In this letter, a robust time synchronization algorithm is proposed for MIMO-OFDM based WLAN systems. IEEE 802.11ac MIMO-OFDM WLAN standard specifies that the preamble with cyclic shift diversity (CSD) scheme is used for time and frequency synchronization. However, since the CSD scheme introduces multiple cross-correlation peaks at the receiver, serious performance degradation appears if the conventional cross-correlation based algorithm is applied. In the proposed algorithm, the time synchronization error due to multiple peaks is compensated by adding the cross-correlation value to its reverse cyclic-shifted version. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves an SNR gain of 1.5 to 4.5dB for the synchronization failure rate of 10-2 compared with the existing algorithms.

A robust time synchronization algorithm is proposed for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based aeronautical mobile airport communication systems (AeroMACS). Using a very sharp timing metric obtained from the preamble, the proposed algorithm shows very robust time synchronization performance for various channel models in an airport. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves an SNR gain of 2 to 3dB at the failure rate of 10-2 to 10-3 compared with previous algorithms.

In this letter, we propose a low complexity fixed sphere decoder (FSD) with statistical threshold for multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The proposed algorithm is developed by applying two threshold-based pruning algorithms using an initial detection and statistical noise constraint to the FSD. The proposed FSD algorithm is suitable for a fully pipelined hardware implementation and also has low complexity because the threshold of the proposed pruning algorithm is pre-calculated and independently applied to the path without sorting operation. Simulation results show that the proposed FSD has the performance of the original FSD as well as a low complexity compared to the original FSD and other low complexity FSD algorithms.

This paper presents an adaptive interference-aware receiver for multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) downlink systems in wireless local area network (WLAN) systems. The MU-MIMO downlink technique is one of the key techniques that are newly applied to WLAN systems in order to support a very high throughput. However, the simultaneous communication of several users causes inter-user interference (IUI), which adversely affects receivers. Therefore, in order to prevent IUI, a precoding technique is defined at the transmitter based on feedback from the receiver. Unfortunately, however, the receiver still suffers from interference, because the precoding technique is prone to practical errors from the feedback quantization and subcarrier grouping scheme. Whereas ordinary detection schemes are available to mitigate such interference, such schemes are unsuitable because of their low performance or high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose an switching algorithm based on the norm ratio between an effective channel matrix for the desired signal and that of the interfering signals. Simulation results based on the IEEE 802.11ac standard show that the proposed algorithm can achieve near-optimal performance with a 70% reduction in computational complexity.

This paper proposes an efficient list extension algorithm for soft-output multiple-input-multiple-output (soft-MIMO) detection. This algorithm extends the list of candidate vectors based on the vector selected by initial detection, in order to solve the empty-set problem, while reducing the number of additional vectors. The additional vectors are obtained from multiple detection orders, from which high-quality soft-output can be generated. Furthermore, a method to reduce the complexity of the determination of the multiple detection orders is described. From simulation results for a 44 system with 16- and 64-quadrature amplitude modulations (QAM) and rate 1/2 and 5/6 duo-binary convolutional turbo code (CTC), the soft-MIMO detection to which the proposed list extension was applied showed a performance degradation of less than 0.5 dB at bit error rate (BER) of 10-5, compared to that of the soft-output maximum-likelihood detection (soft-MLD) for all code rate and modulation pairs, while the complexity of the proposed list extension was approximately 38% and 17% of that of an existing algorithm with similar performance in a 44 system using 16- and 64-QAM, respectively.