- Research
- Open Access
Eigenvector-based initial ranging process for OFDMA uplink systems
- Sungeun Lee1Email author and
- Xiaoli Ma1
https://doi.org/10.1186/1687-6180-2015-1
© Lee and Ma; licensee Springer. 2015
- Received: 15 April 2014
- Accepted: 24 October 2014
- Published: 16 January 2015
Abstract
At the contention-based synchronization, e.g., initial ranging process, it is crucial to identify multiple users through ranging codes and estimate the corresponding parameters such as timing offset and frequency offset. This paper presents an improved parameter estimation and pairing algorithm for initial ranging process in orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) uplink systems by exploiting multidimensional harmonic retrieval (HR) technique. Unlike most existing techniques that estimate each parameters independently and associate the ranging codes with the estimated parameters manually, the proposed method estimates multiple user’s ranging code, timing and frequency offsets simultaneously, and pair up all the multiple parameters automatically. The simulation results confirm that the proposed technique not only improves the ranging code detection capability and adjusts the acquisition range of the estimators but also increases the maximum number of resolvable users for given samples.
Keywords
- Initial ranging
- Synchronization
- Contention
- OFDMA
- Eigenvector
- Harmonic retrieval
- Random access
- Uplink
- Identifiability
1 Introduction
In general orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) uplink systems, to maintain the orthogonality among multiple users, the signals from all active users should arrive at the base station (BS) synchronously [1]. In order to align the signals of multiple users, contention-based random access procedure, called as initial ranging process, should be performed in the beginning in order to identify multiple users as well as to estimate the corresponding timing and/or frequency offsets for the adjustment/alignment [2, 3]. So, code identification as well as multiuser timing estimation are the main tasks of the BS in contention-based synchronization processes.
On the contention-based synchronization process, the same time/frequency resources are shared by multiple users, so the multiple access interference (MAI) limits the performance of ranging detectors. Consequently, it is essential to deal with MAI of ranging subscriber stations (RSSs) to achieve the reliable initial ranging performance.
In the beginning, the existing ranging detection methods simply treat the MAI as noise, which results in the performance degradation as the number of RSSs increases due to the limitation by the amount of MAI [4–6]. To decrease the effect of the accumulated MAI on the ranging process, Ruan et al. [7] proposed a successive multiuser detection (SMUD) algorithm which detects the channel paths of active ranging signals and cancels their interference for further detection. In order to alleviate the high computational complexity of SMUD, the low-complexity method is proposed in [8], and in order to increase the resilience to MAI, a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) approach is also exploited to derive a two-stage interference cancellation scheme [9]. However, it is shown that still SMUD and interference cancellation-based methods are vulnerable for MAI, and the code detection and parameter estimation performance are severely degraded as the number of active RSSs increases due to accumulated residual MAI [10].
In order to reduce the chance undergoing severe amount of MAI and exploiting the frequency selectivity of the fading channels, subchannel-based frame structure is proposed which allocate a smaller number of subcarriers to each ranging opportunity so that most of the RSSs are expected to transmit on disjoint sets of subcarriers with alleviated interference to each other [11–15].
With the improved parameter estimation capability, subspace decomposition-based approaches are exploited to accommodate the detection of multiple RSSs simultaneously [14, 15]. However, in order to achieve the code detection and parameter estimation at the same time, the allowable parameter estimation range is strictly limited. In order to bind the detected ranging codes with the estimated timing or frequency offsets, the methods either sacrifice the estimation performance by inserting the code sequence in the estimated parameters [14] or perform exhaustive full search by correlating all sets of ranging codes and offsets at the BS [11, 15]. Bacci et al. introduced a game-theoretic approach to derive an energy-efficient method for contention-based synchronization problem [16]. The ranging process is formulated as a noncooperative game for each terminal to determine the transmit power and detection strategy in a selfish way to maximize the detection probability with the minimum energy consumption.
The topic of multidimensional harmonic retrieval (HR) problems are encountered in a variety of signal processing applications including radar, sonar, seismology, communications, MIMO wireless channel, and the different types of schemes are utilized for the application [17–21]. Among these, principal-singular-vector utilization for modal analysis (PUMA) is used as the computationally attractive solution in HR [17]; however, it may not work properly when there are identical frequencies in one or more dimensions. On the other hand, the improved multidimensional folding (IMDF) scheme, which uses eigenvector instead of eigenvalue for estimating frequencies, can resolve identical frequency scenarios by introducing the randomness on the sample data [18, 19]. These IMDF algorithms introduced more relaxed identifiability bound, i.e., increased number of resolvable frequencies for the given sample data [19]. In order to improve the performance, the approaches with the use of higher-order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) and/or structured least squares technique are introduced in [20, 21]. Instead of using stacking matrix form, the HOSVD method captured the structure inherent in the received data at the expense of a high computational complexity [20, 21]. It was shown in [20] that the general computational complexity of the tensor-based approach (HOSVD) is higher than that of the matrix based one (IMDF) even with the computationally efficient subspace estimation methods.
In order to improve the ranging process performance as well as to incorporate the superiority of HR technique with reasonable complexity, the preliminary design utilizing IMDF approach was first introduced in [22]. However, since the single snapshot IMDF approach [18] is simply exploited in [22], the automatic pairing property and multiple resource element utilization were not fully exploited in [22], which results in the limited number of resolvable RSSs as well as the limited detection and estimation performance improvement without proper two-dimensional code design.
