CHAPTER

1 Introduction

1.1 Book objective

Wireless communication is one of the most vibrant areas in the commu-

nication field today. While it has been a topic of study since the 1960s,
the past decade has seen a surge of research activities in the area. This is
due to a confluence of several factors. First, there has been an explosive
increase in demand for tetherless connectivity, driven so far mainly by cellu-
lar telephony but expected to be soon eclipsed by wireless data applications.
Second, the dramatic progress in VLSI technology has enabled small-area
and low-power implementation of sophisticated signal processing algorithms
and coding techniques. Third, the success of second-generation (2G) digital
wireless standards, in particular, the IS-95 Code Division Multiple Access
(CDMA) standard, provides a concrete demonstration that good ideas from
communication theory can have a significant impact in practice. The research
Copyright © 2005. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

thrust in the past decade has led to a much richer set of perspectives and tools
on how to communicate over wireless channels, and the picture is still very
much evolving.
There are two fundamental aspects of wireless communication that make
the problem challenging and interesting. These aspects are by and large not
as significant in wireline communication. First is the phenomenon of fading:
the time variation of the channel strengths due to the small-scale effect of
multipath fading, as well as larger-scale effects such as path loss via dis-
tance attenuation and shadowing by obstacles. Second, unlike in the wired
world where each transmitter–receiver pair can often be thought of as an
isolated point-to-point link, wireless users communicate over the air and there
is significant interference between them. The interference can be between
transmitters communicating with a common receiver (e.g., uplink of a cellu-
lar system), between signals from a single transmitter to multiple receivers
(e.g., downlink of a cellular system), or between different transmitter–receiver
pairs (e.g., interference between users in different cells). How to deal with fad-
ing and with interference is central to the design of wireless communication
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 2 Introduction

systems and will be the central theme of this book. Although this book takes
a physical-layer perspective, it will be seen that in fact the management of
fading and interference has ramifications across multiple layers.
Traditionally the design of wireless systems has focused on increasing the
reliability of the air interface; in this context, fading and interference are
viewed as nuisances that are to be countered. Recent focus has shifted more
towards increasing the spectral efficiency; associated with this shift is a new
point of view that fading can be viewed as an opportunity to be exploited.
The main objective of the book is to provide a unified treatment of wireless
communication from both these points of view. In addition to traditional
topics such as diversity and interference averaging, a substantial portion of
the book will be devoted to more modern topics such as opportunistic and
multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication.
An important component of this book is the system view emphasis: the
successful implementation of a theoretical concept or a technique requires an
understanding of how it interacts with the wireless system as a whole. Unlike
the derivation of a concept or a technique, this system view is less malleable
to mathematical formulations and is primarily acquired through experience
with designing actual wireless systems. We try to help the reader develop
some of this intuition by giving numerous examples of how the concepts are
applied in actual wireless systems. Five examples of wireless systems are
used. The next section gives some sense of the scope of the wireless systems
considered in this book.

1.2 Wireless systems

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Wireless communication, despite the hype of the popular press, is a field

that has been around for over a hundred years, starting around 1897 with
Marconi’s successful demonstrations of wireless telegraphy. By 1901, radio
reception across the Atlantic Ocean had been established; thus, rapid progress
in technology has also been around for quite a while. In the intervening
hundred years, many types of wireless systems have flourished, and often
later disappeared. For example, television transmission, in its early days, was
broadcast by wireless radio transmitters, which are increasingly being replaced
by cable transmission. Similarly, the point-to-point microwave circuits that
formed the backbone of the telephone network are being replaced by optical
fiber. In the first example, wireless technology became outdated when a wired
distribution network was installed; in the second, a new wired technology
(optical fiber) replaced the older technology. The opposite type of example is
occurring today in telephony, where wireless (cellular) technology is partially
replacing the use of the wired telephone network (particularly in parts of
the world where the wired network is not well developed). The point of
these examples is that there are many situations in which there is a choice
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 3 1.2 Wireless systems

between wireless and wire technologies, and the choice often changes when
new technologies become available.
In this book, we will concentrate on cellular networks, both because they are
of great current interest and also because the features of many other wireless
systems can be easily understood as special cases or simple generalizations
of the features of cellular networks. A cellular network consists of a large
number of wireless subscribers who have cellular telephones (users), that can
be used in cars, in buildings, on the street, or almost anywhere. There are
also a number of fixed base-stations, arranged to provide coverage of the
subscribers.
The area covered by a base-station, i.e., the area from which incoming
calls reach that base-station, is called a cell. One often pictures a cell as
a hexagonal region with the base-station in the middle. One then pictures
a city or region as being broken up into a hexagonal lattice of cells (see
Figure 1.1a). In reality, the base-stations are placed somewhat irregularly,
depending on the location of places such as building tops or hill tops that
have good communication coverage and that can be leased or bought (see
Figure 1.1b). Similarly, mobile users connected to a base-station are chosen
by good communication paths rather than geographic distance.
When a user makes a call, it is connected to the base-station to which it
appears to have the best path (often but not always the closest base-station).
The base-stations in a given area are then connected to a mobile telephone
switching office (MTSO, also called a mobile switching center MSC) by high-
speed wire connections or microwave links. The MTSO is connected to the
public wired telephone network. Thus an incoming call from a mobile user
is first connected to a base-station and from there to the MTSO and then to
the wired network. From there the call goes to its destination, which might
Copyright © 2005. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

be an ordinary wire line telephone, or might be another mobile subscriber.

