrices are specially formed so that the symbols obtained after
multi-user interference (MUI) elimination are orthogonal. In
our two transmit antennas configuration, we will send
successively
{ }
1 2
u,q u,q
, X X over the first antenna and
{ }
2 1
u,q u,q
, X X

over the second antenna, with

p p
*
u,q u,q
= X J X

(3)
and
0 1
1 0
(
(
=
(

J is a skew eye matrix representing the
OFDM codeword time reversal. Note that the OFDM codeword
time reversal is not the same as spreaded sequence time reversal
as the OFDM codeword time reversal is done immediately after
the parallel/serial converter in the OFDM modulator. Figure 2.
and TABLE I. resume the transmit operation.
We consider that appropriate OFDM cyclic prefix is used to
avoid inter-block interferences. We suppose that the OFDM sub
carriers are sufficiently spaced and there is no inter carrier
interference. A fully orthogonal real valued spreading code
such as Walsh Code is used.

Figure 2. Data transmission over time and antenna (CP denotes cyclic prefix)
B. Receiver
The receiver structure is represented in Figure 3. In an
uplink configuration, each user will have its own frequency
selective channel between each transmit and each receive
antenna. Considering the channel response of u
th
user between
his j
th
transmit antenna and i
th
receiver antenna, the channel is
modeled as
( ) ( )
1
0
L
u u
j ,i j ,i
l
l
h l
f

=
| |
=
|

\ .

(4)
with 1
m
L f = + (

,
m
is the maximum delay in any user
frequency selective channel, ( )
u
j ,i
l is the l
th
complex value tap
gain, and f the whole bandwidth of the OFDM system.
All user signals emitted from all transmit antennas,
propagate through their respective frequency selective channel
and reach the i
th
receiver antenna. These superposed signals are
affected with an additive complex Gaussian noise with variance
2
n
per dimension. It is assumed that all channels are not
IEEE Communications Society / WCNC 2005 439 0-7803-8966-2/05/$20.00 2005 IEEE
correlated to each other, and the channel is invariant during our
STBC codeword.
TABLE I. TRANSMIT OPERATION OVER SPACE AND TIME

Antenna 1 Antenna 2
2q
1
u,q
X
2
u,q
X

t
i
m
e

2q+1
2
u,q
X
1
u,q
X

Figure 3. Receiver Model
Denote N
u
the number of user in the system. Considering
the system quasi-synchronous as in micro cell environment, the
received signal for each OFDM codeword can be represented as
( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
1 1 2 1
1 2
1
u
N
u u
i ,q ,i u,q ,i u,q q
u
h h
=
= +

y X X N

(5)
( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
2 2 1 2
1 2
1
u
N
u u
i ,q ,i u,q ,i u,q q
u
h h
=
= + +

y X X N

(6)
where ( )
p
u,q
X represent the
th
OFDM codeword from
the matrix
p
u,q
X (or the
th
column from the same matrix) and
denotes the convolution operator.
Following [5], the above equations can be written in matrix
form as
( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
1 1 2 1
1 2
1
u
N
u u
i ,q ,i u,q ,i u,q q
u=
= +

y H X H X N

(7)
( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
2 2 1 2
1 2
1
u
N
u u
i ,q ,i u,q ,i u,q q
u=
= + +

y H X H X N

(8)
With a proper cyclic extensions and sample timing, and
tolerable leakage,
u
j ,i
H is a KK circulant matrix, and from a
basic result from the matrix theory,
u
j ,i
H can be eigenvalue
decomposed as

u * u
j ,i j ,i
= H Q Q (9)
with
( )
u u
j ,i j ,i
diag = Q and ( ) ( ) 1
T
u u u
j ,i j ,i j ,i
L
(
=

.
After DFT operation related to OFDM modulation, we have
p p
i ,q i,q
= r Q y , and

1 1 2 1
1 2
1
u
N
u u *
i ,q ,i u,q ,i u,q q
u=
= +

r s s n (10)

2 2 1 2
1 2
1
u
N
u u *
i ,q ,i u,q ,i u,q q
u=
= + +

r s s n (11)
At this stage, each line in the
p
i,q
r K matrix represents
the superposition of all spread user symbols sent over a distinct
subcarrier during a STBC codeword. Due to our code
repartition system, and analog to a single carrier CDMA
system, we can retrieve any noise added user symbol by
multiplying the received vector by a user code. We can
therefore discriminate all user symbols by multiplying vectors
received at each sub carrier by C. C is defined by

1
u
T
T T
N
(
=

C c c (12)
Hence

1 1
1 2 2
1 2
1
u
T
i ,q i ,q
N
u T u * T T
,i u,q ,i u,q q
u=

=
= +

z r C
s C s C n C
(13)

