Patent Application
20070297540
The drawings accompanying and forming part of this specification are included to depict certain aspects of the invention. The invention may be better understood by reference to one or more of these drawings in combination with the description presented herein. It should be noted that the features illustrated in the drawings are not necessarily drawn to scale.
The following detailed description of the invention refers to the accompanying drawings. The description includes exemplary embodiments, not excluding other embodiments, and changes may be made to the embodiments described without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention. The following detailed description does not limit the invention. Instead, the scope of the invention is defined by the appended claims.
The present invention discloses a novel method for detecting a preamble of an incoming signal in a multi-cell wireless communication system. The method and system determine the integer part of carrier frequency offset and coarse timing position of the preamble. One embodiment of the present invention is an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex Access system with a frequency reuse factor of 1.
An effective reuse pattern W refers to a situation in which all the W cells in a multi-cell communication system have the same center frequency but each cell uses a non-overlapping segment of the frequency band when transmitting the preambles. In other words, an effective reuse pattern W is virtually the same as having W different frequency bands.
In a conventional multi-cell system, each cell is configured as a hexagon. i.e, there are six cells adjacent to the center cell.
In a multi-cell wireless communication system, the preambles broadcasted by the BTS in each cell carry a unique PN sequence. By calculating autocorrelation of the receiving signal, a wireless station can reliably detect the presence of a preamble when there is little interference with the receiving signal. However, if the receiving signal of the wireless station is impaired by interference, the autocorrelation method is no longer a reliable way to detect preambles.
The time domain signal in the receiving period is sampled by the sampler module in the receiver chain. The sampling points in the receiving period are further subdivided into subgroups, each of which is defined as a sampling window with L sampling points. The sampling windows can be overlapped with each other.
In step 310, a receiver module of a wireless station first detects the carrier frequency of a receiving signal. If the carrier frequency offsets of the receiving signal is within a predetermined range, for example, 16 ppm (part per million), the preamble detection module is activated.
In step 320, an L-Point Fast Fourier Transform operation is used to transform the L sampling points in the sampling window into a frequency domain vector with L elements. Each element in the frequency domain vector represents a narrow band in the frequency domain.
The frequency domain vector R with L elements is represented by the following: R=FFT(r)=[R(1),R(2) , . . . , R(L)], where r is the vector of L sampling points in the sampling window. The frequency domain vector covers the radio spectrum, allocated to the wireless communication system, which is shared by three adjacent cells. During the period of preamble transmission, each element in the frequency domain vector represents one narrow band and is allocated to cell 0, cell 1, and cell 2 in sequence. In other words, every third element of the frequency domain vector is allocated to the preamble of one specific cell. However, during data transmission, the data traffic occupies the whole bandwidth.
In step 330, the energy in the sampling window of each segment is calculate as follows:
where j is the segment number and j ε {0,1,2}, E(j) is the total energy in segment j, and └ . . . ┘ denotes the floor operation of the enclosed value.
Let Nsg be the segment number that has the highest energy, ie. E(N
The frequency domain vector of the segment with the highest energy is then denoted as Rsg=[R(i+1), R(3+i+1), . . . , R(3×└(L−i−1)/3┘+i+1)], where i=Nsg and Rsg is a subset of vector R.
In step 340, a new vector Q is generated to reduce the channel effect on the detected signal by the following equation,
where operator (.)* denotes conjugate transpose of the enclosed vector. Q is the dot product of the conjugate of the vector Rsg and the shifted vector of Rsg.
Assuming that the wireless communication system defines a set of M pre-determined PN codes with the same length, denoted as NPN, the wireless station in the wireless communication system creates a list of M pre-generated modified PN codes of length NPN−1. The modified PN code is defined as the dot product of the predetermined PN code with the shifted version of the same predetermined PN code.
For example, if the PN code is c=[c(1), c(2), . . . , c(NPN)], then the modified predetermined PN code is ĉ=[c(1)c(2),c(2)c(3), . . . , c(NPN−1)c(NPN)], where NPN, the length, is the number of the binary bits (1 or −1), in the predetermined PN code.