Thus, we see that a cellular network is not an independent network, but rather
an appendage to the wired network. The MTSO also plays a major role in
coordinating which base-station will handle a call to or from a user and when
to handoff a user from one base-station to another.
When another user (either wired or wireless) places a call to a given user, the
reverse process takes place. First the MTSO for the called subscriber is found,

Figure 1.1 Cells and

base-stations for a cellular
network. (a) An oversimplified
view in which each cell is
hexagonal. (b) A more realistic
case where base-stations are
irregularly placed and cell
phones choose the best
base-station. (a) (b)

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 4 Introduction

then the closest base-station is found, and finally the call is set up through
the MTSO and the base-station. The wireless link from a base-station to the
mobile users is interchangeably called the downlink or the forward channel,
and the link from the users to a base-station is called the uplink or a reverse
channel. There are usually many users connected to a single base-station,
and thus, for the downlink channel, the base-station must multiplex together
the signals to the various connected users and then broadcast one waveform
from which each user can extract its own signal. For the uplink channel, each
user connected to a given base-station transmits its own waveform, and the
base-station receives the sum of the waveforms from the various users plus
noise. The base-station must then separate out the signals from each user and
forward these signals to the MTSO.
Older cellular systems, such as the AMPS (advanced mobile phone service)
system developed in the USA in the eighties, are analog. That is, a voice
waveform is modulated on a carrier and transmitted without being trans-
formed into a digital stream. Different users in the same cell are assigned
different modulation frequencies, and adjacent cells use different sets of fre-
quencies. Cells sufficiently far away from each other can reuse the same set
of frequencies with little danger of interference.
Second-generation cellular systems are digital. One is the GSM (global
system for mobile communication) system, which was standardized in Europe
but now used worldwide, another is the TDMA (time-division multiple access)
standard developed in the USA (IS-136), and a third is CDMA (code division
multiple access) (IS-95). Since these cellular systems, and their standards,
were originally developed for telephony, the current data rates and delays
in cellular systems are essentially determined by voice requirements. Third-
generation cellular systems are designed to handle data and/or voice. While
Copyright © 2005. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

some of the third-generation systems are essentially evolution of second-

generation voice systems, others are designed from scratch to cater for the
specific characteristics of data. In addition to a requirement for higher rates,
data applications have two features that distinguish them from voice:

• Many data applications are extremely bursty; users may remain inactive
for long periods of time but have very high demands for short periods of
time. Voice applications, in contrast, have a fixed-rate demand over long
periods of time.
• Voice has a relatively tight latency requirement of the order of 100 ms.
Data applications have a wide range of latency requirements; real-time
applications, such as gaming, may have even tighter delay requirements
than voice, while many others, such as http file transfers, have a much
laxer requirement.

In the book we will see the impact of these features on the appropriate
choice of communication techniques.
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 5 1.3 Book outline

As mentioned above, there are many kinds of wireless systems other than
cellular. First there are the broadcast systems such as AM radio, FM radio,
TV and paging systems. All of these are similar to the downlink part of
cellular networks, although the data rates, the sizes of the areas covered by
each broadcasting node and the frequency ranges are very different. Next,
there are wireless LANs (local area networks). These are designed for much
higher data rates than cellular systems, but otherwise are similar to a single
cell of a cellular system. These are designed to connect laptops and other
portable devices in the local area network within an office building or similar
environment. There is little mobility expected in such systems and their major
function is to allow portability. The major standards for wireless LANs are
the IEEE 802.11 family. There are smaller-scale standards like Bluetooth or
a more recent one based on ultra-wideband (UWB) communication whose
purpose is to reduce cabling in an office and simplify transfers between
office and hand-held devices. Finally, there is another type of LAN called
an ad hoc network. Here, instead of a central node (base-station) through
which all traffic flows, the nodes are all alike. The network organizes itself
into links between various pairs of nodes and develops routing tables using
these links. Here the network layer issues of routing, dissemination of control
information, etc. are important concerns, although problems of relaying and
distributed cooperation between nodes can be tackled from the physical-layer
as well and are active areas of current research.

