Adaptive Bit Loading for Wireless OFDM Systems

And& N o 1 1 Barreto and Simeon Furrer

IBM Zlirich Research Laboratory, S&merstr. 4, CH-8803, Rlischlikon, Switzerland e-mail: <aba,sfu>@zurich.ibm.com, Tel.: 4 1 1 7248470, Fax:+41 1 7248955
Abstruct In this paper we investigate the use of adaptive bit loading in existing OFDM-basedW-LAN standards. The performance gain is Bssessed through simulation and the use of higher-rate codes is considered t o improve the performance. Some practical aspects, such as peak-toaverage power ratio, channel estimation, signalling and spectral flatness are also addressed.

I. INTRODUCTION The growing demand for high-speed wireless communication led to the development and standardisation of next-generation Wireless Local Area Networks (W-LAN) supporting data rates of up to 54 Mbps. Both the American (IEEE802.11a [l]) and European (HIPERLAND [2]) standards are based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM),because of its robustness against intersymbol interference in multipath channels. Both standards employ Time Division Duplexing (TDD), which, due to the reciprocity of the up- and downlink channels, gives the transmitter a priori knowledge about the channel. With this knowledge, adaptive bit loading can be used to improve the performance of multicarrier systems by allocating more bits to subcarriers with higher signal-to-noise ratio. Its application to wireless OFDM systems has been investigated in several papers [3-61. In this paper we consider the application of this concept to an extension of the -802.1 l a W-LAN standard. Due to the strong similarities of their physical layer parameters, this investigation also system. We applies to a large extent to a " n - b a s e d will investigate how adaptive loading techniques can be applied to the current standards with as few modifications as possible. We will also show that for certain data rates the performance can be improved if higher coding rates are employed combined with adaptive bit loading. Furthermore some practical aspects will be investigated, such as the performance with non-ideal channel estimation, the peak-toaverage power ratio behaviour, signalling overhead and adaptive loading with a standardscornpliantflat spectrum.

number of data subcarriers

number of pilot subcarrias

48
4 64 4w

size of F F T / I m
symbol duration guardinterval channel spacing subcarrier spacing

800ns
2oMHz

II. SYSTEMDE~CRIETON IEEE802.1 l a is an OFDM-based W-LAN standard for the 5GHz frequency band. The idea behind OFDM is to split a high-rate data s t m m into several parallel streams of lower r a t e (and hence longer symbol period Ts) and transmit each of them in a different subcarrier. The subcarriers are made orthogonal by being spaced UT' apart, in which case spectral overlapping of the subchannels is allowed, maximising the spectral efficiency of the transmission. OFDM can be more a t the transmitter. One of easily implemented using an the main advantages of OFDM is that intersymbol interference can be practically eliminated by introducing a
0-7803-7244-1/01lS10.00 02001 IEEE

sampling rate

3125 kHz 2oMHz

datarate
(Mbps) 6 9 12 18

modulation coding
rate

codedbitsper
OFDMsymbol

databitsper
OFDMsymbol

BPSK BPSK
QPSK QPSK I6-QAM
16-QAM 64-QAM 64-QAM

1 R
3 1 4
1R

48 48
% % 192 192 288 288

24
36

48
72 % 144 192 216

3 1 4

24

1 R
3 1 4

3 6 48
54

2B
34

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with a higher frequency response gain, and hence a higher SNR,and noisy subchannels should carry little or no data. In this work we consider that the same coding and interleaving schemes from the standards are used also with adaptive bit loading. However the coded bits are adaptively allocated to the different subcarriers, which can employ different modulation schemes. We have chosen to implement the Fischer-Huber algorithm [7], which, considering that the overall error rate tends to be dominated by the subcarrier with highest error rate, tries to guarantee that all subcarriers have the same S N R . Considering QAM transmission and assuming that the number of bits per subcarrier per symbol Rk can assume any real value, the following solution is obtained in [7] for the optimum bit distribution, which maximises the S N R under the condition that it is constant for all subcarriers