Since the multiple snapshot approach is quite well aligned with the inherent OFDMA subchannel allocation concept, we propose an improved ranging technique using IMDF with finite snapshots [19] for the initial ranging process. It enables for all the detected ranging codes, the estimated timing offsets and frequency offsets of multiple users to be automatically paired, so extra ranging code and offset association process, which usually requires high computational complexity, can be avoided.
Even though our approach is based on the IMDF algorithm, but it is not a trivial application of the IMDF algorithm to the ranging process. On the top of the IMDF methodology, our novel contribution is twofold.
First, we properly formulate initial ranging signals into finite snapshots such that automatic pairing property can be fully exploited during the procedure, which brings the improved performance as well as the reduced pairing complexity. Moreover, the maximum number of resolvable RSSs that the BS can distinguish can be also increased by applying multidimensional folding (MDF) algorithm.
Next, with the virtue of the automatic paring property, two-dimensional ranging code is newly proposed. The new code index pair design, ranging code extraction and detection procedure, decision boundary for the circular code index pair, and redefined detection events using the code index pair with multiset theory are introduced. According to the new code index pair concept, the enlarged timing and/or frequency offset acquisition range is also derived.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 explains an OFDMA uplink system model in a contention-based synchronization (initial ranging) process. Section 3 explains the proposed harmonic retrieval algorithm with multidimensional folding for extracting the code, timing offset, and frequency offset of active RSSs. In addition, the proposed two-dimensional code design and code detection/evaluation methodology is described. In Section 4, the statistical characteristics of the proposed algorithm, which utilizes IMDF method, is derived to show the identifiability for the number of resolvable RSSs and to confirm the acquisition range of the proposed algorithms on the timing offset and frequency offset. Section 5 evaluates the performance of the proposed method and investigates the comparison with the existing algorithms. Section 6 presents our conclusion.
Throughout this paper, upper (lower) boldface letters will be used for matrices (column vectors). A∗, A T , A H , and A † denote the conjugate, transpose, Hermitian transpose, and pseudo inverse of A, respectively. We will use ⊗ for the Kronecker product, ⊙ for the Khatri-Rao (columnwise Kronecker) product [23], I n for a n×n identify matrix, 0m×n for an m×n zero matrix, [ a] n for the nth element of a, and [ A]m,n for the (m,n)th element of A, D(a) for a diagonal matrix with a as its diagonal.
2 System model
2.1 Ranging process overview
Initial ranging process signal flow and timing.
On the other hand, the absolute frame timing of BS is unknown to each RSS since the propagation delay is unknown to each RSS (refer Figure 1). Therefore, each RSS only estimates its relative downlink frame timing position at first. Next, each RSS transmits its own initial ranging sequence, which is locked on the estimated frame timing, to the BS with the network access request. Once BS receives the sequences from multiple RSSs, the BS should identify multiple RSSs and estimate every RSS’s timing offset and residual frequency offset independently. Finally, from the given estimate, the BS provides the timing and frequency feedback info to the identified RSSs with the network grant message. Consequently, it is crucial on the initial ranging process for BS to identify as many as RSSs and to estimate their timing and frequency offsets as accurate as possible.
Transceiver block diagram of the initial ranging process.
2.2 Resource allocation for ranging process
Let us consider an OFDMA uplink system employing N subcarriers. Among the whole subcarriers, virtual subcarriers are placed at both edges of the spectrum to prevent the spectrum aliasing. Except the virtual subcarriers, the useful subcarriers are grouped by multiple subchannels, and these subchannels are assigned to multiple users (subscribers) for transmission. Typically, each subchannel is divided into Q subbands composed of a set of V adjacent subcarriers [14, 15, 24]. When one transmission block consists of M consecutive OFDMA symbols, let us define a bunch of consecutive V subcarriers (one subband) and M OFDMA symbols as a tile.
Now, among multiple subchannels, let us assume that each RSS only uses a set of R subchannels for ranging with M consecutive OFDMA symbols, and then the total number of subcarriers used for ranging is N R =RQV.
with ∀q∈ [ 1,Q],∀v∈ [ 1,V],∀m∈ [ 1,M]. In (1), K is the number of active RSSs participating the ranging process, and v and m denote the subcarrier and OFDMA symbol index within the tile, respectively. H k [ x],x∈ [ 0,N-1] is the channel frequency response of the kth RSS on the xth subcarrier position.
Since there is no big frequency offset difference between stations after the coarse frequency offset synchronization, the inter-carrier-interference (ICI) term caused by the residual frequency offset is ignored for the simplicity in (1) whereas the accumulated phase rotation term caused by frequency offset is still included.
In (1), the length of one OFDMA symbol is N
T
=N+N
G
with N
G
guard interval for ranging symbols, and i
q
is the starting subcarrier index for the qth tile, and θ
k
and ε
k
denote the timing and frequency offsets of the kth RSS, respectively. [W
q
]v,m is a complex additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) with zero mean and variance
. C
k
is the code sequence matrix for the kth RSS.
Here, let us assume that θ k ∈ [ 0,θmax] and ε k ∈ [ -εmax,εmax] where θmax and εmax are defined as the maximum allowable timing offset and and absolute frequency offset of the system, respectively.
2.3 Code design
Here, C
T
and C
F
are defined as the design parameters to determine the two-dimensional code index pair grid. Note that C
T
and C
F
can be properly chosen according to RSS’s timing and frequency distributions. Let us define a
k
= [ t
k
f
k
]
T
as a two-tuple for the code index pair of the kth user where t
k
∈ [ 0,C
T
) is the code index at the timing offset domain and f
k
∈ [ 0,C
F
) is the one at the frequency offset domain, respectively. The tuple a
k
is chosen from the whole code index pair set
, i.e.,
.
3 MDF estimation using multiple tiles
In order to exploit automatic pairing property of HR, we formulate the received signal as a two-dimensional (2-D) mixture form and then apply MDF estimation method [18] for estimating timing and frequency offsets of RSSs as well as detecting RSSs codes simultaneously.
3.1 2-D mixture model

