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Minimax Robust A Priori Information Aware Channel Equalization Muhammad Danish Nisar, Student Member, IEEE, and Wolfgang Utschick, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—An a priori information aware channel equalizer accepts some prior information about the unknown transmit symbols, in addition to the knowledge of channel coefficients and noise covariance, and therefore offers a superior performance as compared to an equalizer that lacks this additional information. Such an equalizer is employed, for instance, in turbo equalization systems, where it is placed in conjunction with a channel decoder that provides the necessary a priori information. In this paper, we consider the design of such an a priori information aware equalizer, under an imperfect knowledge of channel parameters. Precisely speaking, we pursue a minimax optimization procedure to robustify the design of the equalizer in presence of an uncertainty about the channel coefficients as well as the interference plus noise covariance. To this end, we employ a Kullback–Leibler divergence based, and a norm based uncertainty class, obtain closed form expressions for the worst-case uncertainties, and finally arrive at the optimal mean-square error (MSE) equalizers that offer the best worst-case performance under uncertainty. Finally, we show that the proposed minimax robust equalizer achieves significant performance gains in comparison to the conventional (nonrobust) equalizer, both as a standalone entity and also as part of an iterative detection system. Index Terms—a priori information, equalization, EXIT, KL divergence, minimax, minimax optimization, MMSE, robust, robust signal processing, strong duality, turbo, worst-case.

I. INTRODUCTION

I

N comparison to the optimal maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) and maximum-likelihood (ML) detectors, computationally inexpensive linear equalizers continue to remain a popular choice in practical receiver implementations. Linear equalizers are often designed under the objective of minimizing the equalization mean-square error (MSE), leading to the so-called minimum mean-square error (MMSE) equalizers. The design of an MMSE equalizer requires the knowledge of channel and also the knowledge of interference plus noise covariance. In case, the knowledge of these design ingredients is imprecise, the optimality of the MMSE equalizer in terms of its cost function becomes questionable. Various approaches have been proposed in the literature, especially in the context of minimax optimization framework [1]–[3], to help the equalizer stay robust against their uncertain knowledge.

Manuscript received June 03, 2010; revised September 29, 2010; accepted December 02, 2010. Date of publication December 20, 2010; date of current version March 09, 2011. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Prof. Xiqi Gao. The work of M. D. Nisar has been funded by Nokia Siemens Networks, Germany. The authors are with the Associate Institute for Signal Processing (MSV), Technische Universität München (TUM) (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]). Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TSP.2010.2101068

A. Related Work Robust equalization of a frequency-selective single-input single-output (SISO) channel has been analyzed in [4], where a minimax optimization is pursued under the constraint that the deviations of the estimated channel frequency and phase functions from the true ones are bounded. In [5], the authors extend this to a frequency-selective multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel with an additional requirement of causality on the equalization filters. A similar problem is explored in [6], where the minimax approach is also compared with the so-called “competitive” approach. Unlike [4]–[6], the work in [7] considers uncertainty not only in the channel but also in the estimate of interference plus noise covariance matrix. An important class of linear equalizers, is the a priori information aware equalizers, where we have some a priori knowledge about the unknown transmit symbols. This knowledge is typically available in terms of the symbol means and their correlations, and may originate from parallel transmissions (such as diversity or parallel concatenation) or from serially concatenated outer codes [8]. In the context of serial concatenation, an a priori information aware equalizer can be found in the turbo equalization systems. The pioneering work on turbo equalization [8]–[10] involved optimal MAP detector exchanging soft information about the transmit symbols with the channel decoder. However, later on owing to the exponential complexity of MAP detector, linear equalization based turbo detection became popular [11], [12]. In this regard, Tüchler et al. [13] effectively replaced the MAP detector with a combination of a soft intersymbol interference (ISI) canceler, linear MMSE equalizer and an a priori information aware demodulator. An alternative interpretation of this reduced complexity iterative detector was elaborated in [14], where turbo equalization is presented in the framework of an a priori information aware equalizer designed to equalize a correlated, nonzero mean symbol stream. B. Our Contributions In this work, we pursue the design of the a priori information aware equalizer with robustness against an uncertainty in the knowledge of channel coefficients and the interference plus noise covariance. To this end, we pursue the minimax optimization approach [1]–[3] to design the maximally robust equalizers that promise the best worst-case performance. In this regard, our work differs from [4]–[7] that we consider a more generic equalization scenario with some a priori information available, and simultaneously take into account the uncertainties in both the channel coefficients and the interference plus noise covariance. Our work can also be interpreted as a natural extension of [13] and [14] as we incorporate the presence of uncertainty into the design of the a priori information aware equalizer proposed

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NISAR AND UTSCHICK: MINIMAX ROBUST A PRIORI INFORMATION AWARE CHANNEL EQUALIZATION

there. It is worth mentioning, that our work differs from a recent work [15] that considers robust turbo equalization but with a perfect knowledge of noise covariance, and for a specialized case of convolutional channel matrix. Lastly, we mention that we do not explicitly consider how the estimates of channel and interference plus noise covariance matrices are obtained and whether the a priori information is exploited to improve these estimates or not? We consider these aspects to be beyond the scope of this paper, and therefore focus on the design of a robust equalizer under a given uncertain knowledge of the transmission channel and interference plus noise covariance. C. Outline and Notations We present the system model and the design of conventional (nonrobust) equalizer in Section II. In Section III, two uncertainty classes are defined, and then the design of robust a priori information aware equalizer is posed as a minimax optimization problem. Sections IV and V detail the proposed designs of the robust equalizer under the two uncertainty classes respectively. In Section VI, we outline how to obtain the worst case uncertainty for an arbitrary equalizer, while in Section VII we make some remarks about the results derived in this paper. Section VIII presents a performance comparison of the proposed equalizer with the nonrobust conventional design, and finally Section IX presents the conclusion. We use bold face capital letters for denoting matrices, bold face small letters for vectors and nonbold small letters for scalar variables. The operators and stand for expectation, Hermitian, and matrix determinant, respectively. The optimal values resulting from an optimization setup are labeled ad. The absence and presence of is often ditionally with a used to distinguish between the variables associated with the two uncertainty classes.

