Framed Fidelity MAC: Losslessly packing multi-user transmissions in a virtual point-to-point framework

Zhao Li*, Bigui Zhang, Chengyu Liu, Zhixian Chang, Kang G. Shin, Zheng Yan

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

    Abstract

    As the number of subscribers in wireless communication systems grows rapidly, it has become important to design efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols to realize resources sharing among multiple users. When designing a MAC, effective management of co-channel interference (CCI) among multiple concurrent transmissions is critical to enhancing system's spectral efficiency (SE). Although MACs based on existing signal processing can suppress/mitigate CCI among multiple concurrent transmissions, they either consume communication resources or attenuate the desired signals’ transmission, hence incurring loss of transmission performance. To remedy this deficiency, we propose a Framed Fidelity MAC (F2MAC) to losslessly pack multi-user data transmissions into a virtual point-to-point (p2p) framework. Under F2MAC, the common receiver (Rx) selects a virtual framed-channel (a.k.a. framework) and broadcasts it to all mobile terminals. The latter calculate their precoding vectors based on the received virtual framework and their respective communication channels with respect to (w.r.t.) the Rx. Then, the pre-processed signals of multiple users are sent to the Rx via different eigenmodes of the framed-channel. By applying a receive filter to the received mixed signal, Rx can recover users’ desired data without interference. Since F2MAC can decouple the channel quality information (CQI) from channel direction information (CDI) related to the user's signal transmission, — i.e., CQI is exclusively determined by the user's communication channel while CDI depends on the unified framework, it can avoid the transmission performance loss incurred by existing signal processing based MAC which adjusts both CQI and CDI simultaneously. Moreover, we propose a Flexible Framed Fidelity MAC (F3MAC) to further improve the system's SE. By dynamically re-constructing the virtual framed-channel at each mobile user, the user's transmission can be realized with the principal eigenmode's gain of his/her communication channel. Our in-depth analysis and simulation results have shown the proposed MAC methods to significantly improve the SE of multi-user communication systems.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number109425
    Number of pages13
    JournalComputer Networks
    Volume219
    Early online date21 Oct 2022
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 24 Dec 2022
    MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

    Keywords

    • Co-channel interference (CCI)
    • Interference management (IM)
    • Medium access control (MAC)
    • Multi-user communication
    • Spectral efficiency

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