where
and
are the transpose of Vandermonde matrices with the common ratios
and
for each column to represent the timing and frequency offsets of K RSSs, respectively.

where
is the vector form of the noise matrix W
q
. Since the received signal is formed as undamped 2-D exponentials for each tile, we can apply MDF algorithm [18] for each tile at the initial ranging process.
3.2 MDF algorithm using multiple tiles
3.2.1 Smoothing operation
As shown in (6) and (7), the observed symbols at each tile can be described as the special form of the multiple harmonic combinations. Based on this structure, we even apply smoothing operator
in order to fully utilize this special characteristics of the observed symbols and improve the estimation performance.
where V1,V2 and M1,M2 are positive integers satisfying V1+V2=V+1 and M1+M2=M+1.




with V1+V2=V+1 and M1+M2=M+1.
and
, are the transpose of Vandermonde matrices with the common ratios
and
.
For the noisy case, the perturbation analysis can be applied to derive the theoretical MSEs of one realization of timing and frequency offset estimation [19], Equations (33) to (47). However, since timing offset θ k and frequency offset ε k are all unknown random variables in the ranging process, the theoretical performance analysis on the deterministic realization of η k and ξ k would be meaningless on the whole. Therefore, for the simplicity, the noiseless case is used on the derivation while the noisy case is revisited on the simulation experiment.




3.2.2 Multiple tile combination
where
,
. Whereas [22] uses each tile independently for the code detection and timing/frequency offset estimation, now all channel responses and signals from multiple tiles are stacked and utilized together to create just one augmented matrix
. Therefore, it would be more robust for the noisy scenario due to multiple tile usage.