where K is the number of subcarriers, RT the number of bits per OFDM symbol, Hk the complex channel gain at the k-th subcanier and Nk the noise variance. If Rk happens to be negative for any k, then the k-th subchannel is excluded and the algorithm is applied again over a reduced subchannel set D. This is done iteratively until all remaining channels have a positive rate. The rates obtained this way can be real-valued and must be quantised into integer rates RQk In the standards only the following modulation schemes are provided: BPSK, QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-QAM. The bit rate per subcarrier is hence confined to the set RQkE (0,1,2,4,6}.We choose then the set of quantised rates that minimises the mean square error between the optimum rate distribution RA and the quantised distribution RQk. with the constraint that RQk = R,. Due to the quantisation procedure, the S N R is no longer constant at the different subchannels, as obtained for continuous distribution of Rk A constant S N R can be however guaranteed by adapting the power of the remaining subcaniers:
P, = C 5 2 R Q k
$E

small office environment is considered [8]. This consists of 18 Rayleigh-faded taps with delay spread 6 ~ 5 0 " s . We consider data packets of 53 bytes, corresponding to an ATM cell, and we assume that the channel is constant during a packet transmission. In this section perfect channel estimation and synchronisation are also assumed. At the receiver a Viterbi decoder with soft input is considered. In Fig. 1 we compare the results obtained in an AWGN channel with the ones in a multipath channel for all supported data rates. We can see that in the AWGN channel the S N R required for a particular packet error rate (FER) increases with an increase in the data rate, which justifies the provision of different modes, with the higher-rate modes being supported only if an adequate SNR is guaranteed. We can however observe that from a performance point of view the 9 Mbps mode cannot be justified, since approximately the same PER can be achieved at the same S N R with a higher data rate (12Mbps). The results change qualitatively in a frequency selective channel. In this case the modes with higher coding rate (R=3/4), particularly the 9 and 18 Mbps modes, have a high performance penalty compared to the AWGN case, and higher data rates can be supported with the same or even with a lower SNR. This happens because the high rate codes are more severely affected if a few code bits are strongly corrupted with noise, and this is particularly the case in frequency selective channels, in which some subcaniers may be in a deep fade. Results considering the adaptive bit loading algorithm presented in Section I I I are displayed in Fig. 2. The high-rate modes with 48 and 54 Mbps are not considered here since they already employ the highest modulation level in all subcaniers. We can see that a significant performance gain can be obtained with adaptive bit loading, and that this gain is much greater in the modes that employ a higher coding rate (R=3/4),for instance up to 6dB in the case of transmission at 9Mbps. This happens because, as seen in Fig. 1, the performance loss in a frequency selective channel is higher at high coding rates. By employing adaptive loading we reduce the probability that some code bits be severely affected by fading, since noisy channels cany no data. We can also see

IHd2
where C is a power constant such that c P k = P, is
k

satisfied, with PT the total transmitted power. It should be noticed that if the noise is white, i.e., if NFN for any k, then the algorithm depends on the channel gains IHd only. This means that, if the transmitter knows the channel coefficients, the algorithm can be performed without requiring knowledge of the noise level a t the receiver.

I v .SYSTEM PERFORMANCE
The system performance was analysed through simulation. In the results shown below the ETSI channel model A for a

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that the gains become less significant with higher bit rates, since as the number of transmitted code bits increases, the flexibility of the loading algorithm decreases. Unlike the results for constant loading from Fig. 1, in which the 9 and 18Mbps modes are practically useless in a multipath environment; if adaptive loading is employed we can increase the data rate with increasing SNRs by using all the transmissionmodes. We have considered both the cases with and without the power adaptation scheme described in (2), and we can notice that very little can be gained by performing this step. Since power adaptation increases algorithm complexity with little performance gain, the other results shown throughout this paper will not consider power adaptation. Adaptive bit loading can be applied to the high-rate modes (48 and 54Mbps) only if a higher modulation level is allowed. Keeping the signal constellations square, we can also consider the use of 256-QAMfor these modes when adaptive loading is employed. The results in this case are shown in Fig. 3, where no power adaptation is considered, and they indicate that even with these high data rates adaptive loading can help improve the link performance with a small modification in the system parameters. We have seen in the results above that the gains obtained with adaptive loading are more significant if high-rate codes

o d i f i e d codebiulsym.. datarate databits1 standard codebitslsym. m m o d i f i e d ) symbol codingrate (standard) codingrate ( (Mbps) 3 1 4 32 48 24 If2 6 Y4 64 % 48 In 12 34 128 If2 192 % 24 256 288 3 1 4 192 m 48