1.3 Book outline

The central object of interest is the wireless fading channel. Chapter 2 intro-
Copyright © 2005. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

duces the multipath fading channel model that we use for the rest of the book.
Starting from a continuous-time passband channel, we derive a discrete-time
complex baseband model more suitable for analysis and design. Key physical
parameters such as coherence time, coherence bandwidth, Doppler spread
and delay spread are explained and several statistical models for multipath
fading are surveyed. There have been many statistical models proposed in the
literature; we will be far from exhaustive here. The goal is to have a small
set of example models in our repertoire to evaluate the performance of basic
communication techniques we will study.
Chapter 3 introduces many of the issues of communicating over fading
channels in the simplest point-to-point context. As a baseline, we start by look-
ing at the problem of detection of uncoded transmission over a narrowband
fading channel. We find that the performance is very poor, much worse
than over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel with the same
average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This is due to a significant probability
that the channel is in deep fade. Various diversity techniques to mitigate
this adverse effect of fading are then studied. Diversity techniques increase
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 6 Introduction

reliability by sending the same information through multiple independently

faded paths so that the probability of successful transmission is higher. Some
of the techniques studied include:

• interleaving of coded symbols over time to obtain time diversity;

• inter-symbol equalization, multipath combining in spread-spectrum systems
and coding over sub-carriers in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) systems to obtain frequency diversity;
• use of multiple transmit and/or receive antennas, via space-time coding, to
obtain spatial diversity.

In some scenarios, there is an interesting interplay between channel uncer-

tainty and the diversity gain: as the number of diversity branches increases,
the performance of the system first improves due to the diversity gain but
then subsequently deteriorates as channel uncertainty makes it more difficult
to combine signals from the different branches.
In Chapter 4 the focus is shifted from point-to-point communication to
studying cellular systems as a whole. Multiple access and inter-cell interfer-
ence management are the key issues that come to the forefront. We explain
how existing digital wireless systems deal with these issues. The concepts
of frequency reuse and cell sectorization are discussed, and we contrast nar-
rowband systems such as GSM and IS-136, where users within the same
cell are kept orthogonal and frequency is reused only in cells far away, and
CDMA systems, such as IS-95, where the signals of users both within the
same cell and across different cells are spread across the same spectrum,
i.e., frequency reuse factor of 1. Due to the full reuse, CDMA systems have
to manage intra-cell and inter-cell interference more efficiently: in addition
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to the diversity techniques of time-interleaving, multipath combining and soft

handoff, power control and interference averaging are the key interference
management mechanisms. All the five techniques strive toward the same sys-
tem goal: to maintain the channel quality of each user, as measured by the
signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR), as constant as possible. This
chapter is concluded with the discussion of a wideband OFDM system, which
combines the advantages of both the CDMA and the narrowband systems.
Chapter 5 studies the capacity of wireless channels. This provides a higher
level view of the tradeoffs involved in the earlier chapters and also lays the
foundation for understanding the more modern developments in the subse-
quent chapters. The performance over the (non-faded) AWGN channel, as a
baseline for comparison. We introduce the concept of channel capacity as
the basic performance measure. The capacity of a channel provides the fun-
damental limit of communication achievable by any scheme. For the fading
channel, there are several capacity measures, relevant for different scenarios.
Two distinct scenarios provide particular insight: (1) the slow fading channel,
where the channel stays the same (random value) over the entire time-scale
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 7 1.3 Book outline

of communication, and (2) the fast fading channel, where the channel varies
significantly over the time-scale of communication.
In the slow fading channel, the key event of interest is outage: this is
the situation when the channel is so poor that no scheme can communicate
reliably at a certain target data rate. The largest rate of reliable communication
at a certain outage probability is called the outage capacity. In the fast fading
channel, in contrast, outage can be avoided due to the ability to average over
the time variation of the channel, and one can define a positive capacity at
which arbitrarily reliable communication is possible. Using these capacity
measures, several resources associated with a fading channel are defined:
(1) diversity; (2) number of degrees of freedom; (3) received power. These
three resources form a basis for assessing the nature of performance gain by
the various communication schemes studied in the rest of the book.
Chapters 6 to 10 cover the more recent developments in the field. In
Chapter 6 we revisit the problem of multiple access over fading channels
from a more fundamental point of view. Information theory suggests that
if both the transmitters and the receiver can track the fading channel, the
optimal strategy to maximize the total system throughput is to allow only
the user with the best channel to transmit at any time. A similar strategy is
also optimal for the downlink. Opportunistic strategies of this type yield a
system-wide multiuser diversity gain: the more users in the system, the larger
the gain, as there is more likely to be a user with a very strong channel.
To implement this concept in a real system, three important considerations
are: fairness of the resource allocation across users; delay experienced by the
individual user waiting for its channel to become good; and measurement
inaccuracy and delay in feeding back the channel state to the transmitters.
We discuss how these issues are addressed in the context of IS-865 (also
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called HDR or CDMA 2000 1× EV-DO), a third-generation wireless data