3.2.3 Eigenvector-based estimation
where U
s
has K columns that together span the column space of
. Since the same space is spanned by the columns of G1 from (19), there exists K×K nonsingular matrix L-1 such that U
s
=G1L-1.
U
s
can be partitioned into two submatrices U1 and U2 (refer (46) and (47) in Appendix). Then, L can be obtained from the eigenvalue decomposition of
up to column scaling and permutation ambiguity, i.e., L
sp
=LΛΔ where L
sp
is a practically obtained eigenvector including column scaling and permutation ambiguity, Λ is a nonsingular diagonal column scaling matrix, and Δ is a permutation matrix [18, 19]. This part is maybe most computationally complex part of the whole calculation, and the major computational load complexity to acquire L
sp
is calculated as
[19–21].
where
and
, i.e.,
. In P, the phase rotation components caused by timing offset and frequency offset appear in the same column of the P. In other words, for a fixed kth column,
and
appear simultaneously in the same column of P. Consequently, thanks to this combined structure, we can estimate K RSS’s timing offset and frequency offset at the same time by dividing suitably chosen elements of the P.
The detailed procedure on how to obtain the above P sp and L sp from U s is described in Appendix.
3.3 Effective timing offset and frequency offset estimation
Even though P sp contains the column scaling ambiguity Λ, it is immaterial for estimating the timing and frequency offset of each user. It is because the timing and frequency offset of each user is obtained by phase differential term. Therefore, the scaling effect on the matrix is diminished. In addition, each timing offset with frequency offset is even automatically paired without heavy computational search for the pairing.
Note that still we have the the permutation ambiguity issue on the estimation, i.e., unknown Δ. Since the user (column) identification along with timing and frequency estimation should be performed accordingly in the ranging process, therefore it is crucial to identify each column correctly and to remove the permutation ambiguity clearly. This can be done by the proposed code extraction and code detection process.
3.4 Code extraction
Recall the effective timing and frequency offsets are composed of the code index as well as actual timing and frequency offsets as shown in (4) and (5). Since
and
are automatically paired, the paired ranging code, timing offset, and frequency offset of the kth RSS can be detected and estimated simultaneously by using the effective timing and frequency offsets.
where
and
. Since the timing offset θ
k
only has the positive values, by introducing the bias ΔT on the extracted code index pair, the disturbance due to timing offset can be spread out around the original code index point t
k
. Consequently, by observing b
k
, we can retrieve the code index pair (t
k
,f
k
) accordingly.
3.5 Code detection
Now, the new code detection methodology and the decision boundary/criterion for the circularly repeated code index pair are introduced using multiset theory. In addition, the code detection events are newly redefined for the multidimensional code, e.g., phantom code, collided code, missing code, false-alarmed code, and correctly detected code in this section.


Code tuple example.
with C
T
=C
F
=5.


where κ(k) is the detected code index for the kth received tuple (kth extracted column),
is the set of all integers, and
is the square of the two-norm. Once all of K code index pair is detected, and then, it should be investigated from the detected code index pairs whether or not it contains the phantom code index pair which means the index pair is duplicated more than one time.







where
is the nonnegative integer set and μ(x) denotes the number of occurrences of x in the set. Now, let us take a look at different events on the code detection procedure.
3.5.1 Phantom code

with κ(k) defined in (31). Since a1 and a2 are detected more than once in (34), here,
. The phantom code can be detected at the receiver, so this code index can be opted out during the detection procedure.
3.5.2 Collided code

From the example,
is defined as
. Typically, it is hard to detect the collided code at the receiver side, but with the virtue of automatic pairing property in HR, if each RSS has different timing offsets and/or frequency offsets, it has a chance to remove this collided code as phantom code at the receiver side (like the example). Therefore, HR can avoid the false detection of the collided code effectively.
3.5.3 Missing code
From the example, the missing code is shown as
.
3.5.4 False-alarmed code
Here,
.
3.5.5 Correctly detected code
From the example, the correctly detected code is calculated as
.
On the whole, the index set of detected codes is described as {3} while the index multiset of misdetected codes including both
and
is {1,1,2,4,5}. Finally, the index set of false-detected codes is defined as {6}. Note {1} appears twice on the misdetected multiset since
already carries the two collided code.
3.6 Actual timing and frequency estimation



and it would be compared with
if it is successfully identified without false-alarm (
) and the offset is accurate estimated.
and it would be also compared with
if it is successfully identified without false-alarm (
).
4 Statistical characteristics
4.1 Identifiability
Actually, (44) can be easily induced from (19) since the matrix size of G1 and
would determine the overall rank.
By adjusting the smoothing factors V1,V2,M1, and M2, the code detection and timing and frequency offset estimation performance can be improved as well as Kuid can be increased.
4.2 Acquisition range
Basically, the transmitted code index pair
is twisted by the timing and frequency offsets. So, large timing and/or frequency offsets can cause the misdetection and/or false detection. Therefore, for the reliable code detection, it is essential to limit the allowable timing and/or frequency offset ranges.