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and refer the interLLRs to the a priori information ested reader to [14] and [16] or similar work. The challenge in our design comes from the fact that the knowledge about the channel matrix and the interference plus is available at noise covariance matrix respecthe receiver only in terms of their estimates and tively. So, while we are interested in designing the a priori information aware equalizer to estimate the transmit symbols via the affine transformation1 (2) the equalizer is desired to be robust against the uncertainty in the channel and interference plus noise covariance matrices. Given , the equalization MSE, the expression , adopted as the optimization criterion in this work, can be given as

(3) with , where denotes the identity matrix of dimensions . Note that, in presence of a perfect knowledge of the channel matrix and that of interference plus noise covariance matrix , the conventional MMSE equalizer, obtained by the straight forward minimization of over , can be given as [14]2 (4) (5) In the sequel, however, we consider the scenario where only the estimated versions of and are known at the receiver.

II. SYSTEM MODEL

III. PROBLEM FORMULATION

We consider a typical baseband communication system model with a matrix channel

Given an imperfect knowledge of the channel and the interference plus noise covariance matrix in terms of their estimates and , we would like to design the equalizer such that the equalization MSE over the unknown actual channel is guaranteed to stay below a certain maximum level. To this end, we pose minimax optimization problems via the following uncertainty classes for the channel and the interference plus noise covariance matrices.

(1) The channel matrix can either represent a MIMO transmission (with receive and transmit antennas) over a flat fading channel, or it may correspond to a block based transmission over a multipath channel possibly with the use of a cyclic prefix. However, we keep the discussion general here and the only assumption that we make on the structure of is that . This is so because the transmit vector is assumed to contain independent complex symbols, e.g., from a M-QAM constellation. The vector, denotes the received symbols corrupted by the possibly correlated interference and noise term . The a priori information about is available at the receiver, in terms of its mean and the correlation matrix . The associated covariance matrix can be expressed as . In the context of turbo equalization systems, this a priori information is actually obtained from the extrinsic log likelihood ratios (LLRs) fed back by the channel decoder. Since the main focus of this work is the design of the equalizer itself, we skip the details of the transformation from the extrinsic

A. Uncertainty Classes We define the following two uncertainty classes to constrain the set of possible channel and interference plus noise covariance matrices for minimax formulation. Norm Based Uncertainty Class: This is defined by constraining, for instance, the Frobenius norms of the estimation errors of the channel matrix and the interference plus noise covariance matrix individually. Thus, we define the norm based uncertainty class as (6) 1Presence of the affine term a is due to the available nonzero a priori information [13], [14], [17]. 2The

subscript ()

stand for “Conventional” nonrobust design.

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and

are defined as follows:

can also be observed from Appendix A, where we evaluate their second-order Gateaux derivatives [21, App. A.5] to be employed in the later derivations. (7) (8)

KL Divergence Based Uncertainty Class: This is defined by constraining the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence [18] between the conditional probability densities associated with the estimated and the actual system model. Under the assumption of Gaussian interference plus noise signals, the two models can be characterized by the following distributions: Actual Model:

(9)

Estimated Model :

(10)

denotes the complex Gaussian distribution with where mean vector and covariance matrix . The KL divergence between these distributions can be interpreted as a degree of mismatch and its expected value w.r.t. the transmit vector can be given as [7],

IV. ROBUST EQUALIZER DESIGN FOR KL DIVERGENCE BASED UNCERTAINTY CLASS The minimax robust equalizer for the KL divergence based uncertainty class can be obtained via the optimization problem (14) adapted from (13). Since it involves maximization of a convex function, we note that the inner optimization is not a convex problem. Nevertheless, we show that a form of strong Lagrangian duality, similar to the one encountered in trust region subproblems [22], [23], still holds. This, as we are going to see, forms a key step towards arriving at closed form solution to our problem. First of all, we note that, since is convex in and , the inner maximization in (14) is reached at the boundary of the set . The KL inequality constraint in (12) is therefore an active constraint and can be replaced by the following equality constraint: (15)

(11)

Hence, the inner maximization problem in (14) can be equivalently written as

Now, we define the KL divergence based uncertainty class as (12) (16) The KL divergence measure has been used, for instance, in [7] and [19] to define the uncertainty class for the design of a robust least squares estimator and a conventional MMSE equalizer, respectively. Grünwald et al. [20] analyze interesting relationships between the minimization of KL divergence and the worst-case optimizations. B. Minimax Formulation With the uncertainty classes defined above, the design of maximally robust a priori information aware equalizer can now be posed as the following minimax optimization problem: (13) in (3) and where refers to either or defined above in (6) and (12), respectively. Thus, the inner maximization identifies the worst-case scenario, and then the outer minimization leads to the optimal equalizer that offers the best worst-case performance. We note that, both and are convex in and , because they are defined as sublevel sets of functions that are convex in and . Moreover, can be readily observed to be convex not only in and , but also in the equalizer design variables and . The convexity of and in and

