IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 7, NO.
12, DECEMBER 2008
Efficient Spatial Covariance Estimation for Asynchronous Co-channel
Interference Suppression in MIMO-OFDM Systems
Qiang Li, Jing Zhu, Qinghua Li, and C. N. Georghiades
Abstract—We present algorithms to suppress the asynchronous
co-channel interference (CCI) in MIMO OFDM systems. The
key challenge is that the cyclic prefix of the interference signal
does not line up with that of the intended signal due to the
asynchronous transmission in WLAN. Therefore, the orthogo-
nality across the tones of the interference signal is destroyed
and the conventional frequency domain minimum mean square
error (MMSE) cancelation techniques that employ the interfer-
ence channel response per tone can not work effectively. To
suppress the asynchronous interference, we design an efficient
estimator for the spatial covariance matrix of the interference
using Cholesky decomposition and low-pass smoothing. Both a
MMSE and a maximum a posteriori (MAP) receiver are derived
based on the estimated interference statistics. Simulation results
demonstrate the effectivity of our solution.
Index Terms—OFDM, co-channel interference, MMSE, MIMO
system.
I. I NTRODUCTION
C O-CHANNEL interferences (CCI) is becoming the lim-
iting factor that dominates the performance in the emerg-
ing high-density WLAN (HD-WLAN)[1], where access points
(APs) are densely deployed. Multiple cells that simultaneously
operate on the same channel cannot be separated far enough in
distance and will interfere with each other. Researchers inves-
tigated CCI suppression extensively since Winters’s seminal
paper [2]. Catreux et al. studied the throughput of interference-
limited MIMO cellular system [3]. Blum [4] investigated the
MIMO capacity under interference with single-user detection.
Dai et al. [5] proposed a multiuser detection technique to
cancel MIMO CCI for flat fading channels. Li and Sollen-
berger [6] designed an adaptive array processing scheme using
a MMSE diversity combiner for OFDM modulation and a
time-varying channel. Maltsev et al. [7] proposed an MMSE
canceler that estimates the interference covariances per tone
from short training symbols and utilizes the correlation acorss
tones. Besides the physical layer approaches, Zhu et al. [1]
proposed a medium access control (MAC) based solution,
which adapts the carrier sensing threshold to control the CCI
level and whose throughput gain was verified by test-bed
experiments.
Typically, CCI in WLANs is asynchronous due to the ran-
dom access protocol, i.e. CSMA/CA (Carrier Sensing Medium
Manuscript received October 28, 2007; revised February 10, 2008 and May
19, 2008; accepted July 22, 2008. The associate editor coordinating the review
of this letter and approving it for publication was Y. Zheng.
Q. Li and C. N. Georghiades are with the Electrical and Computer
Engineering Department, Texas A&M University (e-mail: {qiangli, georghi-
ades}@ece.tamu.edu). This work was completed while Q. Li was working as
an intern with Communications Technology Lab, Intel Corporation.
J. Zhu and Q. Li are with Communication Technology Lab (CTL), Intel
Corporation (e-mail: {jing.z.zhu, qinghua.li}@intel.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/T-WC.2008.071201
1536-1276/08$25.00 
c 2008 IEEE
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4849
Access / Collision Avoidance). Thomas et al. [8] showed
that the conventional frequency domain CCI cancelation that
estimates both the intended and interfering channels could
not work effectively. This is because the asynchronousness
destroys the cyclically padded OFDM symbol structure that
enables the inter-tone orthogonality. Hence, we adopt a sta-
tistical approach. We first models the asynchronous CCI as a
zero-mean, time uncorrelated, and spatially colored stationary
Gaussian random process and then design an efficient esti-
mator for the spatial covariance of the CCI, which utilizes
the OFDM symbol structure and matrix decomposition tech-
niques.
II. S PATIAL C OVARIANCE E STIMATION FOR
A SYNCHRONOUS I NTERFERENCE
Gaussian distribution matches the asynchronous interfer-
ence statistics very well [11], [12]. The Gaussian approxi-
mation simplifies and eases the receiver design because the
second moment, i.e. covariance, is sufficient to characterize the
interference statistics. We exploit the spatial structure (in the
covariance matrix) to suppress the interference. For a MIMO
OFDM system with Mt transmitter antennas, Mr receiver
antennas and total K subcarriers, the baseband received signal
on the kth tone is written as
yk (tn ) = Hk xk (tn ) + zk (tn ) , (1)
where xk (tn ) ∈ CMt ×1 and yk (tn ) ∈ CMr ×1 are the
transmitted and received signal; zk (tn ) ∈ CMr ×1 represents
interference plus noise; Hk ∈ CMr ×Mt is the channel matrix
of kth tone; tn is the time index of the nth OFDM symbol.
We design an efficient estimator for the covariance of z(tn )
on each tone, and then design a Wiener filter suppress inter-
ference. The spatial covariance of z(tn ) on the k th tone can
be expressed as
1
S−1