where θmax and εmax stand for the maximum allowable timing and frequency offsets, respectively. So, from the inequality, it is available to adjust the maximum ranges of timing offset and frequency offset accordingly by enlarging one of the allowable ranges while shrinking another ranges at the same time. Remark that even though the acquisition range is derived as a lower bound by taking only a portion of the decision region
in (45), the maximum allowable ranges θmax and εmax are larger than the one introduced in MUSIC [15] and ESPRIT [14]. For example, with the same C
T
=C
F
=5, the maximum ranges of MUSIC and ESPRIT were defined as
and
while the ranges of the proposed HR can be picked up as
and
(whose range is enlarged by more than 10%) when we just treat the importance of both timing offset and frequency offset ranges equivalently with
from the Figure 3.
5 Simulation results
The overall system model and simulation parameters are based on the IEEE 802.16m and 3GPP LTE environments in [2, 3]. The total bandwidth is 10 MHz, and N=1024. Let us assume that each ranging subchannel is composed of Q=3 tiles with V=6 consecutive subcarriers, while M=5 OFDMA blocks are presented in ranging subchannels. In order to corporate with wide bandwidth, extended vehicular A (EVA) channel model is applied to evaluate the performance [25].
The timing and frequency offset ranges are designed for θ k ∈ [ 0,114) and ε k ∈[-0.02,0.02] which correspond to the system more than 1 km cell radius considering the round-trip delay, e.g., dense small cell, and 135 km/h Doppler frequency at f c =2.4 GHz. Note that all the simulation results reflect the ICI caused by residual frequency offset even though it is neglected in (1) for the simplicity.
The code design parameters C T and C F are set as C T =C F =7 for the proposed HR algorithm.

Parameters | HR, MUSIC, ESPRIT | Zadoff-Chu sequence |
---|---|---|
Sampling frequency | 15.36 MHz | 15.36 MHz |
Total number of subcarriers | 1,024 | 2,048 |
Number of OFDM symbols (M) | 5 | 2 |
Each ranging symbol length |
|
|
Total ranging symbol length | 5.675N T =425.625 μs | 5.5N T =412.5 μs |
Total number of ranging subchannels (R) | 4 | 1 |
Number of tiles/ranging subchannel (Q) | 3 | 1 |
Number of subcarriers/tile (V) | 6 | 144 |
Total number of ranging subcarriers (RQV) | 72 | 144 |
Timing offset range | [0, 114] samples | [0, 114] samples |
Frequency offset range | [ -300, 300] Hz | [ -300, 300] Hz |
Contention-based initial ranging capability with the number of RSSs
Parameters | MUSIC | ESPRIT | HR | Zadoff-Chu sequence |
---|---|---|---|---|
Number of uniquely identifiable RSSs per subchannel, Kuid | 4 | 4 | 16 | N/A |
Total number of uniquely identifiable RSSs, R·Kuid | 16 | 16 | 64 | 64 |
Total number of code sequences for RSSs,
| 16 | 16 | 28 | 28 |
Number of active RSSs per subchannel,
| 3, 6 | 3, 6 | 3, 6 | N/A |
Total number of active RSSs, R·K | 12, 24 | 12, 24 | 12, 24 | 12, 24 |
Transmitted frame structure. Two different frame structures are described, harmonic retrieval (HR) and Zadoff-Chu (ZC) sequence algorithm. MUSIC and ESPRIT use the same frame structure as HR.
5.1 Smoothing factor decision and identifiability comparison
Let us recall that the smoothing operator
enlarges the observed data matrix
to the smoothed data matrix
by choosing appropriate smoothing factors V1,V2 and M1,M2 with the condition V1+V2=V+1 and M1+M2=M+1. Therefore, the size of smoothed data matrix
depends on the smoothing factors. In fact, this smoothing factor could affect the code detection and offset estimation performance as well as the maximum number of distinguishable RSSs.
The number of identifiable RSSs, K uid with (a) different smoothing factor configuration or (b) different algorithms.
In addition, Figure 5b shows the trend on the maximum number of identifiable RSSs according to the number of subcarriers for fixed number of OFDM symbols M=5. As seen in the figure, the maximum number of RSSs which MUSIC and/or ESPRIT can support is limited by M even though we allocate more subcarriers for the ranging whereas the number of RSSs for HR can keep increasing without limitation. This addresses that the proposed HR technique can be popularly exploited on the scenarios such that high volume of users and/or devices should be separated at the same time at the dense small cell.
5.2 Misdetection probability
Misdetection probability, P miss with (a) R · K =12 or (b) R · K =24 RSSs.
Code detection and offset estimation notation
Main algorithm | Code detector (CD) | Timing offset estimator (TE) | Frequency offset estimator (FE) |
---|---|---|---|
Zadoff-Chu (ZC) | ZCCD | ZCTE | ZCFE |
MUSIC | MCD | AHTE (adhoc TE) | MFE |
ESPRIT | ECD | ETE | EFE |
Harmonic retrieval (HR) | HRCD | HRTE | HRFE |
As seen in the figures, the proposed HRCD shows good Pmiss performance. It is because automatic pairing property in HR improves the performance of code indices detection. Even though ESPRIT code detector (ECD) also exploits two independent estimates of the code indices to make a decision, the misdetection frequently occurs for ECD due to the discrepant code indices for two independent estimations. In addition, it is shown in Figure 6a,b that ZCCD has very poor performance regardless of SNR. It is because the orthogonality property of Zadoff-Chu sequence can sustain only with small number of RSSs. Different multipath fading channels as well as asynchronous timing/frequency offsets among multiple RSSs deteriorate the ZCCD detection performance dramatically.
Note that in Figure 6b, MUSIC and ESPRIT misdetection performance cannot be evaluated for R·K=24 since it exceeds the maximum number of RSSs which MUSIC and/or ESPRIT can support, which is the limiting factor of MUSIC and ESPRIT algorithms.
5.3 False detection probability
False detection probability, P false with (a) R · K =12 or (b) R · K =24 RSSs.
5.4 Timing and frequency offset estimation accuracy



