Carrier Frequency Offset Estimation for PUCCH in High Speed Train Environment

Xiaona Ren
The State Key Laboratory of ISN Xidian University Xian, CHINA

Guangliang Ren
The State Key Laboratory of ISN Xidian University Xian, CHINA

Chunhui Le
Huawei Technologies Shanghai, CHINA

AbstractAn iterative carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation method is proposed for the physical uplink control channel (PUCCH) of 3GPP-LTE in high speed train environment. In the algorithm, the signal of one user in the received multi-user signals is separated by despreading, and the despreaded pilot signals of the user are employed in the cross-correlation operation to estimate the coarse CFO in frequency domain. The data signals compensated by the estimated coarse CFO, are employed to estimate the fine CFO by the cross-correlation operation. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has high accuracy in low SNR and low complexity, and improve the performance of the system greatly. Keywords-LTE; PUCCH; carrier frequency offset estimation; high speed train; multi-user

However, there are many algorithms about CFO estimation in OFDM system. The available CFO estimation algorithms in OFDM system are generally classified into two categories, i.e., time-domain estimation algorithm [1][2], e.g. the cyclicprefix-based (CPB) scheme and the training-symbol-based method, and frequency-domain estimation algorithm [3][4]. However, both of [1] and [2] estimate the CFO in timedomain, and the multi-user occupy the same resource both in frequency-domain and in time-domain on PUCCH, on which we cant separate the signal of each user in time-domain. Therefore, these two methods are not applicable for PUCCH of LTE. The frequency-domain estimation algorithm, e.g. pilot-tone-aided method [3][4], cant directly apply to the PUCCH of LTE either, because multi-user occupy the same subcarriers in frequency domain. To estimate CFO on PUCCH, and get high estimation accuracy for multi-user in low SNR, we propose an iterative carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation algorithm for PUCCH formats 1a/1b. The following sections are organized as: In section , system model is described and in section , CFO estimation algorithm is introduced for PUCCH formats 1a/1b. In section , simulation results are presented. Finally, basic conclusions are drawn in section . II. SYSTEM MODEL

I.

INTRODUCTION

The goal of next generation wireless communication is to realize the mobile multimedia transmission with high quality and high data rate. Long Term Evolution (LTE) of 3GPP, or E-UTRA supports peak rates up to 300Mbps in downlink and 75Mbps in uplink. With the development of the high speed train, the speed of the train can up to 350Km/h, and LTE has already been a communication standard in high speed train environment. However, there are many problems due to the high speed environment, such as fast-varying channel and large Doppler shift (e.g. when users are moving at a speed of 350km/h, the Doppler shift will come up to 1490Hz in LTE uplink system). The PUCCH is a code-multiplexed narrow band channel where more than one user is multiplexed by means of CDMA on the same set of carriers. The control information carried by PUCCH is important to the performance of the system, so the performance of PUCCH should be guaranteed even when it works under very low SNR environment, e.g. some users are located at the edge of the cell. The large Doppler shift, will cause the decrease of the detection probability of PUCCH for multi-user in low SNR environment, and further lead to the loss of the performance of the LTE system. Thus, a new frequency offset estimator, which can cover large frequency range and has high accuracy for multi-user in low SNR, is required to maintain the link quality for PUCCH in high speed train environment. LTE is usually used in low-speed environment. Therefore, there arent any research about carrier frequency offset estimation on PUCCH in recent years.

A. Pucch Structure In LTE uplink, a 1 ms subframe consists of two 0.5ms slots, each of which has 7 SC-FDMA symbols in case of normal cyclic prefix, and which is placed at the edges of the system bandwidth. The PUCCH consists of 12 subcarriers over 2 resource blocks, between which slot-based frequency hopping is adopted. The ACK/NACK signals from different UEs are multiplexed by means of CDMA on PUCCH, and each ACK/NACK signal is code spread by the cyclic shift sequences and orthogonal cover sequences [5]. PUCCH has two basic transmission formats called formats 1a/1b and format 2, each of which can multiplex multiple users. In this paper, we mainly talk about PUCCH formats 1a/1b. Reference signal (RS) symbols and data symbols are timedivision multiplexed within a subframe. Multiple users are code-division multiplexed with different length-12 orthogonal sequence mapped to the 12 subcarriers. UE generates one ACK/NACK signal corresponding to the transmission result of

This work was supported in part by the State Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant No.61072102, and National Major Specialized Project of Science and Technology, Grant No.2011ZX03001-007-01, and was partly funded by Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

the downlink data, and this signal is code spread onto the 1st, 2nd, 6th and 7th SC-FDMA symbols, while the RS is code spread onto the 3rd , 4th and 5th SC-FDMA symbols. B. Signal model Consider the uplink of an 3GPP-LTE based SC-FDMA system supporting N subcarriers, and accommodating a maximum of K simultaneously active users on PUCCH. We suppose bk the modulated control information for the kth active user, and C k ,i = [Ck ,i (0), Ck ,i (1), , Ck ,i (11)]T is the kth active users length-12 orthogonal sequence during the ith will map onto SC-FDMA symbol. Then C k ,i

Zk,i (l) = ri (n)e j 2nl / N

n=0

N 1

(4)

Ng + iNs = exp j2k Hl Sk (i) pk (i) Ak,i (l)i,l + Ik,i (l) + uk,i (l) N where k is the normalized CFO of the kth user, I k ,i (l ) means the ICI of the kth user, and uk ,i (l ) is the inter-user interference and noise.

i ,l

is a attenuation coefficient caused

by the residual carrier frequency offset, and III.

i ,l 1 .