Rkzz = E{zk (tn )zk (tn )H } = lim {zk (tn )zk (tn )H } ,
S S→∞ t =0
n
where S is the number of training symbols. For WLAN, it
is required to measure the interference statistics over short
duration because different interferers are randomly present
with transmission duration comparable to the desired packet.
The sample averaging covariance estimator is the maximum
likelihood (ML) estimator and unbiased. However, it tends
to spread the eigenvalues due to the limited samples. This
tendency is highly undesirable and often causes a substantial
degradation in performance. Therefore, we utilize the correla-
tion information across OFDM tones to refine the estimation.
Moreover, we use the Cholesky decomposition to turn a
4850 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 7, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2008

1x2 SIMO, 64QAM

constrained parameter estimation problem (for positive definite 2

matrix) into an unconstrained one.

0 Chol decomp. + smooth
w/ smoothing
w/o smoothing
A. Temporal Low-Pass Smoothing

Relative Estimation Accuracy F−norm (dB)

S−1
Let R̃kzz  S1 tn =0 {zk (tn )zk (tn )H }, where R̃kzz ∈
−2

CMr ×Mr . The sequence {R̃1zz · · · R̃K zz } fully characterizes the

statistics of the interference. The vector of diagonal entries −4

S̃nn  [R̃1zz [n, n], · · · , R̃K

zz [n, n]]
T
is the estimated power
spectral density (PSD) of interference plus noise received from −6

the nth antenna. Similarly, the vector of off-diagonal sequence

S̃mn  [R̃1zz [m, n], · · · , R̃K T
zz [m, n]] represents the estimated −8
mutual PSD between interference signals received from the
mth and nth antennas. Transforming the auto/mutual PSDs
back to time domain with inverse discrete Fourier transform
−10
8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24
SNR (dB)
(IDFT) provides the (cyclic) auto/cross-correlations of the
interference plus noise r̃mn = F−1 S̃mn , for m, n = 1 · · · Mr Fig. 1. Relative estimation accuracy for spatial covariance, defined as:
R̂k −Rk 
and time spacing from 0 to K − 1, where F−1 is the IDFT ξF (R̂kzz , Rkzz ) = zz
Rk
zz F
zz F
where Rkzz is the actual spatial covariance;
matrix. We assume that the transmitted interference signal and AF denotes the Frobenius norm of matrix A. With 4 OFDM symbols silent
time interference measurement. 1 interferer, standard 802.11n channel model
the noise are uncorrelated in time and have a zero mean. D, interleaver and LDPC code are used. The relative estimation accuracies
Because the maximum channel delay is L, the auto/cross- averaged across tones are plotted.
correlation of the received interference plus noise is zero if
the time spacing between the two samples is greater than L, TABLE I
S PATIAL C OVARIANCE E STIMATION A LGORITHM I
i.e. E{zm (τ1 )zn (τ2 )} = rmn (τ1 − τ2 ) = 0 for |τ1 − τ2 | ≥ L,
where zm (τ ) is the time domain interference plus noise from 1. Samples Average Estimation: for k = 1 · · · K,
mth receiver antenna. Therefore, there are at least K − 2L + 1  S−1 k
R̃kzz = S1 H k
tn =0 {z (tn ) z (tn )}.
zeros in the middle part of the auto/corss-correlation vectors 2. Cholesky Decomposition: for k = 1 · · · K, R̃kzz = (Ũk )H · Ũk
 T
r̃mn s. This is referred to as “time domain lowpass” and the 3. Smoothing: for each entry in Ũk , let ũ = Ũ1 [m, n] · · · ŨK [m, n] ,
 1 
limited channel delay implies that the corresponding entries v = P · ũ, then v = Û [m, n] · · · ÛK [m, n] ,
T

