CLAIM OF PRIORITY UNDER 35 U.S.C. §120
The present Application for Patent is a continuation of patent application Ser. No. 11/557,035 entitled “NARROW-BAND INTERFERENCE CANCELLER” filed Nov. 6, 2006, issued as U.S. Pat. No. 7,720,185, and assigned to the assignee hereof and hereby expressly incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
BACKGROUND
1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication systems, and more particularly, to concepts and techniques for canceling narrow-band interference in a wireless receiver.
2. Background
In a wireless communications system, a transmitter typically processes (e.g., encodes and modulates) data and generates a radio frequency (RF) modulated signal. The transmitter then transmits the modulated signal through a wireless medium to a receiver. As the modulated signal propagates through the wireless medium, it may be subject to noise, interference, and other disturbances.
The function of the receiver is to recover the modulated signal in the presence of these disturbances. The design of the receiver will depend not only on the type of signal to be detected, but the nature of the disturbances. Narrow-band interference, for example, is a type of disturbance that can present unique challenges for a receiver designer. Unless properly filtered, the receiver may be unable to recover the modulated signal.
Narrow-band interference is often a concern in broadcast systems. These systems often operate in the UHF region, and therefore, are susceptible to narrow-band interference from TV signals operating in the same region of the frequency spectrum. Another source of narrow-band interference is other channels, whose interaction due to the non-linearity of the receiver may result in equivalent in-band components. The most common effects in this category are IM2 and IM3 interferers. The second-order non-linearity (IM2) components are generally out of band, except for a DC component which can be cancelled by a DC offset. The IM3 imperfections, however, tend to produce in-band components that can appear anywhere in the baseband signal, depending on the frequency of the narrow-band interference.
There is therefore a need in the art for techniques to cancel narrow-band interference at a wireless receiver.
SUMMARY
One aspect of a receiver is disclosed. The receiver includes an interference canceller configured to filter digital samples produced from a modulated signal transmitted over a wireless channel, and a digital variable gain amplifier (DVGA) configured to amplify the filtered digital samples.
An aspect of a method for canceling interference in a receiver is disclosed. The method includes filtering digital samples produced from a modulated signal transmitted over a wireless channel, and amplifying the filtered digital samples with a variable digital gain.
Another aspect of a receiver is disclosed. The receiver includes means for filtering digital samples produced from a modulated signal transmitted over a wireless channel, and means for amplifying the filtered digital samples with a variable digital gain.
Various aspects of a wireless communications system are illustrated by way of example, and not by way of limitation, in the accompanying drawings, wherein:
DETAILED DESCRIPTION
The detailed description set forth below in connection with the appended drawings is intended as a description of various configurations of the invention and is not intended to represent the only configurations in which the invention may be practiced. The detailed description includes specific details for the purpose of providing a thorough understanding of the invention. However, it will be apparent to those skilled in the art that the invention may be practiced without these specific details. In some instances, well known structures and components are shown in block diagram form in order to avoid obscuring the concepts of the invention.
The concepts and techniques described herein may be used in various wireless communication systems such as cellular systems, broadcast systems, wireless local area network (WLAN) systems, and others. The cellular systems may be Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) systems, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) systems, Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) systems, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) systems, Single-Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) systems, and other multiple access systems. The broadcast systems may be MediaFLO systems, Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds (DVB-H) systems, Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting for Terrestrial Television Broadcasting (ISDB-T) systems, and other broadcast systems. The WLAN systems may be IEEE 802.11 systems, Wi-Fi systems, and others. These systems are known in the art.
The concepts and techniques described herein are well suited for systems with a single subcarrier as well as systems with multiple subcarriers. Multiple subcarriers may be obtained with OFDM, SC-FDMA, or some other modulation technique. OFDM and SC-FDMA partition a frequency band (e.g., the system bandwidth) into multiple orthogonal subcarriers, which are also called tones, bins, etc. Each subcarrier may be modulated with data. In general, modulation symbols are sent on the subcarriers in the frequency domain with OFDM and in the time domain with SC-FDMA. OFDM is used in various systems such as MediaFLO, DVB-H and ISDB-T broadcast systems, IEEE 802.11a/g WLAN systems, and some cellular systems. Certain aspects and configurations of a narrow-band interference canceller are described below for a broadcast system that uses OFDM, e.g., a MediaFLO system.
At transmitter 102, a transmit (TX) data and pilot processor 106 processes (e.g., encodes, interleaves, and symbol maps) traffic data and generates data symbols. The TX data and pilot processor 106 also generates pilot symbols. As used herein, a data symbol is a modulation symbol for data, a pilot symbol is a modulation symbol for pilot, and a modulation symbol is a complex value for a point in a signal constellation (e.g., for PSK or QAM). An OFDM modulator 108 multiplexes the data symbols and pilot symbols, performs OFDM modulation on the multiplexed data and pilot symbols, and generates OFDM symbols. An analog front end (AFE) 114 processes (e.g., converts to analog, amplifies, filters, and frequency upconverts) the OFDM symbols and generates a modulated signal, which is transmitted via an antenna 116.
