This work aims to expose the potential performance loss due to synchronization errors in the downlink of the two major cellular standards of OFDM systems, i.e., the WiMAX OFDM physical layer and the LTE. Different to most results in literature, the physical layer coded throughput is utilized as the major performance measure. The influence of an imperfect carrier frequency synchronization or symbol timing is evaluated via analytical modeling and standard compliant link level simulations. In the frequency aspect, a modified differential estimator for the residual frequency offset in WiMAX is proposed. It is shown that the theoretical performance of such an estimator approaches the Cramer-Rao lower bound and provides a significant gain in terms of the mean squared error. However, such an improvement becomes negligible in terms of the coded throughput. Therefore, a throughput loss prediction model is proposed for ...

Feedback in wireless communications is tied to a long-standing and successful history, facilitating robust and spectrally efficient transmission over the uncertain wireless medium. Since the application of multiple antennas at both ends of the communication link, enabling multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission, the importance of feedback information to achieve the highest performance is even more pronounced. Especially when multiple antennas are employed by the transmitter to handle the interference between multiple users, channel state information (CSI) is a fundamental prerequisite. The corresponding multi-user MIMO, interference alignment and coordination techniques are considered as a central part of future cellular networks to cope with the growing inter-cell-interference, caused by the unavoidable densification of base stations to support the exponentially increasing demand on network capacities. However, this vision can only be implemented with efficient feedback algorithms that provide accurate CSI at the transmitter without ...

The last ten years have seen a massive growth in the number of connected wireless devices. Billions of devices are connected and managed by wireless networks. At the same time, each device needs a high throughput to support applications such as voice, real-time video, movies, and games. Demands for wireless throughput and the number of wireless devices will always increase. In addition, there is a growing concern about energy consumption of wireless communication systems. Thus, future wireless systems have to satisfy three main requirements: i) having a high throughput; ii) simultaneously serving many users; and iii) having less energy consumption. Massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) technology, where a base station (BS) equipped with very large number of antennas (collocated or distributed) serves many users in the same time-frequency resource, can meet the above requirements, and hence, it is a promising candidate technology ...

An important specificity of wireless communication channels are the rapid fluctuations of propagation coefficients. This effect is called fading and is caused by the motion of obstacles, scatterers and reflectors standing along the different paths of electromagnetic wave propagation between the transmitting and the receiving terminal. These changes in the geometry of the wireless channel prompt the attenuation coefficients and the relative phase shifts between the multiple propagation paths to vary. This suggests to model the channel coefficients (the transfer matrix) as random variables. The present thesis studies information rates for reliable transmission of information over fading channels under the realistic assumption that the receiver has only imperfect knowledge of the random fading state. While the over-idealized assumption of perfect channel-state information at the receiver (CSIR) gives rise to many simple expressions and is fairly well understood, the settings with ...

Wireless broadband communications for users moving at vehicular speed is a cor- nerstone of future fourth generation (4G) mobile communication systems. We inves- tigate a multi-carrier (MC) code division multiple access (CDMA) system which is based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). A spreading sequence is used in the frequency domain in order to distinguish individual users and to take advantage of the multipath diversity of the wireless channel. The transmission is block oriented. A block consists of OFDM pilot and OFDM data symbols. At pedestrian velocities the channel can be modelled as block fading. We ap- ply iterative multi-user detection and channel estimation. In iterative receivers soft symbols are derived from the output of an soft-input soft-output decoder. These soft symbols are used in order to reduce the interference from other users and to enhance the channel estimates. We ...

In this work, a realistic physical layer performance evaluation of High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) as well as IEEE 802.16-2004, commonly referred to as Worldwide Inter-operability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), is provided. The performance evaluation is carried out in two measurement campaigns that took place in an alpine and an urban environment. Both, WiMAX and HSDPA use adaptive modulation and coding to adapt the channel coding rate and the size of the symbol alphabet to the current channel conditions. Additionally, both systems allow for multiple transmit and multiple receive antennas to increase the spectral efficiency and the reliability of the transmission. While WiMAX utilizes multiple transmit antennas by simple Alamouti space-time coding, HSDPA implements a closed-loop system with channel adaptive spatial precoding. The necessary, quantized channel information is fed back from the user equipment to the base station. The ...

Base station cooperation is recognized as a key technology for future wireless cellular communication networks. Considering antennas of distributed base stations and those of multiple terminals within those cells as a distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, this technique has the potential to eliminate inter-cell interference by joint signal processing and to enhance spectral efficiency in this way. Although the theoretical gains are meanwhile well-understood, it still remains challenging to realize the full potential of such cooperative schemes in real-world systems. Among other factors, such as the limited overhead for pilot symbols and for the feedback and backhaul, these performance limitations are related to channel and synchronization impairments, such as channel estimation, feedback quantization and channel aging, as well as imperfect carrier and sampling synchronization among the base stations. Because of these impairments, joint data precoding results to be mismatched with ...

This thesis presents the design and application of a Link-to-System (L2S) model capable of predicting the downlink throughput performance of cellular mobile networks based on the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard. The aim of a L2S model is to accurately abstract the physical layer at a fraction of the complexity of detailed link level simulations. Thus, it dramatically reduces the necessary simulation run time and by extension enables the simulation of much more complex scenarios. The thesis is divided in four main parts. First, the basics of the LTE standard are presented, with the link abstraction model being presented afterwards. Extensions for the L2S model for the cases of Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) and imperfect channel state information are presented in the third section. In the last chapter, the performance of the application of Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) ...