The Lagrangian function associated with this problem can be written as (17) where is employed as the Lagrangian multiplier to dualize the equality constraint in (16). The positive semidefiniteness constraint is not dualized, but we will see later in (27), that it is implicitly satisfied. Next, we refer to a proposition that characterizes a strict local maximum of twice differentiable functions without assumptions on their convexity or concavity. Proposition 1. [21, Prop. 3.2.1]: Given that the cost function and the equality constraint are both twice continuously differentiable in and , if there exist and , such that (18) (19) (20) and furthermore, (21)

NISAR AND UTSCHICK: MINIMAX ROBUST A PRIORI INFORMATION AWARE CHANNEL EQUALIZATION

for all and mality, then

in the tangent space of the constraint at optiand constitute a strict local maximum of subject to .

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the conditions in (18) and (19) lead to the following worst-case uncertainties:

Thus, besides the KKT conditions (18), (19), and (20), if the second-order derivative is negative definite, then a strict local maximum is guaranteed. From Appendix A, we have

(26) (27) where

(22) Thus, for the condition (21) to be satisfied, the first term in (22) must be negative for all in the tangent space of the constraint at optimality. However, based on the arguments similar to those in [7], adapted from [22, Theorem 2.1], it can be shown that the term must, in fact, be negative for an arbitrary as well. Thus, we require (23) which, after simple manipulations, leads to being negative definite. Carrying out an eigenvalue decomposi, it can readily be observed that the tion of the matrix condition (21) can therefore be transformed into a necessary and sufficient condition on the Lagrangian multiplier

Note also that, with , the constraint is implicitly satisfied by in (27). Thus, provided that the condition (20) holds, the robust equalizer design problem (14) can be equivalently expressed as (28) where is the dual function obtained by the back substitution of and in the Lagrangian function (17). From the derivations in Appendix B, it can be given as

(29) (24) denotes the principal eigenvalue of its mawhere trix argument. A crucial observation here is that with , the Lagrangian becomes globally concave in and . This leads to the following proposition.

We note that its convexity in

is by definition convex in and and follows from the convexity of in and . Now, since by chain rule we

have

Proposition 2: A strict local maximum that satisfies the KKT conditions (18), (19) and (20) with a , is also the global maximum of subject to . Proof: Since for a is globally concave in have for all

, the Lagrangian and , we

where the equality in first line follows from (20) which ensures that . Now since the second term on RHS is nonnegative for all , we equivalently have (25) . for all Thus, a solution and , satisfying the KKT conditions in Proposition 1 with a Lagrangian multiplier satisfying (24), is the global maximum of in . Note that

(30) a that solves the inner minimization in (28), i.e., solves , implies that the condition (20) in Proposition 1 is satisfied as well. Hence, via Proposition 2, we established that the strong Lagrangian duality indeed holds for the inner maximization problem in (14). Before pursuing further, we make a change of variables, by defining the singular value decomposition (SVD), (31) where is the diagonal matrix containing the singular values, and denotes the set of singular vectors associated with nonzero singular values. Now, with the unitary matrix , we express

(32)

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where and its leading columns. Expressing and tions, we have

represents in these new nota-

leads to

, which can be transformed to (42)

(33) in (29) depends on only via and We note that , and setting can be considered as a first step towards the minimization of over in (28). , and then with Thus, we can safely restrict3 the following redefinitions: (34)

and this, together with the closed-form expression for in (39), completes the design of the maximally robust a priori information aware spatial MMSE equalizer for the KL divergence based uncertainty class. The associated worst-case channel uncertainty and the worst-case interference plus noise covariance matrix can be obtained via (26) and (27) respectively, by substituting and . V. ROBUST EQUALIZER DESIGN FOR NORM BASED UNCERTAINTY CLASS The minimax robust equalizer for the norm based uncertainty class can be obtained via

the original system model can be expressed for simply as (35)

(43)

We note that the system dimensions are now effectively reduced to , and we now have from and . The reconstruction expression can be written as , and and (cf. (26) and (27), the worst-case (optimal) values, respectively), are recasted as

in (6) is separable Since the norm based uncertainty class and , the minimax into individual uncertainty classes for robust equalizer design problem can be decomposed as

(36)

(44) The inner-most optimization over to (cf. (3))

can, in fact, be simplified (45)

(37) Incorporating the uncertainty class definition from (8), this re, where duces to Note that we now have and . Thus, the dual optimization problem in (28) can now be posed in the new notations as (46) (38)

where

. Setting , we get the optimal

Assuming, that the uncertainty (governed by ) is small enough to keep the PSD constraint inactive, the problem can be readily solved to

as (47) (39)

Substituting

into

where the Lagrangian multiplier is selected to satisfy the uncertainty norm constraint with equality, leading to

, we finally get (48) (40)

The numerical solution of the remaining convex optimization problem (41) 3Note that this change of variables cannot be made right at the start in presence

of uncertainties about channel and interference plus noise covariance matrices, as will be evident in the analysis for the later uncertainty class. It is the special structure of the worst-case scenario here, that allows this change of variables . and the conclusion of ~ = 0

W

The remaining optimization problem can now be posed as (49) To solve this minimax problem, we follow a line of argumentation similar to that for the KL divergence based uncertainty class in Section IV, and conclude by virtue of Proposition 1 and Proposition 2, that once the KKT conditions are satisfied at a Lagrangian multiplier , then a local maximum

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of , is also its global maximum.4 The leads to KKT optimality condition for

needs to be solved numerically to get the optimal minimax rofor the norm based uncertainty class. The opbust equalizer timal Lagrangian multiplier plugged into (54) gives and the worst-case uncertainties for the norm based uncertainty class can be obtained via (48) and (51).

