Millimeter-wave transmission for small-cell backhaul in dense urban environment: a solution based on MIMO-OFDM and Space-Time Shift Keying (STSK)

Abstract

Next generation wireless standards will exploit the wide bandwidth available at the millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) frequencies, in particular the E-band (71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz). This large available bandwidth may be converted into multi-gigabit capacity, when efficient and computationally-affordable transceivers are designed to cope with the constrained power budget, the clustered fading and the high level of phase noise, which actually characterize mm-wave connections. In this paper, we propose a viable Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) solution for high bit-rate transmission in the E-band with application to small-cell backhaul based on Space-Time Shift Keying (STSK) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). STSK provides an efficient trade-off between diversity and multiplexing without inter-channel interference (ICI) and without the need for large antenna arrays. These features make STSK theoretically preferable over other throughput-oriented space-time coding techniques, namely Spatial Multiplexing (SMUX) and Spatial Modulation (SM), which were recently considered in the literature for mm-wave MIMO applications. In this paper we consider the most significant channel impairments related to small-cell backhaul in dense urban environment, namely the correlated fading with and without the presence the line-of-sight (LOS), the phase noise, the rain attenuation and shadowing. Additionally, we consider small-size MIMO systems (2×2 and 4×4), and low-cost base station equipments in the perspective of easily-deployable small-cell network components. Comparative results, obtained by intensive simulations targeted at assessing link performance and coverage, have clearly shown the superior performance of STSK against counterpart techniques, although obtained at the cost of a somewhat reduced spectral efficiency.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Mohammed El-Hajjar: orcid.org/0000-0002-7987-1401

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