2 2
2 1 2
1 2
1
u
T
i ,q i ,q
N
u T u * T T
,i u,q ,i u,q q
u=

=
= + +

z r C
s C s C n C
(14)
In synchronous system, all users are fully separated and
each user symbols will be located in a distinct column of
p
i ,q
z .
We can safely rewrite 13 and 14 as
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1 1 2 1
1 2
u u u * u
i ,q ,i u,q ,i u,q q
= + z B B n (15)

2 2 1 2
1 2
u u u * u
i ,q ,i u,q ,i u,q q
= + + z B B n (16)
p
u
i ,q
z a diagonal matrix obtained from the corresponding
column of
p
i ,q
z for the user u. Since
p
u
i ,q
z and
u
j ,i
are
diagonal matrices, we may write, for individual sub carrier k,
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
1 1 2 1
1 2
u u u * u
i ,q ,i u,q ,i u,q q
z k k b k k b k n k = + (17)
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
2 2 1 2
1 2
u u u * u
i ,q ,i u,q ,i u,q q
z k k b k k b k n k = + + (18)
Equations 17 and 18 are presented in identical form of a
single user STBC over a fading channel first proposed by
Alamouti [3]. Hence, we only need to know the channel state
information (CSI) of the desired user to proceed the decoding.
The equations 17 and 18 show that the proposed receiver
uncouples the users entirely and we obtain the single user
STBC form for each user after multi-user detection. Any
techniques applicable to the Alamouti scheme can be applied
without major modification.
III. OVERLOADED SYSTEM
In todays multimedia scenario, a high rate transmission is
very appreciable. While the combined array processing
technique can provide a high rate system [4][5], the number of
receiver antenna deployable is physically limited over an area
thus limiting the number of possible users sharing the system
simultaneously. Furthermore, as stated previously, each
receiver antenna set up for each user does not provide any
diversity gain. Traditional CDMA with antenna diversity does
provide diversity gain with transmission rate tradeoffs. For very
high number of users in a system, a long spreading code is
needed and this makes the system unattractive for high rate
application.
We propose in this section a code sharing CDMA system
exploiting the space diversity to deal with the high rate needed
in multimedia application while obtaining a good diversity gain.
The transmission rate is increased by reducing the CDMA code
length with one or more users sharing the same code. This is a
compromise between the number of receiver antenna to be
deployed and the code length. We may obtain more diversity
gain by increasing the number of receiver antenna while
maintaining constant the spreading code length and the number
of users in the system. In parallel, the system can cope with
more users while increasing either the number of receive
antennas or the code length. If the Walsh Codes are shortened
by half, the rate doubles with slightly less diversity gain. These
flexibilities can be obtained without any major structure
changes at the transmitter. Dynamic configuration of the
transmitter can be envisaged. This configuration is made
possible with the basic transceiver proposed in Section II. The
new receiver structure is presented in Figure 4.
We impose the following constraint on the system: there is
no more than
u
N

users using the same code. The same

transmit and channel model is used for each user. At the
receiver, we have the same equation as10 and 11. When the
received signal is applied with the code matrix, we have

1 1 2 1
1 2
1
u
N
u T u * T T
i ,q ,i u,q ,i u,q q
u=
= +

z s C s C n C (19)

2 2 1 2
1 2
1
u
N
u T u * T T
i ,q ,i u,q ,i u,q q
u=
= + +

z s C s C n C (20)
The difference with the previous system is that, for each
branch, there is still at most N
r
users signal superposed after the
match filter. Knowing that the STBC symbols are orthogonal
for each user after dispreading, we can use therefore the linear
STBC multi-user decoder proposed in [4] condition that we
have at least N
r
receive antennas and that over each antenna, the
dispreading has been applied.

Figure 4. Overloaded receiver model
Let
u

be the set of users sharing the spreading code C

.
u
N

is defined by
{ }
( ) ( )
1
u
u
, ,
N max size

with denotes
the number of spreading code available. Since we have
uncoupled the users having different code in
p
i ,q
z , we will
concentrate on one spreading code to uncouple the rest of the
users.
As illustrated in Figure 4. , the system has N
r
receive
antennas with
r u
N N

. We have

1 2 1 1
1 2
u
u u * u
,i u,q ,i u,q q i ,q
u

= +

z B B n (21)

2 1 2 2
1 2
u
u u * u
,i u,q ,i u,q q i ,q
u

= + +

z B B n (22)
IEEE Communications Society / WCNC 2005 441 0-7803-8966-2/05/$20.00 2005 IEEE
2 1 2
2 1
2 1
2 1 2 1
2 2 2 1
u
u
T u u
u, q ,i ,i
i i K
u* u* T*
K
,i ,i u, q
u
K K K
u T
i u i
u

( (

= ( + (
( (

= +

b
z n
b
b n
(23)
Similar to [5], our system can be reduced to K individual
problem, and we can write

( )
( ) ( )
( ) ( )
( )
( )
( )
( ) ( ) ( )
1
2
1 2
2 1
u
T
u
T u u
u,q ,i ,i
i i
u* u* T*
,i ,i u,q
u
u T
i u i
u
b k k k
k k
k k b k
k k n k