A k ,i = [ Ak ,i (0), Ak ,i (1),..., Ak ,i ( N 1)]

Sk

are

the

PROPOSED SECHEME

modulated information for the kth user during each SC-FDMA symbol in a subframe, following

Sk = [Sk (0), Sk (1),, Sk (13)] = [bk , bk ,1,1,1, bk , bk , bk , bk ,1,1,1, bk , bk ]

(1) The orthogonal cover sequence for the kth user used in a subframe is described as
Pk = [ pk (0), pk (1), , pk (13)] = [ wk ,0 , wk ,1 , wk ,0 , wk ,1 , wk ,2 , wk ,2 , wk ,3 , wk ,0 , wk ,1 , wk ,0 , wk ,1 , wk ,2 , wk ,2 , wk ,3 ]

In this section, The proposed CFO estimation algorithm is described in detail. According to previous analysis, we assume that Z k ,i (l ) and Z k ,i +1 (l ) are the ith and i+1th SC-FDMA symbol for the kth user in a slot in frequency domain, respectively, following as

Zk,i (l) = ri (n)e j 2nl/ N

n=0

N1

N +iNs = exp j2k g Hl Sk (i) pk (i) Ak,l (i)i,l + Ik,i (l) + uk,i (l) N
and

(5)

(2)

where orthogonal covers sequences [ wk ,0 , wk ,1 , wk ,2 , wk ,3 ] and

[ wk ,0 , wk ,1 , wk ,2 ] of the k user, which are used for data symbols and pilot symbols respectively, are known at the receiver.
At the receiver, the received complex baseband signal during the ith symbol can be expressed as follows:
K1 N1 t (Ng +iNs )T ri (t) = Sk (i) pk (i)Ak,i (m)Hm exp j2m exp( j2 fkt) +ni (t) NT k=0 m=0

th

Zk,i+1(l) =ri+1(n)ej2nl/N
n=0

N1

(6)

N +(i +1)Ns =exp j2k g HSk (i +1)pk (i +1)A,l (i +1)i+1,l +Ik,i+1(l) +uk,i+1(l) l k N
A. Despreading According to the orthogonal of the cyclic shift sequences, users signal can be separated by despreading. After separating users, each of the SC-FDMA symbol becomes one sample, expressed as

(3)

where H m is the frequency domain channel response, which we may reasonably consider a const on PUCCH during a symbol. N g is the samples of the CP for the elimination of the inter-symbol interference, and
th

Bk ,i = Z k ,i (l ) Ak ,i* (l )
l

N s indicates the samples during one SC-FDMA symbol, N s = N g + N . f k is the ni (t ) is additive

2 w .
th

N + iN s = 12 exp j 2 k g HS k (i ) pk (i ) + I k ,i + uk ,i N
and
Bk ,i +1 = Zk ,i +1 (l ) Ak ,i +1* (l )
l

(7)

carrier frequency offset of the k user, and

white Gaussian noise with zero mean and variance

After sampling, removing the CP and FFT process, the i symbol is given by

N g + (i + 1) Ns = 12exp j 2 k HS k (i + 1) pk (i + 1) + Ik ,i+1 + uk ,i +1 N

(8)

where I k ,i is ICI of the kth user during the ith symbol in frequency domain, which is almost eliminated. uk ,i is the inter-user interference and interference can be ignored. noise, and the inter-user

and D is the interval of the cross-correlation between data symbols. IV. SIMULATION RESULTS

B. Coarse CFO Estimation In this algorithm, the CFO is estimated in frequency domain. The coarse CFO is achieved by cross-correlation operation between pilots symbols, between which the interval is one symbol in a slot, following

The performance of the proposed twice iterative CFO estimation algorithm has been investigated by computer simulation. A. High Speed Train (HST) Scenario For simulating the HST scenario [7], we adopt the propagation models, which are described in TABLE 1. The maximum Doppler shift is given as

k ,coarse =

Bk ,4 pk * (4) N angle * 4 N s m Bk ,2 pk (2)