We note that unlike the case of KL divergence based uncertainty class, the optimality condition fails to admit a closed form ex. Thus, a numerical optimization would be necpression for , and essary to arrive at the worst-case channel uncertainty for then ultimately at the minimax robust equalizer the norm based uncertainty class. However in the special case of , or if the uncertainty class is modified from (7) to,

VI. WORST-CASE UNCERTAINTY FOR AN ARBITRARY EQUALIZER In order to compare the robustness of various equalizers, an analysis of their performance at their respective worst-case uncertainties is necessary. To this end, we pursue the following optimization problem to identify the worst-case uncertainties for , with respect to, for instance, the KL a given equalizer divergence based uncertainty class,

(50)

(56)

then we are indeed able to proceed further. We label the as. With sociated modified norm based uncertainty class by similar to that in this definition, we get an expression for Section IV,

This can be readily recognized as the inner maximization problem of the minimax robust equalizer design problem (cf. (14)). Following steps similar to those in Section IV, the worst-case uncertainties can be expressed as

(51)

(57)

, and . Putting in the into the Lagrangian, we get the dual function

(58)

with values for

where

(52) and the remaining optimization problem can be expressed as

with a . The optimal Lagrangian multiplier is obtained by numerically solving the dual convex problem, i.e.,

(53) (59) which is comparable to the problem (28) in the KL divergence based uncertainty class. But we note that the change of variables to reduce problem dimensions, especially the implication for the minimization of the dual does not hold here, . Thus, unlike because of the noncanceled term the case of KL divergence based uncertainty class, the problem dimensions do not reduce here. Nevertheless, the first-order optimality condition for yields

(54) and the remaining convex optimization problem

(55) 4Alternatively, the strong Lagrangian duality can be invoked by realizing that, the inner maximization over is basically a trust region subproblem [22], [23].

H

defined in (29). Substitution of obtained with from the optimization problem above, into the expressions of and in (57) and (58), respectively, yield the worst-case uncertainties for the given equalizer . VII. DISCUSSION In this section, we make some observations and intuitive remarks on the results derived in this paper. Remark 1: The norm based uncertainty class in (6) is parametrized by two parameters and which separately control the uncertainty in and , while the KL divergence based uncertainty class in (12) allows the uncertainty control via a single . parameter Remark 2: A fundamental difference exists in the way the two uncertainty classes are defined. While the norm based uncertainty class restricts the uncertainty magnitude directly, the KL divergence based uncertainty class restricts the KL divergence between the two distributions (actual: (9) and assumed: (10)) resulting from the uncertainty. However, the redefined norm

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based uncertainty class in (50) can be interpreted in terms of the two conditional distributions. The uncertainty class basically bounds the errors between the two distributions by restricting the errors in their means and covariances individually, while the uncertainty class bounds the error between the two distributions via the KL divergence measure. Remark 3: KL divergence based uncertainty class admits closed form expressions for both, the worst-case channel uncertainty and the worst-case interference plus noise covariance , in its matrix. In contrast, the norm based uncertainty class original form, only offers the closed form expression for the worst-case interference plus noise covariance matrix. Remark 4: The worst-case uncertainties corresponding to the norm based uncertainty class, lack the crucial structure that allows for the reduction of problem dimensions. The implication that only holds in the case of KL divergence based uncertainty class, and as such dimensions of the optimization problem are lower there. Remark 5: A question of central importance is how to choose ) characterizing the size of unthe threshold value (such as certainty sets in the design process? We emphasize, that it is to be chosen not only w.r.t. the magnitude of uncertainty expected, but also with regard to the desired trade off between conservativeness and robustness. In case, we have additionally the information about uncertainty distribution, some hints on the selection of in order to provide probabilistic guarantees are discussed in Appendix C. This question has been addressed in the context of minimum variance (non a priori information aware) MIMO equalizers by Rong et al. in [24]. Remark 6: We have also analyzed the evolution of the optimal robust equalizer as a function of the uncertainty level, i.e., how it transforms from an all zero equalizer at extremely high uncertainty magnitudes to the conventional equalizer at extremely low uncertainty magnitudes. This interesting simulation based analysis, not presented here because of space constraints, shows that this variation of the equalizer w.r.t. uncertainty level is quite smooth. VIII. SIMULATION RESULTS We provide simulation results for the a priori information aware equalization with transmission over a matrix channel as in (1). As aforementioned, the model can be interpreted in two ways, corresponding either to a MIMO transmission over flat fading channel or to a cyclic prefixed transmission over multipath fading channel. For simulation results, we adopt the first interpretation of the system model, and consider a 4 2 MIMO transmission (i.e., and ) with i.i.d. complex Gaussian distributed channel coefficients. The transmit symbols come from a Gray encoded 16-QAM constellation. The received signal vector is impaired not only by the additive white Gaussian noise, but also by the spatially correlated interference term with a given carrier-to-interference (C/I) level. The spatial covariance matrix is modeled as with controlling the degree of interference spatial correlation [25]. For the results presented in this section, we fix , but we mention that lower values such as also lead to similar results. The a priori information about is provided to the equalizer in terms of the mean and the correlation matrix . For simulation results, the a priori information are obtained from the