( (

( = + (
( (

= +

z n
b
(24)
with ( )
u
j ,i
k representing the k
th
element of the diagonal
matrix
u
j ,i
. Considering input from all antennas, we obtain

( )
( )
( )
( )
( ) ( )
( ) ( )
( )
( )
( )
( )
( ) ( ) ( )
1
2 1
1
1 1 1 1
1
2 2 2 1 2 1
r
r
u
u
r
u r r
r u u r
T
T T
k N
N
N T
T
N
N
N N N
N N N N
k , , k
k k k k
k k
k k
k k k

(
=
(

(
(
(
(
(
(
= + (
(
(
(
(
(
( (


= +
Z z z
b n
b n

b n

(25)
Supposing that the channel state information is perfectly
known, the above equation can be solved iteratively. To
simplify our demonstration, we consider here
r u
N N

= .
Let Q, the number of user left to be detected at current
iteration. Initially, let
Q
k

= Y Z , ( )
Q
k = and ( )
Q
k = b .
We partition

1 1
1 1 1
1 1
1 1 1
2 2
1 1
2 2
Q Q
Q
Q Q
Q Q Q
Q Q
Q Q
Q Q Q
Q Q

(

(
( (
= =
( (


(

(

A B

(26)
and we look for a filter
Q
W such as

1 2
3 4
Q Q Q
Q Q
Q Q Q
( (
= =
( (
( (

W W P 0
W
W W 0 V
(27)
Arbitrary, we impose
1
Q
W and
4
Q
W equal to identity matrix
( ) 2 1 Q
I and
2
I respectively. We obtain, after straightforward
calculation

1
2
1
3
1
1
Q
Q
Q
Q

=
=
=
=
W B
W A
P A B
V - A B
(28)
Finally, we uncouple one user from the other (Q-1) users
when
Q
W is applied to
Q
Y .

1 1
2 1
Q Q Q
Q Q
Q Q
Q
Q

( ( (
= = +
( ( (

Y P 0
W Y
b
Y 0 V
(29)
we obtain

( )
1 Q Q
Q Q Q Q

= + = + Y V b N - A B b N (30)
The equation 30 can be used to decode a STBC codeword
based on conventional Alamouti scheme. We set
1 Q Q

= Y Y
and
Q Q
= P and iterates from 26 until Q=1. We restart all
over again for each subcarrier. Note that the decoding for each
subcarrier can be done in parallel.
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
We first examine the system performance without any
overloading. We consider a multi-user system using Walsh-
Hadamard spreading code in a multi-path Rayleigh channel
environment. We voluntarily limit the spreading code length to
8. We simulate 8 users communicating quasi synchronously to
the receiver. Each user has two transmit antennas. In Figure 5. ,
we present the performance for some of the users over various
multipath Rayleigh channel configuration when one receive
antenna is used. The channels between users and between
transmit antennas are independent and uncorrelated to each
other. Perfect channel state information is available at the
receiver and we idealize that we are able to obtain perfect time -
frequency synchronization. We also consider that each OFDM
codeword is sufficiently prefixed. As we can see in Figure 5. ,
the system performance is comparable to the single user case of
Alamouti scheme in a fading channel. 128 OFDM tones are
used. The obtained results have been compared with the upper
bounds derived in [14] to check the compliance of the results.
It has been shown that the linear decoding technique
performs similarly to single user STBC case [4]. It is therefore
interesting to compare our overloaded architecture performance
to the results obtained in [4].
From the previous simulation configuration, we add an
additional receive antenna and we double the number of users
IEEE Communications Society / WCNC 2005 442 0-7803-8966-2/05/$20.00 2005 IEEE
in the overall system to 16. Therefore, 2 users are sharing the
same spreading code at any time. The performances of two
random users out of 16 are shown in Figure 6. We observed
that the performance of our overloaded architecture is similar to
the single user case as is [4]. This is not surprising since our
basic multi user architecture uncouples all users to individual
problems without any significant performances losses. The
obtained results validate the framework of the system.

Figure 5. BER of multi-user user multi-carrier STBC over various Rayleigh
multi-path channels (Walsh Code)

Figure 6. Performance of the overloaded system with two users sharing a
spreading code and with receive antenna equal to two
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we proposed an overloaded multi-user CDMA
system with space-time diversity for high rate uplink
application. We have shown that with a combination of classic
CDMA detection and linear decoding, the rate can be easily
increased while keeping the number of required receiver
antenna to perform linear decoding very low. This is made
possible by our basic multi-user STBC-CDMA design that
uncouples each user equivalently to single user STBC case. The
reduced number of required antenna is appreciated when space
is a practical problem. The overall system is with low
complexity and can be easily paralleled. Computer simulations
have shown that, high rate application is possible and show
promising results without significant performances losses.
There is almost no limitation to make the rate even higher and
render this design appealing for multimedia wireless systems.
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th
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