of the frequency domain covariance matrices are correlated. k

The “lowpass” property can be exploited by filtering co-
variance estimates across tones, where the filter matrix P [7]
can be pre-computed and stored. It is known that lowpass
filters can smooth temporally correlated signals. Analogically,
the above process can be regarded as a temporal lowpass
filtering that smooths spectrally correlated signal. However, if
we filter each vector S̃mn individually, it is not guaranteed that
the smoothed covariance matrix formed by the filtered entries
for each tone is positive semidefinite. Namely, the smoothed
matrix may not be a valid covariance matrix that should be
positive semidefinite containing Mr2 constrains1 .
B. Cholesky Decomposition
In multivariate statistics, it is a common approach to decom-
pose the complicated covariance matrices into simpler compo-
nents for further processing. There are three popular choices
for matrix decomposition: variance-correlation decomposition,
spectral decomposition (singular value decomposition (SVD))
and Cholesky decomposition. While the entries of the cor-
relation and orthogonal matrices in the variance-corrleation
and spectral decompositions are still constrained, those of Uk
in the Cholesky decomposition are always unconstrained [9].
This property of Cholesky decomposition can be exploited in
1 A complex unconstrained M × M matrix has 2M 2 degrees of freedom.
r r
r
There exists a Cholesky matrix that is upper triangular with Mr positive and
Mr (Mr − 1)/2 complex unconstrained entries for each positive semidefinite
matrix. Therefore, each positive semidefinite matrix has 2Mr2 − Mr −
Mr (Mr −1)
2
× 2 = Mr2 constrains.
construct Û from v.
4. Reconstructing : reconstruct the estimated covariance,
R̂kzz = (Ûk )H · Ûk .
smoothing the covariance matrices. The Cholesky decompo-
sition of R̃kzz is expressed as R̃kzz = (Uk )H Uk , where Uk
is a upper triangle matrix; Uk is also called “square-root” of
matrix R̃kzz .
Instead of filtering each entry of R̃kzz , we now smooth
that of upper triangular matrix Uk across tones by the
filtering matrix P. After the smoothing, we reconstruct the
spatial covariance for each tone as R̂kzz = (Ûk )H Ûk . This
reconstruction guarantees that R̂kzz is (Hermitian and) positive
Ûk e = f H f ≥ 0
semidefinite because eH R̂kzz e = (Ûk e)H 
f
for any vector e. The correlation in each entry of Uk across
tones can be exploited by linear minimum mean square error
(MMSE) filter (i.e. Wiener filter). Other choice of smooth
function might be possible, e.g. Kaiser-Bessel window. The
algorithm is summarized in Table I. We show the averaged
accuracies (across tones) of different spatial covariance esti-
mation approaches in Fig 1.
III. I NTERFERENCE AWARE R ECEIVER D ESIGN
A. MMSE Receiver for Co-channel Interference Mitigation
We mitigate the interference on the k th tone using MMSE
filter computed from the estimated R̂kzz . Denote the MMSE
H
filter as w, w = R̂−1 H
yy R̂xy = (ĤĤ + R̂zz )−1 Ĥ , where