perspective of serial concatenation, under the common assumption of Gaussian LLRs [26] for the bits. The LLRs are assumed i.e., their variance is to have the distribution equal to twice the absolute value of mean. With the sign of mean chosen w.r.t. the actual bit being , the quality of the a priori information is solely controlled via the mean . Note that among the two robust designs resulting from the KL divergence based and norm based uncertainty classes (presented in Sections IV and V, respectively), we provide here the simulation results for the KL divergence based robust equalizer design only.5 The performance of the robust equalizer based on the norm based uncertainty class is expected to be similar, but since the two uncertainty classes are characterized in different ways, a comparison of their performance with each other is not possible. Note further that for easier interpretation of simulation results, we use a normalized KL measure (60) , such that a design value of in place of corresponds to no uncertainty, while a value of corresponds to a maximum uncertainty that leads to an all zero equalizer being optimal. In the sequel, we compare the performance of the proposed maximally (minimax) robust a priori information aware MMSE equalizer with the nonrobust, conventional equalizer [12], [14]. We label these equalizers as follows: • conventional a priori Information MMSE equalizer: from (4) and (5); • minimax robust a priori Information MMSE equalizer: from (42) and (39). Note that for solving the optimization problem (41), we employ the Matlab optimization toolbox, in particular the function fmincon with the active-set algorithm. In Section VIII-A, we present the performance comparison of the two equalizers as stand-alone entities, in terms of the equalization MSE—our optimization function—as well as in terms of the coded BER (CBER) which is often the ultimate performance measure. Next, in Section VIII-B, we investigate the performance of the equalizers in the context of turbo equalization and study their convergence behavior via EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts [26]. A. Analysis as a Standalone Entity In this subsection, we compare the performance of the conventional and the robust equalizer as standalone entities designed for the given a priori information. To this end, we generate numerous (1000) Monte Carlo realizations of and , and then compare the performance of the two equalizer for their respective worst-case channels under the KL divergence based uncertainty class. Fig. 1 shows the worst-case equalization MSE achieved by the two a priori information aware equalizers as a function of receive SNRs at two C/I levels namely 15 and 30 dB. The results 5 10 15, are shown for four uncertainty magnitudes, and 20 dB. It can be seen that for all the uncertainty magnitudes, the performance of the proposed minimax robust equal5This preference to the KL divergence based design is primarily based on the remarks 3 and 4 in Section VII.

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Fig. 2. Performance comparison in terms of equalization MSE for worst-case channels as a function of the quality of a priori information. The curves are 15 dB, C/I shown at  30 dB and two SNR values. The solid curves represent SNR of 10 dB, while the dashed curves represent SNR of 20 dB.

=0

Fig. 1. Performance comparison in terms of equalization MSE for worst-case channels versus SNR at different uncertainty levels. Solid lines represent curves for  dB, dashed for  10 dB, dot-dashed for  15 dB, and 20 dB. (a) C/I 15 dB and (b) C/I 30 dB. dotted for 

= 05 =0

=0 =

=

=0

izer is superior to the nonrobust design. As expected, the performance of both the equalizers improve as the uncertainty goes down to 20 dB. Additionally, it can be observed that the performance gap between the two equalizers shrinks as the uncertainty goes down, which is also intuitive, since under no uncertainty, the minimax robust equalizer converges to the conventional one. In comparison with Fig. 1(a), Fig. 1(b) considers a lower interference level, which leads to improvement in the equalization MSE performance. The saturation of MSE curves in both figures, as the SNR increases, can be attributed to the presence of uncertainty in the estimates of channel and interference plus noise covariance matrices. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that especially at high uncertainties, while the MSE of proposed equalizer only saturates with increasing SNR, the MSE performance of the conventional design worsens with the increasing SNR. This results from the fact that the conventional equalizer ignores the presence of uncertainty in its design.

=

The results in Fig. 1, are obtained for a fixed quality of a for the mean of priori information governed by a value of Gaussian LLRs. In Fig. 2, we compare the performance of the equalizers as a function of the a priori information quality. To this end, we vary the mean of Gaussian LLRs from (corresponding to no a priori information) to (corresponding to an almost perfect a priori information). We observe that the performance gap is relatively stable from low to high quality of the a priori information. Next, we examine the implications of superior equalization MSE performance on the final coded BER performance of the system. To this end, we consider transmission of 16-QAM constellation symbols (with Gray-mapping) and examine the worstcase CBER performance. The CBER results are then averaged over various channel realizations via Monte Carlo simulations. To obtain the CBER results, we employ the rate 1/3 turbo code from LTE specifications [27]. We present in Fig. 3, the comparison of the conventional and the proposed minimax robust a priori information aware equalizer in terms of their final coded BER performance at four uncertainty levels. The comparison is shown at two C/I levels, namely 10 dB and 30 dB in the two subfigures respectively. It can be observed that the proposed robust equalizer leads to a significantly superior coded BER performance at both C/I levels, especially at moderate uncertainty magnitudes. All the same, the error floor of the minimax robust equalizer is always lower which, as will be seen in Section VIII-B, has important implications on the better convergence properties of the robust equalizer in iterative systems. B. Analysis in Iterative Detection Setup In this subsection, we investigate via EXIT charts, the performance of the equalizers in an iterative set up with a channel decoder that feeds back the a priori information about transmit symbols [28]. EXIT chart [26] is a useful tool in analyzing the performance of turbo processing based iterative receivers. It plots the mutual information at the input of a block versus the mutual information at its output. Since the output of one block