In step 350, in order to calculate the correlation between the frequency domain vector and the modified PN code, a bit mask is further applied to the Q vector to produce a vector with the same length as the modified predetermined PN code. The bit mask has the same length as vector Q, and it consists of a sequence of 0's followed by NPN−1 1s and then followed by a sequence of 0's. The default bit mask has NPN−1 1s in the middle of the bit mask.
A new vector {circumflex over (Q)} is obtained after the completion of the following two operations: Taking Boolean AND operation between the bit mask and the vector Q and removing a predetermined number of elements, also known as guard bands, from both ends of the vector generated by the AND operation.
In order to take into account all possible carrier frequency offsets, a set of bit masks is generated to create a set of vectors {circumflex over (Q)}, with each vector {circumflex over (Q)} corresponding to one carrier frequency offset value. Each bit mask is the result of shifting the default bit mask by a certain number of units of sub-carrier spacing. If the carrier frequency offset of the receiving signal is in the range of [−a, a] sub-carrier spacing, where a is an integer, the bit mask is shifted in the range of [−b, +b] sub-carrier spacing, where b is an integer and b=┌a/3┐, where ┌ . . . ┐ denotes the ceiling operation of the enclosed value. In other words, the default bit mask is shifted to the left or right by at most b position. As a result, 2b+1 {circumflex over (Q)} vectors are generated and each is associated with one carrier frequency offset value.
In step 360, a correlation vector S is obtained by calculating the correlation between each pair of the vectors {circumflex over (Q)} and ĉ, shown in the following equation: S(k)={circumflex over (Q)}(ĉ)T, where operator (.)T denotes conjugate transpose of the enclosed vector. Each element S(k) in the correlation vector is a scalar and k ε {0,1, . . . ,(2b+1)×M−1}.
Whether a preamble is present in the receiving signal can be determined by comparing the highest value of the correlation result S(k) with the predetermined threshold, such as the average of the correlation values. If there exits an S(k) that exceeds the predetermined threshold, a preamble is present in the sampling window and thus the preamble is detected and the integer part of the carrier frequency offset is identified.
The integer part of the carrier frequency offset is determined by the following equation: carrier frequency offset=3Noffset+Nsg−Nsg(c), where Noffset is the number of units of sub-carrier spacing; Nsg is the segment number; Nsg(c) is the segment number that the BTS of the cell sends the PN code c, with Nsg(c) ε {0,1,2}. If the carrier frequency offsets are in [−6, 6] sub-carrier spacing, Noffset ε {−2,−1,0,1,2 }.
In step 370, the preamble detection module continues to exam every sampling window and identifies the highest S(k) among sampling windows. The sampling window with the highest S(k) is identified as the coarse timing position of the preamble.
The present invention discloses a method and system for detecting a preamble reliably in the presence of interference caused by multiple cells reusing the same frequency in a multi-cell communication system.
After receiving a signal in the receiving period, the method first identifies the segment with the highest energy, among the cells sharing the same center frequency, and generates a frequency domain vector for the segment. It then takes the dot operation on the frequency domain vector to reduce the channel effect. Subsequently, the correlation between the frequency domain vector and the modified PN code is calculated.
By examining the outcome of correlation operation, the numerical operations of the method conclude whether a preamble is presents in the receiving signals of the receiving period. The numerical operations of the method also determine the integer part of the frequency offset and coarse timing position of the preamble if it is present in the receiving signal. Since the present method includes shift, product and correlation operations, the method is also known as Shift-Product-Correlation (SPC).
The above illustration provides many different embodiments or embodiments for implementing different features of the invention. Specific embodiments of components and processes are described to help clarify the invention. These are, of course, merely embodiments and are not intended to limit the invention from that described in the claims.
Although the invention is illustrated and described herein as embodied in one or more specific examples, it is nevertheless not intended to be limited to the details shown, since various modifications and structural changes may be made therein without departing from the spirit of the invention and within the scope and range of equivalents of the claims. Accordingly, it is appropriate that the appended claims be construed broadly and in a manner consistent with the scope of the invention, as set forth in the following claims.
The present application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application Ser. 60/815,661, which was filed on Jun. 22, 2006.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60815661 | Jun 2006 | US |