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 7, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2008 4851

the tone index k is suppressed for notational simplicity. be written as

The straightforward estimate of Ryy is E{yyH }, where the  
Rzz (tn ) 0
average is over the received signals ys of the k-th tone Rzz = 0 R∗ . (3)
zz (tn +1)
within one packet. However, this method does not provide
accurate estimates especially for high order modulations. Since
the received signal y is scaled by the random transmitted C. Bound of the Mean Square Error (MSE)
signal x and the number of samples ys is limited per packet,
the straightforward averaging results in a large variation in The MSE is defined as E{x − wy2 }, which quantifies
practice. Hence, to derive the MMSE receiver, the intended the filtered signal quality. The actual MSE is denoted by
signal channel matrix H and interference statistics Rzz are MSE, and the estimated MSE is computed as:
estimated separately.
ˆ = (1 + HH R̂−1
MSE zz H)
−1
. (4)
The receiver can apply the MMSE filter w directly. Al-
ternatively, one may separate the filtering into two steps:
ˆm= 1
interference whitening and MMSE filtering on the whitened The post-equalizer SNR can be written as SNR ˆ m,m −
MSE
interference. The whitening filter is Û−1 . Noting Û−1 is 1 . The post-equalizer SNR of each data stream is used
upper triangular helps to lower the whitening complexity. This to compute the soft information of each coded bit. Hence,
implementation minimizes the changes on the legacy receiver the post-equalizer MSE determines the receiver performance.
that only handles white noise. In this section, we characterize the relationship between the
estimated MSEˆ in (4) and the actual output MSE. The
difference between the two is caused by the estimation error in
B. Enhancements for Space-time Block Coded (STBC) System R̂zz . To focus on the impact of spatial covariance estimation,
Space-time coding is a powerful approach that exploits we assume the channel matrix H is known and consider the
the spatial diversity to combat fading in MIMO wireless SIMO case below, where there is no intra-user interferences.
communications systems. We use the Alamouti code as an Generalization to MIMO case is straightforward.
example, and modify the signal model in (1) to incorporate Theorem 1: The MSE of the MMSE receiver with the
the space-time code by stacking the received signal vectors estimated spatial covariance is upper bounded by:
from time tn to tn + 1 as
 
⎛ y1 (tn ) ⎞ ⎛ H H12
⎞ ⎛ z1 ⎞ ˆ + MSE
MSE ≤ MSE ˆ 2 · ΔRzz F · λmax (R̂−1
ˆ − MSE zz ).
11

⎜ .
.. ⎟ ⎜ .. . .
.. ⎟ . (5)
⎜ ⎟ ⎜ ⎟ ⎜ .. ⎟
⎜ yMr (tn ) ⎟ ⎜ HM∗r 1 HMr∗2 ⎟ x1 ⎜ zMr ⎟
⎜ y1∗ (tn +1) ⎟ = ⎜ H12 −H11 ⎟ ( x2 ) + ⎜ ⎟
⎜ zMr +1 ⎟ . (2) Proof: See Appendix A.
⎜ ⎟ ⎜ ⎟ ⎝ . ⎠
⎝ .. ⎠ ⎝ .. .. ⎠ .. From (5), it is seen that the actual MSE depends on the
. . . ˆ ΔRzz F = Rzz − R̂zz F , and the largest
∗
yM (t +1)
r n
∗
HM r2
∗
−HM r1 
z2Mr
 estimated MSE,
    ˆ 2
y H̃
z eigevalue of R̂−1
zz . We can ignore the second-order term MSE
for reasonable high signal to interference ratio (SIR), where
z is the asynchronous co-channel interference plus noise, ˆ << 1. The second term of the bound includes factors
MSE
which is space-time coded. If the intended and interference of F-norm of the covariance estimation error and the the
signals are synchronized in terms of OFDM cyclic structure largest eigenvalue of R̂−1
zz . ΔRzz F s for different estimation
and space-time modulation, we have 2Mr − 2 degrees of schemes are shown in Fig. 1. The bound implies, besides the
freedom for interference suppression. However, for random F-norm of the estimation error, the eigen-structure of R̂zz has
asynchronous interference, the term z is unstructured. Not also a significant impact to the MSE. In other words, a singular
only the degree of freedom is insufficient, but also we need R̂zz has a large error. Sample covariance matrix, i.e. the
to double the dimension of the “spatial-temporal” covariance ML estimator, has the tendency to spread the eigenvalues [9].
estimation. This prevents us from obtaining good CCI suppres- Therefore, it decreases λmin (R̂zz ) (or increase λmax (R̂−1
zz )),
sion even with the improved covariance estimation techniques and in turn increase the MSE of the equalizer.
in the previous section. The reason is that the asynchrony
makes the space-time coded CCI act like a 2Mr ×2Mr spatial
multiplexing interference. Total 2Mr degrees of freedom at D. MAP Receiver for Co-channel Interference Suppression
the receiver are not enough to suppress the interference signal
effectively. Since we have modeled the interference as Gaussian random
To avoid the high complexity equalization such as decision process with zero mean and covariance Rzz , the optimum
feedback, we propose a heuristic solution that block diagonal- MAP bit detector that minimizes bit error probability can
izes the covariance matrix by zero-forcing the cross correlation be derived. The a priori L-value of the coded bits bi , i =
information between two successively received signal vectors 0, 1, . . . , Nt M − 1, is defined as LA (bi ) = ln PP[b[bi i=−1]
=1]
. To
from time tn to tn + 1. This approximation holds if the compute the LA (bi )s, we can either generate the candidate
asynchrony is not severe or the scrambling sequence varies sets Li,+1 and Li,−1 by exhaustive listing for small antenna
across OFDM symbols. It not only reduces the amount of number and lower modulation order, or generate by the list
estimation parameters by half, but also frees the degrees of sphere decoding for large antenna number and higher order
freedom for interference suppression. More precisely, Rzz can modulation. Interested reader is referred to [10]. Using the