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Fig. 3. Performance comparison in terms of coded BER for worst-case chan5 dB, nels at different uncertainty levels. Solid lines represent curves for  dashed lines for  10 dB, dotted–dashed lines for  15 dB, and dotted 20 dB. (a) C/I 10 dB and (b) C/I 30 dB. lines for 

=0

=0

=

=

=0

=0

forms the input to the other block, the EXIT curves of the two blocks can be drawn into a single plot with axes swapped for one of the blocks. Such an EXIT chart can be used to analyze the performance of turbo processing system without the need to simulate the whole iterative process. Furthermore, it provides useful insights on the convergence behavior of different schemes. In Fig. 4, we plot the EXIT characteristic curves of the equalizers, while incorporating the turbo principle of nullifying the a priori information for the current symbol [13], [14]. Fig. 4(a) considers the scenario with uncertainty level 10 dB and C/I 30 dB, while Fig. 4(b) considers 15 dB and C/I 15 dB. In each subfigure, the equalizer EXIT curves are plotted at two operating SNRs, namely SNR 15 dB and SNR 30 dB. Along the axis, the mutual information between the a priori information provided to the equalizer at its input and the actual bits is plotted, while along the axis the mutual information between the output of the equalizer/demodulator and the

Fig. 4. EXIT chart based performance comparison of the equalizers as part of an iterative system for two scenarios. Thick continuous curve (without markers) represent the EXIT curve for the rate 1/2 and rate 2/3 convolutional decoders. The equalizer EXIT curves are shown for two SNR values. The dashed curves show the performance at SNR 15 dB, while the solid curves show the per30 dB. (a)  10 dB, C/I formance at SNR 30 dB, rate 1/2 and (b)  15 dB, C/I 15 dB, rate 2/3.

=0

=

=

=

=0

=

actual bits is recorded. We note that, as the quality of the input a priori information improves, both the equalizers produce an increasingly better mutual information at the output. To throw some light on the convergence behavior of the equalizers in turbo equalization setting, we also show in Fig. 4 the decoder EXIT curves from [29], for a rate 1/2 and rate 2/3 convolutional code with generator (7, 5) in the standard octal representation. The convergence behavior can be analyzed by tracing the staircase trajectories starting from equalizers with no a prioriinformation. It can be seen that the iterative performance improves until an intersection between the EXIT curves of the equalizer and the decoder. For instance, in Fig. 4(a), at a SNR of 15 dB, the EXIT curves for both equalizers intersect with the decoder curve rather early at the decoder output MI of around 0.25. However, as the SNR increases to 30 dB, we note that while the conventional equalizer’s curve intersects still around an MI of 0.45, but the trajectory of the robust equalizer

NISAR AND UTSCHICK: MINIMAX ROBUST A PRIORI INFORMATION AWARE CHANNEL EQUALIZATION

continues as far as 0.99, leading to a significantly better detection quality. Similar comments hold for the subfigure Fig. 4(b), where rate 2/3 decoder is considered. Thus, in both scenarios, we observe gains of the proposed minimax robust equalizer as compared to the conventional nonrobust equalizer.

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, we follow For evaluating the derivative of a similar procedure. The first-order gradients are obtained as

(66) (67)

IX. CONCLUSION In this paper, we presented the design of a minimax robust a priori information aware equalizer in presence of an uncertain knowledge of the channel matrix and an imperfect estimate of the interference plus noise covariance matrix. Robust equalizer design is crucial in practical systems where we neither have a perfect channel knowledge nor is the estimate of interference plus noise covariance matrix perfect. In such scenarios, ignoring the presence of uncertainty—the conventional design approach—can lead to a significant degradation in equalization performance. On the other hand, incorporating uncertainty, for instance, via the deterministic framework—the minimax robust design approach—leads to equalizers that offer the best possible guarantee on the worst-case performance. We have analyzed the performance of the proposed minimax robust equalizer in comparison to the conventional approach, and observed significant performance gains both as a stand-alone entity and as part of an iterative (turbo) equalization system. Moreover, we have presented a methodology to obtain probabilistic performance guarantees, if statistical information about the uncertainty is made available.

APPENDIX A SECOND ORDER GATEAUX DERIVATIVE OF THE IN (17) LAGRANGIAN We evaluate here the second-order Gateaux derivative [21, App. A.5] of in (17). To this end, we first evaluate the gradients of in (11), individually with respect to and , to get (61)

such that the first-order gateaux derivative along arbitrary directions and is obtained as (68) For the evaluation of the second-order derivative, we again evaluate the gradients (69) hence the second-order gateaux derivative of is given as

(70) which is also nonnegative for all , and confirms the convexity of in and . Finally, plugging in the expressions from (65) and (70), we get the second-order Gateaux derivative of the Lagrangian as in (22).