(9)

f max = f c v / c

(12)

where m is the index of slot in a subframe. This method can get large estimation range. The CFO is large, if CFO is directly estimated by fine CFO estimation according to data signals correlation without estimating coarse CFO first, the large estimation range will not be obtained, and there will occur phase ambiguity for fine CFO estimation. Thus, coarse CFO is estimated for large estimation range and fine CFO is evaluated for high accuracy. C. Fine CFO Estimation After compensating part of the coarse CFO estimations, there will not occur phase ambiguity for fine CFO estimation, and can reduce the influence of the noise. The fine CFO is estimated according to the cross-correlation between the data symbols, between which the interval is four symbols. Thus, it can be obtained as

where f c is the carrier frequency in Hz, v is the velocity of the train, and c is the speed of light ,both in m/s. In HST scenario, Doppler shift is described as

f d = f max cos (t )
where cos (t ) is written by

(13)

cos (t ) =

d0 vt d + (d0 + vt )2
2 B

, for 0 < t < 2d0 / v

(14)

where d 0 is the initial distance of the train from the eNodeB, and d B is the distance between the eNodeB and the railway track, both in meters, and t is time in seconds.
TABLE I. Scenario Model ISD BS-track distance Rician factor Train speed Considering maximum Doppler shift PROPAGATION MODELS FOR HST SCENARIO Open space Static with Doppler shift 1000m 50m 350km/h 1340 Hz Tunnel with leaky cable Single tap Ricain fading infinity 10 300km/h 1150 Hz Tunnel for multiantennas Static with Doppler shift 300m 2m 300km/h 1150Hz

k , fine =

Bk ,5 pk* (5) Bk ,6 pk* (6) N angle + * * 10 Ns m Bk ,0 pk (0) Bk ,1 pk (1)

(10)

where m is the index of slot in a subframe. Therefore, the total CFO estimation for the kth active user becomes

k = * k ,coarse + k , fine

(11)

Where is a coefficient, and 0 < 1 This algorithm is named as twice iterative CFO estimation scheme. The Cramer-Rao bound of the CFO is given as [6]

MSE( ) =

1 4 (Ns / N) Np nrxs Nblock D2 Es / N0

2 2

(12)

Where nrxs is the number of receiver antenna, and

B. Simulation Parmeters The parameters used in the LTE PUCCH, which is an SCFDMA system with one transmit antennas and two receive antenna, are from [5]. In this simulation, The length of FFT is 1024. And the number of the user K = 1,2,4,8,12, respectively, and is set to be 0.5.

N block means the number of subcarriers in a resource block,

10

-2

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-3

K=1 K=2 K=4 K=8 K=12 CRB

miss detection rate

no CFO estimation CFO estimation and compensation 10

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Figure 1. MSE of CFO estimation vs. SNR with different users (HST scenario 3)

Figure 3. PUCCH miss detection rate vs. SNR with no CFO estimation and CFO estimation

Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 show the MSEs of the carrier frequency offset estimation by the proposed method with different users in the SC-FDMA system, of which the channel model are HST scenario 1 and HST scenario 3, respectively , and compared with the CRB. It can be seen from the curves that with the increasing of users number, the MSE of the CFO estimation increase on a fixed SNR due to the multi-user interference. However, performance degrades a little with the increasing number of users. Therefore, the proposed algorithm is robust to the number of users. Figures also indicate that the performance of the proposed algorithm has high accuracy in low SNR.
10
-2

V.

CONCULTION

10

-3

K=1 K=2 K=4 K=8 K=12 CRB

To estimate the CFO in the high speed train environment, we proposed an twice iterative CFO estimation algorithm for PUCCH. The despreaded pilot signals of the user are employed in the cross-correlation operation to estimate the coarse CFO in frequency domain. The data signals compensated by the estimated coarse CFO, are employed to estimate the fine CFO by the cross-correlation operation. The simulation results shows that the scheme is robust to the number of users, and it has high estimation accuracy in low SNR. The proposed method also decrease the miss detection rate on PUCCH in low SNR, which improve the performance greatly. REFERENCES
[1] H. Chen and G. J. Pottie, A comparison of frequency offset tracking algorithms for OFDM, in Proc. IEEE GLOBECOM, 2003, pp. 10691073. N. Lashkarian and S. Kiaei, Class of cyclic-based estimators for frequency-offset estimation of OFDM systems, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 48, no. 12, pp. 2139-2149, Dec. 2000. S. Kapoor, D. J. Marchok, and E.-F. Juang, Pilot assisted synchronization for wireless OFDM systems over fast time varying fading channels, in proc. 48th IEEE VTC, May 18-21, 1998, vol. 3, pp.2077-2080. W. Lei, J. Lu, and J. Gu, A new pilot assisted frequency synchronization, in Proc. IEEE ICASSP, Apr. 6-10, 2003, vol. 4, pp. IV-700-IV-703. 3GPP, TS 36.211, Physical Channels and Modulation, V8.7.0 May 2009. K. Shi, E. Serpedin, and P. Ciblat, Decision-directed fine synchronization in OFDM systems, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 53, no. 3, pp. 408-412, Mar. 2005. 3GPP, TS 36.104, Base Station (BS) Radio Transmission and Reception, V9.5.0, Sep 2010.

MSE

10

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[2]

[3]
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[4]
-9 -8 -7 -6 -5 SNR(dB) -4 -3 -2 -1 0

-10

Figure 2. MSE of CFO estimation vs. SNR with different users (HST scenario 1)

[5] [6]

Fig. 3 shows the miss detection rate on PUCCH with CFO estimation and without CFO estimation, respectively. It can be seen from the curves that large CFO lead to high miss detection rate in low SNR, which cause performance degradation, and the proposed method can decrease the miss detection rate ,which improve the performance greatly.

[7]