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4852
1x2 SIMO, 16 QAM, SNR = 20 dB
0 0
10
Sync, Inter−channel known, MMSE
Chol. Decomp&smoothing, MMSE
Cov smoothing w/o Matrix decomp. MMSE
w/o smoothing MMSE
−1
10 MRC
PER
−2
10
−3
10
2 4 6 8
SIR (dB)
Fig. 2. Packet error rate of different receivers for 1x2 SIMO, 16 QAM,
MMSE receiver.
max-log approximation and plugging the estimated interfer-
ence statistics, the extrinsic L-value can be approximated as:
1 loses the positive semidefinite property and only provides 1
LE (bi |y) ≈ max {−||Û−1 (y − Hx)||2 + bT[i] LA,[i] }
x∈Li,+1 2
−1 2 1 T
− max {−||Û (y − Hx)|| + b[i] LA,[i] },
x∈Li,−1 2
(6)
where b[i] denotes the sub-vector of b omitting its ith element,
and LA,[i] is the vector of all LA values, also omitting its ith
element. The MAP detector iteratively exchanges the extrinsic
information with the outer channel decoder to improve the per-
formance. Since the MAP detector requires a large candidate
list (exponential to Mt ) to generate the likelihood information
for each bit, the complexity of the MAP detector is higher
than the MMSE receiver, whose complexity per data stream
is linear to Mt .
IV. S IMULATIONS AND R EMARKS
Gray mapping, 802.11n OFDM symbol level interleaver,
LDPC code, and 802.11n channel model D [13] are employed.
The interference is asynchronous with an offset uniformly
distributed within one OFDM symbols (1 − 80 time samples).
A silent window after the intended preamble is introduced for
estimating the spatial covariance, where no signal is sent by
the intended transmitter. The silent duration is 4 − 12 symbols
for fast interference statistics measurement. Required SIRs for
PER 1% are compared. We simulated one interferer case in
this paper which was typical in high density LAN from the
testbed measurement. The more interferers, the less structure
of the interference statistics due to the averaging effect and
will cause some interference suppression gain loss.
Fig. 2 compares receiver schemes for 1 × 2 SIMO. The
channel matrix of the desired signal is estimated under the
interference2 and 4 silent symbols are employed. The proposed
Cholesky smoothing outperforms the conventional MRC by 8
dB. Namely, the proposed method can tolerate interference 8
2 The desired signal channel is estimated under the interference by using
the method in [14] with one OFDM preamble symbol.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 7, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2008
2x3 MIMO , Alamouti code, SNR = 20 dB
10
Sync, Inter Channel Known.
Cholesky Decom.+ w/ Block Diag.
Cholesky Decom. + w/o Block Diag.
−1
MRC
10
PER
−2
10
−3
10
−4
10
10 12 14 0 2 4 6 8 10 12
SIR
Fig. 3. Packet error rate for space-time coded system, 2x3 MIMO 16 QAM,
MMSE receiver.
dB stronger than that of the MRC for the same PER. The
straightforward smoothing without Cholesky decomposition
dB improvement over non-smoothing. In contrast, Cholesky
smoothing with the property delivers 3 dB gain over non-
smoothing. The PER of the MMSE receiver with synchro-
nized interferer and known interfering channel is plotted as
a benchmark. The asynchrony accounts for a gap less than
2 dB between asynchronous Cholesky smoothing and the
synchronized case. The MRC curve has a slop steeper than
those of the MMSE receivers but suffers an SIR loss 5 − 8
dB. The diversity order of MRC is Mr . The MMSE receivers
works as zeor-forcing receiver at high SNR. Its diversity order
is Mr − Ns − Ni + 1 as analyzed in [15], where Ns and Ni
are the numbers of the intended and interfering spatial streams
respectively. The diversity order decreases as the number of
interferers increases. The SIR loss of MRC is due to the
interference power projected on the intended signal direction.
For typical high-density WLAN, the performance is dominated
by interfererence instead of diversity.
We consider an Alamouti coded system with 2 transmit and
3 receive antennas in Fig. 3. The PERs are plotted for the
schemes with/without block diagonalization, where 6 and 12
silent symbols are used for the diagonalized and undiagonal-
ized respectively. As expected, MMSE without diagonization
encounters the freedom deficiency problem and degrades the
performance. The proposed scheme with diagonalized Rzz
approaches the performance with synchronized interference
and known channel (doted curve). Again, MRC has a better
diversity gain than those of MMSE cancelation but suffers a
SIR loss of 6 dB for the same reason as before.
The performance of MAP decoder with/without iteration are
compared with that of the MMSE receiver in Fig. 4, where
6 silent symbols are used. We assume perfect knowledge
of the intended channel to remove the effect of channel
estimation and highlight that of the interference covariance
estimation. The MAP demodulator and LDPC decoder it-
eratively exchange the extrinsic information. The iterations
deliver a marginal gain of 1 dB over that with a single
iteration. The MAP receiver successively decodes the packet
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 7, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2008 4853