:
'

10-

-s

---f

-sllm&lds ABLvilhs~codc\ ABLvilhhi*he+-nneCo$r

0

Po

Epb

Fig. 3. High-rate OFDM with adaptive bit loading

Fig. 4 .OFDM with adaptive bit loading using high rate codes

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at the transmitter, which result in a bit load distribution that does not match the real channel. The channel estimation algorithm relies on the transmission of M known training symbols. Let cdi) be the i-th training symbol with unit energy transmitted at the k-th subcarrier. The channel can be described by the frequency-response coefficients hb such that the received signal is given by (3) rk(i) = hkCk(i)+ V k ( i ) with vd0 the noise component with variance N. For W-LANapplications it can be assumed that the channel remains constant during a transmission frame, so that an initial estimate can be obtained simply by averaging the estimates obtained by zero-forcing for each known OFDM training symbol. Considering that 1cd2=1 we have the following estimate:

hu,k =

Crk(i)ck*(i= ) hk+ek
i= 1

(4)

where ek = L.$;k(i)ck*(i) is the estimation error with

M ,=

variance N/M. In W-LANstandards the channel estimation is based upon the second preamble, which consists of one known OFDM symbol repeated twice (M=2). This yields a somewhat coarse channel estimation, with a reduction of just 3dB in the error variance. This can be improved if we take into account the correlation among neighbouring subcarrim.Let h be the vector of frequency-domain channel coefficients and hdbe the vector of channel estimates obtained by zeroforcing and averaging as in (4). The linear minimum meansquare emr (LMMSE) estimator is given by [101:
-1
hh?lmSe

= Rh,(Rhh

a2z)

hd

(5)

where Rhh = E { h h H ] , is the noise variance and Z the a t r i x . identity m The channel autocorrelation function in the frequency domain is the Fourier transform o f the channel power delay profile, i.e., the correlation m a t r i x RN,depends on the channel delay profile, which is usually not known. We can nevertheless assume the maximum delay spread to be no longer than the guard interval, in which case a robust estimator can be implemented by assuming the power delay 9 ] .The noise profile to be constant over the guard interval [ variance ?c can also be assumed to have a fixed value without any major degradation in the estimation performance. In this work a value of E#b20dB was assumed with good results over a large range of SNRs, as seen in the results below. It a t r i x has to be calculated should be noticed that the filtering m only once, keeping the complexity of the estimation algorithm to a minimum. The performance of a W-LAN OFDM system was simulated considering the channel estimator proposed above,

both with and without adaptive bit loading. The results are displayed in Fig. 5 . We can see that the performance loss compared to a system with perfect channel knowledge is below 1dB with standard transmission. The performance loss is larger when adaptive bit loading is employed, but it is still small enough to keep the performance gain obtained through adaptive loading attractive. At high rate modes the performance loss with channel estimation is even less significant, since these have to operate at higher S N R levels, in which a more reliable channel estimation can be obtained. B. Peak-to-Avemge Power Ratio One of the greatest problems with OFDM is that the signal in the time domain consists in the sum of many independently modulated sinewaves, and its amplitude has a nearly Gaussian distribution, with a very high peak-to-average power ratio (PAP) compared to single d e r modulation. This means that a large power amplifier backoff is required to minimise nonlinear distortion, and that many bits are needed to represent the signal. Thus, the effect on the PAP of any new technique proposed for OFDM has to be investigated. One positive side-effect of adaptive bit loading is that it reduces the PAP when compared to a system with constant loading. This can be understood intuitively if we consider that in the limit a system with adaptive bit loading tends to a single carrier system, which has a much more favourable dishibution of the PAP. This can be confirmed by simulation results, as shown in Fig. 6, where the PAP distribution is plotted for two different channels. It can also be observed that the reduction in the PAP is more pronounced in a channel with deep frequency fades, since in this case the signal transmit power is concentrated in fewer subcaniers. C. Spectral Flatness In W-LAN standards it is required that the transmit signal be spectrally flat, which means that without a modification in these requirements we cannot apply subcarrier suppression. One simple solution to this problem is to send dummy subcarriers at the frequencies in which no data should be transmitted. This reduces the efficiency of adaptive bit loading, since some power is wasted on these carriers, but it may be better than to lose information on severely faded