In one configuration of a TX pilot processor 110 residing in a base station, two time-division multiplexed (TDM) pilots are generated. The first TDM pilot (or “TDM pilot 1”) is a pilot generated with a first pseudo-random number (PN) sequence (or “PN1” sequence) and the second TDM pilot (or “TDM pilot 2”) is a pilot generated with a second PN sequence (or “PN2” sequence). Each base station is assigned a specific PN2 sequence that uniquely identifies the base station among neighboring base stations. A receiver in an access terminal may use the TDM pilot 1 to detect for the presence of a signal, obtain a coarse timing estimate, and estimate the frequency error. The receiver may use the TDM pilot 2 to identify the specific base station transmitting the TDM pilot 2 and fine tune the coarse timing estimate.
At the receiver 104, an antenna 118 receives the modulated signal from the transmitter 102 and provides it to an AFE 120. The AFE 120 processes the modulated signal (e.g., filters, amplifies, and frequency downconverts) to obtain a baseband signal and further digitizes the signal to obtain digital samples of the baseband signal. An automatic gain control (AGC) circuit 122 adjusts the gain of the AFE 120 and multiplies the samples with a digital variable gain to produce samples having a desired average power (i.e., a power setpoint).
An interference canceller 124 removes narrow-band interference from the samples. After canceling the narrow-band interference, depending on the signal-to-interference ratio, the average power is reduced and can be variable. This could have a negative impact on downstream processing. To maintain a constant signal power level after removing narrow-band interference, a digital variable gain amplifier (DVGA) 126 is used to amplify the output of the interference canceller 124 to the power setpoint. In a manner to be described in greater detail later, a bypass circuit 126 may be used to bypass the interference canceller 124 and DVGA 126 when the narrow-band interference is weak or non-existent. The bypass circuit 126 may determine that the narrow-band interference is weak when the gain of the DVGA is close to unity or below some other threshold. When bypassed, the bypass circuit 126 may also disable the interference canceller 124 and DVGA to reduce power consumption.
An initial acquisition unit 130 is responsible for signal acquisition and coarse time and frequency synchronization. The samples are correlated with a delayed pilot sequence and the result compared to one or more parameters to detect the presence of the pilot sequence in the received signal and the timing. In one configuration of an initial acquisition unit 130 utilizing two time-division multiplexed pilots, the samples are correlated with a delayed TDM pilot 1 sequence. The result is compared with any number of parameters to detect the presence the signal from the transmitter 102, an estimate of the frequency offset, and a coarse estimate of timing. The parameters may include, by way of example, the height, width and slope of the signal peak generated by the correlator. In a manner to be described in greater detail later, the TDM pilot 1 parameters may be adjusted based on the strength of the narrow-band interference.
An OFDM demodulator 132 performs OFDM demodulation on the samples and produces data symbol estimates, which are estimates of the data symbols sent by transmitter 102. The OFDM demodulator 132 provides the data symbol estimates to a receive (RX) data processor 134. The RX data processor 134 processes (e.g., symbol demaps, deinterleaves, and decodes) the data symbol estimates and produces decoded data.
The adaptive filter is used to model the undesired component tk as closely as possible, given its reference xk′. This is possible using the structure showed in
Equation 1 requires the addition of L multiplication products to produce the estimate yk. This may be achieved with L multipliers and an L-input adder. Alternatively, a multiplexing scheme may be used to reduce the hardware requirements. By way of example, the hardware requirements may be reduced by accumulating N pipelined multiplication operations, with each multiplication operation producing L/N filter coefficients. In this example, the number of multipliers can be reduced to L/N multipliers. In operation, two multiplexers 306, 308 provide the first L/N reference samples xk′ from the sample register 302 and the first L/N filter coefficients wk(n) from the coefficient register 304 to the L/N multipliers 310 during a first clock cycle. The resulting L/N multiplication products are provided to an accumulator 312 for addition. During the next clock cycle, the two multiplexers 306, 308 provide the next L/N reference samples xk′ from the sample register 302 and the next L/N filter coefficients wk(n) from the coefficient register 304 to the L/N multipliers 310 to produce a second set of L/N multiplication products, which are also provided to the accumulator 312 for addition. This process is repeated for N clocks cycles to produce L multiplication products that are added together in a pipeline fashion by the accumulator 312 to produce the estimate yk. This process can be employed whenever the rate of the input samples xk is at least N times slower than the clock rate.