−1
and ΔRzz = Rzz − Rˆzz , Rˆzz
2x4 MIMO, Spatial Multiplexing, SNR = 25 dB
0
10 = UH U and ΔRzz =
H
MAP, 4 Iter. T T. Since 
Soft output MAP UHHH UH F = trace(HHH UH UHHH UH U)
Chol.+smoothing,MMSE
−1 Smoothing, W/O Matrx Decomp. ,MMSE 1
10
W/O Smoothing, MMSE = −1 ,
ˆ
MSE

UTH TUH F = trace(UTH TUH UTH TUH )
−1 −1
PER

= Rˆzz ΔRzz F ≤ ΔRzz F · λmax (Rˆzz ) ,

−2
10

(9)

−3 where we have used the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality

10
trace(AB) ≤ AF · BF , and ABF ≤ BF λmax (A).
Therefore,
 
−4
10
−2 0 2 4 6 8 10
ˆ + MSE
MSE ≤ MSE ˆ 2 · ΔRzz F · λmax (R̂−1
ˆ − MSE zz ).
SIR
(10)
Fig. 4. Packet error rate for 2x4 MIMO system, 16QAM, MAP receiver.

within 1 − 2 iterations for most cases. The MAP receiver

provides more diversity gain than MMSE receiver as expected. R EFERENCES
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(1 + HH Rˆzz H) (1 + HH Rˆzz H)2 [14] Y. Li, “Simplified channel estimation for OFDM systems with multiple
  transmit antennas,” IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 1, pp. 67-75,
ˆ + MSE
= MSE ˆ 2 · trace HH Rˆzz −1 ΔRzz Rˆzz −1 H Jan. 2002.
[15] J. Winters, J. Salz, and R. D. Gitlin, “The impact of antenna diversity
≤ MSE ˆ 2 · UTH TUH F UHHH UH F ,
ˆ + MSE on the capacity of wireless communication systems,” IEEE Trans.
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