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Q M I
1 QMl2

overhead to be transmitted. One possibility is to transmit only the transitions between different modulation levels, which are likely to be f e w ,with the disadvantage that the signallingfield would have a variable length. Another alternative is to divide the total bandwidth into clusters of N adjacent subcarriers, and to allocate a given modulation level to each cluster, as proposed in [6].This reduces the number of signalling bits by N,with a penalty in the performance. A thorough analysis of adaptive loading algorithms would have to include the bandwidth loss caused by the signalling overhead, as well as the performance loss provoked by possible wrong detections of the loading information. VI. CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER WORK It was shown in this paper that a substantial performance improvement can be obtained with the use of adaptive bit loading in the OFDM-based W-LAN systems. This technique is particularly effective at the lower end of data rates, which can be reflected in an increased system robusmess and higher transmission range. Furthermore, adaptive bit loading can be implemented with only minor changes to existing standards. Further investigations have to deal with time-variant channels and consider the signalling scheme.
REFERENCES

Fig. 6. Peak-to-averagepower ratio i n OFDM with adaptive bit loading

subchannels. Furthermore, since all the subcarriers have to be transmitted anyway, they should all carry some information. We have for instance considered that each dummy subcarrier is BPSK modulated and repeats one code bit already transmitted in another subcarrier. The signal in the dummy subcarriers can be used for a slight improvement in the detection of the data bits. The results obtained with this scheme are shown in Fig.7, where we can see that the performance losses caused by the insertion of the dummy h a t adaptive bit loading subcarriers are relatively small and t improves the performance even under the requirement of spectral flatness. It can be also observed that at high bit rates the performance loss is negligible, since with higher bit loads the necessity of subcanier suppression becomes less likely. D. Signnlling One difficulty in the implementation of adaptive bit loading is that some extra signalling is needed, since the receiver must know which modulation level is used on each subcanier. There are 5 different modulation levels (6 if 256-QAM is also employed) to be distributed among 48 subchannels, which amounts to nbil,=[10gz57= 112 bits. In practice only the modulation combinations that yield the desired data rate have to be considered, and, due to the channel frequency correlation, neighbouring subcarriers are very likely to have the same modulation, which reduces the amount of signalling

[l] IEEE Std 802.11a, Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Speci$cations: High-speed Physical Layer in the 5GHz B d , Dec. 1999 [2] ETSI TS 101 475, Broadband Radw Access Networks (BRAN); HlPERLAN Type 2; Physical (PHY) Layer [3] A. Czylwik, Adaptive OFDM for Wideband Radio Channels, in Pmc. Globecom96, London, UK, Nov.1996, pp.713-718 [4] L. van der Perre, S.Thoen, P. Vandameele, B. Gyselinckx and M. Engels, Adaptive Loading Strategy for a High Speed OFDM-Based WLAN, in Pmc. Globecom 98, Sydney, Australia, Nov. 1998, pp. 1936-1940 [5] S.Thoen, L. Van der Perre, B. Gyselinckx, M. Engels and H. de Man, Adaptive loading in the downlink of OFDWSDMA-based wireless local networks, in Pmc. VTC 2000, Tokyo,Japan, May 2000, pp. 235-239 [6] R. m e i d , E. Bolinth, H. Rohling and K. A r e a , Adaptive modulation for the HIPERLANL2 air interface, in P m . lntl OFDM Workhop, Hamburg, Germany, Sep.2OOO [7] R.F.H. Fischer and J.B. Huber, A New Loading Algorithm for Discrete Multitone Transmission, in Pmc. Globecom 96,London, UK,Nov. 1996, pp. 724-728 [SI ETSI EP BRAN#, 30701F. Criteriafor Comparison, July 1998 . Li, LJ. Cimini Jr. and NR. Sollenbeger, Robust [9] Y Channel Estimation for OFDM Systems with Rapid Dispersive Fading Channels, IEEE T m . Commun., July 1998, pp.902-915 [lo]JJ. van de Beek, 0. Edfors, M. Sandell, S . K .Wilson and P . O . Borjesson, On Channel Estimation in OFDM Systems, in P m . VTC95. Chicago, USA, July 1995, pp. 815-819

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