APPENDIX B EVALUATION OF THE DUAL FUNCTION We derive here the expression of the dual function in (29). To this end, we basically substitute the expressions for and from (26) and (27) into the respective expressions for to ultimately get the dual function . First we note that

(62) such that its first-order gateaux derivative along arbitrary directions and is obtained as and (63) (71) Now for evaluating the second-order derivative, we again evaluate the gradients (64) hence the second-order gateaux derivative of given as

After some simple manipulations, we finally obtain

is

(65) which can be seen to be nonnegative for all confirming the convexity of in

and , thereby and .

(72)

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 59, NO. 4, APRIL 2011

Next, by employing the matrix inversion lemma, it is straightforward to show that (73)

, where denotes the number of samples employed for the estimation of the sample covariance matrix. To demonstrate how this distributional information can be helpful for the RO approach, let us consider the KL divergence based uncertainty class (12) bounded via

and that (74)

(78)

such that

(75) Hence, the corresponding dual function can be expressed as

being less than or equal to . We attempt to establish a relationship between and the probability of QoS constraint satisfaction. To this end, we first obtain approximate distributions of . The third term in (78) simplifies each of the three terms in , with to . The density of can be approximated via central limit theorem (CLT) as Gaussian with known mean and with variance [33, Theorem 2.11], such that

(76)

APPENDIX C PROBABILISTIC GUARANTEES AND MINIMAX OPTIMIZATION One of the celebrated advantages of the robust optimization (RO)—the approach pursued in this work—in contrast with the stochastic optimization, is that it does not require any distributional information about the uncertainty [3]. A natural question that we attempt to answer here is: Can the RO approach benefit if the distributional information of the uncertainty is revealed? To this end, we first note that the minimax optimization problem (13) can be recasted as

where we effectively try to optimize the equalizer such that a given QoS constraint MSE is satisfied for all . In the sequel we consider the case when and are of stochastic nature, and . We further note that under the RO design approach, the following (one-way) implication holds

where and , respectively, denote the Euler’s digamma function and its derivative, that admit simple recursive formulas. The second term in (78) is equivalent to . The variable has known moments [33, Lemma 2.10] that under CLT eventually lead to with

Finally, the first term in (78) can be shown to be approximately Gaussian distributed via the Liapunov’s CLT [34, Corollary 9.8.1], such that , where

with

. Hence, we have

(79)

(77) which can be exploited [30], [31] as follows: • to yield probabilistic guarantees on the QoS constraints satisfaction; or • to determine the size of the uncertainty set, for a given satisfaction probability. Precisely speaking, we assume that is revealed to have i.i.d. entries that are Gaussian distributed and centered around the actual values, i.e., and the estimate of the interference plus noise covariance matrix is Wishart distributed [32, Ch. 3] around the actual covariance matrix, i.e.,

where and are respectively the sum of mean and sum of variances of the individual terms of . REFERENCES [1] S. Verdu and H. V. Poor, “On minimax robustness: A general approach and applications,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 30, pp. 328–340, Mar. 1984. [2] S. A. Kassam and H. V. Poor, “Robust techniques for signal processing: A survey,” Proc. IEEE, vol. 73, pp. 433–481, Mar. 1985. [3] A. Ben-Tal, L. El Ghoaoui, and A. Nemirovski, Robust Optimization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009.