Timing estimation error variance,
, with (a)
R
·
K
=12 or (b)
R
·
K
=24 RSSs.
Frequency estimation error variance,
, with (a)
R
·
K
=12 or (b)
R
·
K
=24 RSSs.
In Figure 9, it is shown that HRFE outperforms MFE and EFE over the whole range, and HRFE becomes better than ZCFE with SNR increase. Even though HRFE shows worse performance on low SNR ranges compared to ZCFE, but please remark that this estimation error variance is only evaluated for the successfully corrected code sets, i.e.,
. Therefore, if we consider the poor false-alarm and missing probability performance of ZCCD shown in Figure 7 (more than 10% of false-alarm and missing), the overall ZCFE performance will be severely degraded on the whole.
On the whole, the performance of other algorithms undergo severe performance degradation because wrongly detected code index disturbs timing and frequency offset estimation. However, the proposed HRTE and HRFE algorithm more robust to the wrongly detected code effect.
6 Conclusions
First, the proposed method utilizing IMDF scheme supports the flexible subcarrier allocation usage. Basically, the proposed algorithm can be applied for the subcarrier allocation based on small tile and/or resource block structure whereas Zadoff-Chu sequence algorithm requires only the subband allocation, which should consist of consecutive subcarriers. Since the proposed algorithm also supports frequency noncontiguous combination of multiple tiles, actually it would even bring the performance improvement on the proposed scheme due to the enriched frequency diversity experience on the sample data. In addition, tile concept is compliant to the state-of-the-art wireless cellular systems, e.g., IEEE 802.16m and 3GPP LTE-Advanced [2, 3], so this scheme can be adopted directly to the practical system without any painful remedy on the frame and resource allocation structure.
Next, the proposed method using IMDF scheme fully utilizes the resources to distinguish multiple RSSs as many as possible. In the practical scenario which only a few OFDMA symbols are utilized in the ranging process, the proposed HR algorithm can still increase Kuid by adjusting the number of tiles Q and the number of subcarriers V. Note that the number of RSSs in MUSIC and ESPRIT is easily restricted by the limited number of OFDMA symbols. Consequently, it confirms that the HR algorithm can smartly utilize the given data matrix to distinguish many RSSs simultaneously.
From the simulation results, it is shown that the proposed method outperforms the other algorithms in terms of the code detection and offset estimation while supporting more number of RSSs. Especially, the newly designed and introduced two-dimensional code index pair with the aid of automatic pairing property enables for the algorithm to increase the minimum Euclidean distance between two code index pairs and improve the acquisition range and detection/estimation performance accordingly. Consequently, this HR method can be proper for the dense network ranging process such as small cell, Machine-type communications, device-to-device communications.
Appendix
where
and
.




Declarations
Authors’ Affiliations
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