system.
A wireless system consists of multiple dimensions: time, frequency, space
and users. Opportunistic communication maximizes the spectral efficiency by
measuring when and where the channel is good and only transmits in those
degrees of freedom. In this context, channel fading is beneficial in the sense
that the fluctuation of the channel across the degrees of freedom ensures that
there will be some degrees of freedom in which the channel is very good.
This is in sharp contrast to the diversity-based approach in Chapter 3, where
channel fluctuation is always detrimental and the design goal is to average
out the fading to make the overall channel as constant as possible. Taking
this philosophy one step further, we discuss a technique, called opportunistic
beamforming, in which channel fluctuation can be induced in situations when
the natural fading has small dynamic range and/or is slow. From the cellular
system point of view, this technique also increases the fluctuations of the
interference imparted on adjacent cells, and presents an opposing philosophy
to the notion of interference averaging in CDMA systems.
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 8 Introduction

Chapters 7, 8, 9 and 10 discuss multiple input multiple output (MIMO)

communication. It has been known for a while that the uplink with multiple
receive antennas at the base-station allow several users to simultaneously
communicate to the receiver. The multiple antennas in effect increase the
number of degrees of freedom in the system and allow spatial separation of
the signals from the different users. It has recently been shown that a similar
effect occurs for point-to-point channels with multiple transmit and receive
antennas, i.e., even when the antennas of the multiple users are co-located.
This holds provided that the scattering environment is rich enough to allow
the receive antennas to separate out the signal from the different transmit
antennas, allowing the spatial multiplexing of information. This is yet another
example where channel fading is beneficial to communication. Chapter 7
studies the properties of the multipath environment that determine the amount
of spatial multiplexing possible and defines an angular domain in which such
properties are seen most explicitly. We conclude with a class of statistical
MIMO channel models, based in the angular domain, which will be used in
later chapters to analyze the performance of communication techniques.
Chapter 8 discusses the capacity and capacity-achieving transceiver archi-
tectures for MIMO channels, focusing on the fast fading scenario. It is demon-
strated that the fast fading capacity increases linearly with the minimum of
the number of transmit and receive antennas at all values of SNR. At high
SNR, the linear increase is due to the increase in degrees of freedom from
spatial multiplexing. At low SNR, the linear increase is due to a power gain
from receive beamforming. At intermediate SNR ranges, the linear increase
is due to a combination of both these gains. Next, we study the transceiver
architectures that achieve the capacity of the fast fading channel. The focus is
on the V-BLAST architecture, which multiplexes independent data streams,
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one onto each of the transmit antennas. A variety of receiver structures are
considered: these include the decorrelator and the linear minimum mean
square-error (MMSE) receiver. The performance of these receivers can be
enhanced by successively canceling the streams as they are decoded; this
is known as successive interference cancellation (SIC). It is shown that the
MMSE–SIC receiver achieves the capacity of the fast fading MIMO channel.
The V-BLAST architecture is very suboptimal for the slow fading MIMO
channel: it does not code across the transmit antennas and thus the diversity
gain is limited by that obtained with the receive antenna array. A modifi-
cation, called D-BLAST, where the data streams are interleaved across the
transmit antenna array, achieves the outage capacity of the slow fading MIMO
channel. The boost of the outage capacity of a MIMO channel as compared
to a single antenna channel is due to a combination of both diversity and
spatial multiplexing gains. In Chapter 9, we study a fundamental tradeoff
between the diversity and multiplexing gains that can be simultaneously har-
nessed over a slow fading MIMO channel. This formulation is then used as a
unified framework to assess both the diversity and multiplexing performance
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 9 1.3 Book outline

of several schemes that have appeared earlier in the book. This framework
is also used to motivate the construction of new tradeoff-optimal space-time
codes. In particular, we discuss an approach to design universal space-time
codes that are tradeoff-optimal.
Finally, Chapter 10 studies the use of multiple transmit and receive antennas
in multiuser and cellular systems; this is also called space-division multi-
ple access (SDMA). Here, in addition to providing spatial multiplexing and
diversity, multiple antennas can also be used to mitigate interference between
different users. In the uplink, interference mitigation is done at the base-
station via the SIC receiver. In the downlink, interference mitigation is also
done at the base-station and this requires precoding: we study a precoding
scheme, called Costa or dirty-paper precoding, that is the natural analog of
the SIC receiver in the uplink. This study allows us to relate the performance
of an SIC receiver in the uplink with a corresponding precoding scheme in
a reciprocal downlink. The ArrayComm system is used as an example of an
SDMA cellular system.
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