Exploring the physical layer frontiers of cellular uplink

Abstract

Communication systems in practice are subject to many technical/technological constraints and restrictions. Multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) processing in current wireless communications, as an example, mostly employs codebook-based pre-coding to save computational complexity at the transmitters and receivers. In such cases, closed form expressions for capacity or bit-error probability are often unattainable; effects of realistic signal processing algorithms on the performance of practical communication systems rather have to be studied in simulation environments. The Vienna LTE-A Uplink Simulator is a 3GPP LTE-A standard compliant MATLAB-based link level simulator that is publicly available under an academic use license, facilitating reproducible evaluations of signal processing algorithms and transceiver designs in wireless communications. This paper reviews research results that have been obtained by means of the Vienna LTE-A Uplink Simulator, highlights the effects of single-carrier frequency-division multiplexing (as the distinguishing feature to LTE-A downlink), extends known link adaptation concepts to uplink transmission, shows the implications of the uplink pilot pattern for gathering channel state information at the receiver and completes with possible future research directions.

A Joint Modulation-Coding Scheme and Resource Allocation in LTE Uplink

“…The second step groups the mean values in sets of 12 subcarriers [30]. The third step considers the equalization (F) proposed in [19] in the frequency domain for each set given as…”

“…x is the subcarriers signal power. The fourth step spreads the SINR to each set already equalized, which can be described as [19]…”

“…This paper examines the LA, FDPS, and MCS allocation to improve the link level throughput and decrease resource waste in environments with low SNR and considerable mobility. The LA used in this work is based in [19] and implemented in the LTE-A Uplink Link Level Simulator [20] downloadable at [21]. This simulator was implemented by the Institute of Telecommunications TU Wien to facilitate reproducibility in wireless communications academic research [22].…”

Flexible multi-node simulation of cellular mobile communications: the Vienna 5G System Level Simulator

“…Our research group at the Institute of Telecommunications at TU Wien has been active in the field of LL and SL simulation of cellular networks already since the introduction of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) in late 2008. We developed in the past a whole suite of LTE compliant LL and SL simulators [19][20][21], known as the Vienna LTE simulators, which we successfully share with other researchers to facilitate reproducibility in wireless communications academic research [22,23]. Evolving these simulators, however to support the increased heterogeneity and the emerging use cases of 5G, is not straightforward due to a lack of flexibility of the simulation platform in terms of implementation structure and functionality.…”

Versatile mobile communications simulation: the Vienna 5G Link Level Simulator

“…Our mobile communications research group at the Institute of Telecommunications at TU Wien has a long and successful history of developing and sharing standardcompliant cellular communications simulators under an academic use license, with the goal of enhancing reproducibility in wireless communications academic research [1,2]. The implementation of our work-horse arXiv:1806.03929v1 [eess.SP] 11 Jun 2018 of the past nine years, that is, the Vienna LTE Simulators [3], started back in 2009, leading to three reliable standard compliant LTE simulators: a downlink system level simulator [4,5] and two link level simulators, one for uplink [6] and one for downlink [7]. Today the Vienna LTE Simulators count more than 50 000 downloads in total.…”