Since several years, multi-antenna systems are foreseen as a potential solution for increasing the throughput of future wireless communication systems. The aim of this thesis is to study and to improve the transmitter and receiver's techniques of these MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) systems in the context of a multi-carrier transmission. On the one hand, the OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) modulation, which transform a frequency selective channel into multiple non frequency selective channels, is particularly well adapted to the conception of MIMO receivers with low complexity. On the other hand, two techniques allowing to improve the exploitation of frequential and/or temporal diversities are associated with OFDM, namely linear precoding (LP-OFDM) and CDMA in a MC-CDMA (Multicarrier Code division Multiplex Access) scheme. We have associated LP-OFDM and MC-CDMA with two MIMO techniques which require no channel state information at the ...

When data is transmitted over the wireless communication channel, the transmit signal experiences distortion depending on the channel¢s fading characteristics. On the one hand, this calls for efficient processing at the receiver to mitigate the detrimental effects of the channel and maximize data throughput. On the other hand, the diversity inherently present in these channels can be leveraged with appropriate transmit processing in order to increase the reliability of the transmission link. Recently, in [1] it was shown that the channel characteristics can be exploited to maximize the total data throughput in the interference channel where multiple user pairs rely on the same resource to communicate among themselves. In this PhD dissertation, we first propose novel equalizer designs for frequency selective channels. We then present new results on the diversity gain of equalizers in fading channels when appropriate precoding is ...

In the last decades the world has experienced a massive growth in the demand for wireless services. The recent popularity of hand-held devices with data exchange capabilities over wireless networks, such as smartphones and tablets, increased the wireless data traffic even further. This trend is not expected to cease in the foreseeable future. In fact, it is expected to accelerate as everyday apparatus unrelated with data communications, such as vehicles or household devices, are foreseen to be equipped with wireless communication capabilities. Further, the next generation wireless networks should be designed such that they have increased spectral and energy efficiency, provide uniformly good service to all of the accommodated users and handle many more devices simultaneously. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (Massive MIMO) systems, also termed as large-scale MIMO, very large MIMO or full-dimension MIMO, have recently been proposed as a candidate ...

Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) techniques have been widely employed by dif- ferent wireless systems with many advantages. By using multiple antennas, the system is able to transmit multiple data streams simultaneously and within the same frequency band. The methods known as spatial multiplexing (SM) and spatial diversity (SD) im- proves the high spectral efficiency and link reliability of wireless communication systems without requiring additional transmitting power. By introducing channel coding in the transmission procedure, the information redundancy is introduced to further improve the reliability of SM links and the quality of service for the next generation communication systems. However, the throughput performance of these systems is limited by interference. A number of different interference suppression techniques have been reported in the literature. Theses techniques can be generally categorised into two aspects: the preprocessing techniques at the transmitter side and ...

The wireless communication industry has experienced rapid growth in recent years, and digital cellular systems are currently designed to provide high data rates at high terminal speeds. High data rates give rise to intersymbol interference (ISI) due to so-called multipath fading. Such an ISI channel is called frequency selective. On the other hand, due to terminal mobility and/or receiver frequency offset the received signal is subject to frequency shifts (Doppler shifts). Doppler shift induces time-selectivity characteristics. The Doppler effect in conjunction with ISI gives rise to a so-called doubly selective channel (frequency- and time-selective). In addition to the channel effects, the analog front-end may suffer from an imbalance between the I and Q branch amplitudes and phases as well as from carrier frequency offset. These analog front-end imperfections then result in an additional and significant degradation in system performance, especially ...

This thesis investigates and analyses the performance of terrestrial free-space optical communication (FSO) system based on the phase shift keying pre-modulated subcarrier intensity modulation (SIM). The results are theoretically and experimentally compared with the classical On-Off keying (OOK) modulated FSO system in the presence of atmospheric turbulence. The performance analysis is based on the bit error rate (BER) and outage probability metrics. Optical signal traversing the atmospheric channel suffers attenuation due to scattering and absorption of the signal by aerosols, fog, atmospheric gases and precipitation. In the event of thick fog, the atmospheric attenuation coefficient exceeds 100 dB/km, this potentially limits the achievable FSO link length to less than 1 kilometre. But even in clear atmospheric conditions when signal absorption and scattering are less severe with a combined attenuation coefficient of less than 1 dB/km, the atmospheric turbulence significantly impairs ...

Mobile communication networks of the third and future generations are designed to offer high-data rate services like video-telephony and data-transfer. The current Rake receiver architecture will create a shortage in available bandwidth offered to the users. This is not due to a shortage in spectrum but results from inefficient receiver architectures. Spectral efficiency can be increased considerably through multi-user detection techniques in the receiver algorithms. The present thesis investigates iterative re- ceivers for encoded CDMA transmission in the uplink. The iterative receiver is a suboptimal receiver algorithm with manageable complexity. It consists of an inter- ference mitigating multi-user detector, a bank of single-user decoders, and a channel estimator. Instead of deciding on the transmitted symbols right after the first decod- ing, the receiver feeds back tentative decision symbols to mitigate multiple-access interference in the next iteration. Similarly, soft decision symbols ...