A computation block 314 uses the reference samples xk, the current filter coefficients wk(n), and the filtered samples ŝk output from the interference canceller 124 to update the filter coefficients wk(n−1). In this example, the computation block 314 computes the filter coefficients as follows:
wk(n+1)=wk(n)+2μ·ŝk·conj(xk′) (2)
where conj(.) denotes the complex conjugate operation and 2μ is the loop gain.
The reference samples xk′ are loaded from the sample register 302 in the adaptive filter 202 into a register 316 and a filtered sample ŝk output from the interference canceller 124 is loaded into a register 318. In order to reduce the hardware requirements of the computation block, the L updated filter coefficients wk(n+1) are computed serially. During each clock cycle, a reference sample xk′ from the register 316, a filter coefficient wk(n) from the coefficient register 304, and the filtered sample ŝk from the latch 318 are provided to the computation block 314 to update a single filter coefficient wk(n+1).
Referring to
Returning to
In one configuration, the adaptive filter 202 supports multiple operating modes (e.g., an acquisition mode and a tracking mode). In the acquisition mode, the filter coefficient updates are performed with a relatively large loop gain 2μ to achieve faster convergence. This might be advantageous, for example, when the access terminal first powers up. Once the filter coefficients wk(n) are converged, the adaptive filter 202 switches to the tracking mode. In the tracking mode, the filter coefficients wk(n) are modified with a lower loop gain 2μ to achieve a good balance between rate of convergence and time averaging. The update rate can also be reduced in tracking mode, in order to minimize the jitter-effects and conserve power.
Returning to
In a broadcast system, where the receiver resides in the access terminal, the AFE 120 may occasionally, or frequently, tune to another RF channel broadcasting the same content to improve reception as the access terminal moves through the access network. Before the AFE 120 tunes to another RF channel, it needs to determine whether the signal strength on that channel is sufficient. The ability to make this determination is enhanced if the signal strength measurement is made after the narrow-band interference is removed. The RSSI computed by the computation block 136 may be used for this purpose.
When the AFE 120 (see
Returning to
These indicators may also be used to adjust one or more parameters used by the coarse acquisition unit 130 to detect the pilot sequence. By way of example, the indicators may be used to adjust the parameters that are applied against the height, width and slope of the signal peak output resulting from the correlation of the samples and the locally stored replica of the TDM pilot 1. During periods of strong narrow-band interference, these indicators may be used to adjust the parameters used to detect the pilot sequence. Those skilled in the art will readily understand how best to optimize the adjustment of the parameters to detect the pilot sequence depending on the level of narrow-band interference experience by the receiver.
The various illustrative logical blocks, modules, circuits, elements, and/or components described in connection with the embodiments disclosed herein may be implemented or performed with a general purpose processor, a digital signal processor (DSP), an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), a field programmable gate array (FPGA) or other programmable logic component, discrete gate or transistor logic, discrete hardware components, or any combination thereof designed to perform the functions described herein. A general-purpose processor may be a microprocessor, but in the alternative, the processor may be any conventional processor, controller, microcontroller, or state machine. A processor may also be implemented as a combination of computing components, e.g., a combination of a DSP and a microprocessor, a plurality of microprocessors, one or more microprocessors in conjunction with a DSP core, or any other such configuration.
The methods or algorithms described in connection with the embodiments disclosed herein may be embodied directly in hardware, in a software module executed by a processor, or in a combination of the two. A software module may reside in RAM memory, flash memory, ROM memory, EPROM memory, EEPROM memory, registers, hard disk, a removable disk, a CD-ROM, or any other form of storage medium known in the art. A storage medium may be coupled to the processor such that the processor can read information from, and write information to, the storage medium. In the alternative, the storage medium may be integral to the processor.
The previous description is provided to enable any person skilled in the art to practice the various embodiments described herein. Various modifications to these embodiments will be readily apparent to those skilled in the art, and the generic principles defined herein may be applied to other embodiments. Thus, the claims are not intended to be limited to the embodiments shown herein, but is to be accorded the full scope consistent with the language claims, wherein reference to an element in the singular is not intended to mean “one and only one” unless specifically so stated, but rather “one or more.” All structural and functional equivalents to the elements of the various embodiments described throughout this disclosure that are known or later come to be known to those of ordinary skill in the art are expressly incorporated herein by reference and are intended to be encompassed by the claims. Moreover, nothing disclosed herein is intended to be dedicated to the public regardless of whether such disclosure is explicitly recited in the claims. No claim element is to be construed under the provisions of 35 U.S.C. §112, sixth paragraph, unless the element is expressly recited using the phrase “means for” or, in the case of a method claim, the element is recited using the phrase “step for.”