NISAR AND UTSCHICK: MINIMAX ROBUST A PRIORI INFORMATION AWARE CHANNEL EQUALIZATION

[4] G. V. Moustakides and S. A. Kassam, “Minimax equalization for random signals,” IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 33, pp. 820–825, Aug. 1985. [5] N. Vucic and H. Boche, “Robust minimax equalization of imperfectly known frequency selective MIMO channels,” in Proc. 41st Asilomar Conf. Signals, Syst., Comput. (ACSSC), Nov. 2007, pp. 1611–1615. [6] S. S. Kozat and A. T. Erdogan, “Competitive linear estimation under model uncertainties,” IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 2388–2393, Apr. 2010. [7] Y. Guo and B. C. Levy, “Robust MSE equalizer design for MIMO communication systems in the presence of model uncertainties,” IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 54, no. 5, pp. 1840–1852, May 2006. [8] J. Hagenauer, “The turbo principle: Tutorial introduction and state of the art,” in Proc. Int. Symp. Turbo Codes, Mar. 1997, pp. 1–11. [9] C. Douillard, M. Jezequel, C. Berrou, A. Picart, P. Didier, and A. Glavieux, “Iterative correction of intersymbol interference: Turbo equalization,” Eur. Trans. Telecommun. Related Technol., vol. 6, pp. 507–511, 1995. [10] X. Wang and H. V. Poor, “Iterative (turbo) soft interference cancellation and decoding for coded CDMA,” IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 47, pp. 1046–1062, Jul. 1999. [11] D. Raphaeli and A. Saguy, “Linear equalizers for turbo equalization: A new optimization criterion for determining the equalizer taps,” in Proc. 2nd Int. Symp. Turbo Codes, Sep. 2000, pp. 371–374. [12] R. Kötter, A. Singer, and M. Tüchler, “Turbo equalization: An iterative equalization and decoding technique for coded data transmission,” IEEE Signal Process. Mag., vol. 21, pp. 67–80, Jan. 2004. [13] M. Tüchler, A. Singer, and R. Kötter, “Minimum mean squared error equalization using a-priori information,” IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 673–683, Mar. 2002. [14] G. Dietl and W. Utschick, “Complexity reduction of iterative receivers using low-rank equalization,” IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 1035–1046, Mar. 2007. [15] N. Kalantarova, S. S. Kozat, and A. T. Erdogan, “Robust turbo equalization under channel uncertainties,” IEEE Trans. Commun., 2010, submitted for publication. [16] M. D. Nisar, H. Nottensteiner, and W. Utschick, “Iterative suppression of co-channel interference,” in Proc. 17th Eur. Signal Process. Conf. (EUSIPCO), Aug. 2009, pp. 461–465. [17] K. Kusume, G. Dietl, and W. Utschick, “On the unbias constraint for iterative minimum mean square error detection,” in Proc. 12th Int. Symp. Wireless Personal Multimedia Commun. (WPMC), Sep. 2009. [18] S. Kullback and R. A. Leibler, “On information and sufficiency,” Ann. Math. Stat., vol. 22, pp. 79–86, Mar. 1951. [19] B. C. Levy and R. Nikoukhah, “Robust least-squares estimation with a relative entropy constraint,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 50, pp. 89–104, Jan. 2004. [20] P. D. Grünwald and A. P. Dawid, “Game theory, maximum entropy, minimum discrepancy and robust Bayesian decision theory,” Ann. Stat., vol. 32, pp. 1367–1433, Aug. 2004. [21] D. P. Bertsekas, Nonlinear Programming, 2nd ed. Belmont, MA: Athena Scientific, 1999. [22] R. J. Stern and H. Wolkowicz, “Indefinite trust region subproblems and nonsymmetric eigenvalue perturbations,” SIAM J. Optim., vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 286–313, 1995. [23] C. Fortin, “The trust region subproblem and semidefinite programming,” Optim. Methods Softw., vol. 19, no. 27, pp. 41–67, Feb. 2004. [24] Y. Rong, S. A. Vorobyov, and A. B. Gershman, “Robust linear receivers for multiaccess space-time block-coded MIMO systems: A probabilistically constrained approach,” IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 24, pp. 1560–1570, Aug. 2006. [25] M. Biguesh and A. B. Gershman, “Training-based MIMO channel estimation: A study of estimator tradeoffs and optimal training signals,” IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 884–893, Mar. 2006. [26] S. T. Brink, “Convergence behaviour of iteratively decoded parallel concatenated codes,” IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 49, pp. 1727–1737, Oct. 2001.

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[27] Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); Physical Channels and Modulation, TS 36.211, Standardization Committee 3GPP, 2010 [Online]. Available: http://www.3gpp.org [28] M. D. Nisar and W. Utschick, “Robust turbo equalization—A minimax perspective,” in Proc. 6th Int. Symp. Turbo Codes Iterative Inf. Process. (ISTC), Sep. 2010, pp. 379–383. [29] M. Tüchler, R. Kötter, and A. Singer, “Turbo equalization: Principles and new results,” IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 50, pp. 754–767, May 2002. [30] D. Bertsimas, D. B. Brown, and C. Caramanis, “Theory and applications of robust optimization,” SIAM Rev., pp. 1–56, Dec. 2009, submitted for publication. [31] A. Ben-Tal and A. Nemirovski, “Selected topics in robust convex optimization,” Math. Programm., vol. 1, pp. 125–158, Feb. 2007. [32] A. K. Gupta and D. K. Nagar, Matrix Variate Distributions. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1999. [33] A. Tulino and S. Verdu, Random Matrix Theory and Wireless Communications. Delft, The Netherlands: Now Publishers, 2004. [34] S. I. Resnick, A Probability Path. Cambridge, MA: Birkhaüser Verlag AG, 1998. Muhammad Danish Nisar (S’05) was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1982. He received the Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Pakistan, in 2004 and the Master’s degree in communication engineering from the Technical University Munich (TUM), Germany, in 2006, both with honors. Since 2007, he has been pursuing research towards the Ph.D. degree at the Associate Institute for Signal Processing, Technical University Munich (TUM), Germany. His Ph.D. research has been funded by Nokia Siemens Networks, Munich, Germany. His research interests focus on robust signal processing for communications, primarily from the perspective of physical layer techniques in mobile communication transceivers.

Wolfgang Utschick (SM’06) was born on May 6, 1964. He completed several industrial education programs before he received the Diploma and Ph.D. degrees, both with honors, in electrical engineering from the Technische Universität München, Germany (TUM), in 1993 and 1998, respectively. During this period, he held a scholarship of the Bavarian Ministry of Education for exceptional students. From 1998 to 2002, he codirected the Signal Processing Group of the Institute of Circuit Theory and Signal Processing, TUM. Since 2000, he has been consulting in 3GPP standardization in the field of multielement antenna systems. In 2002, he was appointed Professor at the TUM, where he is Head of the Fachgebiet Methoden der Signalverarbeitung. He teaches courses on signal processing, stochastic processes, and optimization theory in the field of digital communications. Dr. Utschick was awarded in 2006 for his excellent teaching records at TUM, and in 2007 he received the ITG Award of the German Society for Information Technology (ITG). He is a senior member of the German VDE/ITG, where he has been appointed in the Expert Committee for Information and System Theory in 2009. He is currently also serving as a Chairman of the national DFG Focus Program “Communications in Interference Limited Networks” (COIN). He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING and an Editor and Founder of the Springer Book Series Foundations in Signal Processing, Communications and Networking. Since 2010, he has been a member of the Technical Committee of Signal Processing for Communications and Networking of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

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