The ever increasing demand for mobility calls for new mobile communication systems that deal more efficiently with the very limited bandwidth available. While such systems do exist and work well in computer simulations, little is known about their performance under real world conditions. Little is also known about how to best determine and compare the throughput performance of such wireless communication schemes in specific, realistic outdoor scenarios. The range of effective answers spans from performing numerical simulations to building prototypes. In recent years we have determined that a cost, time, and manpower efficient ---as well as effective--- method is that of carrying out quasi-realtime testbed measurements. In this approach, all possible transmit data is generated off-line in Matlab, but only the required data is then transmitted over a wireless channel which is altered by moving the receive antennas. The for ...

Since Marconi succeeded in carrying out the first wireless transmission in 1894, experimental research has been always linked with wireless communications. Today, most wireless communications research relies only on computer simulations. Although computer simulations are necessary and recommendable for wireless systems evaluation, they only reflect the simulation environment rather than the actual scenarios in which wireless systems operate. Consequently, it is desirable to assess wireless communications systems in real-world scenarios while, at the same time, keeping the required effort within reasonable terms. Among the different strategies suitable for undertaking such assessment, the testbed approach constitutes a simple and flexible enough solution based on the software-defined radio concept in which only the fundamental operations (usually the transmission and the acquisition) are carried out in real- time, while the remaining tasks are implemented off-line in high-level programming languages (e.g. MATLAB) and using ...

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 ...

The goal of this Ph.D. dissertation is to address a number of challenges encountered in the digital baseband design of modern and future wireless communication systems. The fast and continuous evolution of wireless communications has been driven by the ambitious goal of providing ubiquitous services that could guarantee high throughput, reliability of the communication link and satisfy the increasing demand for efficient re-utilization of the heavily populated wireless spectrum. To cope with these ever-growing performance requirements, researchers around the world have introduced sophisticated broadband physical (PHY)-layer communication schemes able to accommodate higher bandwidth, which indicatively include multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver and are capable of delivering improved spectral efficiency by applying interference management policies. The merging of Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) schemes with the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) offers a flexible signal processing substrate to implement ...

This thesis represents a significant part of the research activity conducted during the PhD program in Information Technologies, supported by Selta S.p.A, Cadeo, Italy, focused on the analysis and design of a Power Line Communications (PLC) system. In recent times the PLC technologies have been considered for integration in Smart Grids architectures, as they are used to exploit the existing power line infrastructure for information transmission purposes on low, medium and high voltage lines. The characterization of a reliable PLC system is a current object of research as well as it is the design of modems for communications over the power lines. In this thesis, the focus is on the analysis of a full-duplex PLC modem for communication over high-voltage lines, and, in particular, on the design of the echo canceller device and innovative channel coding schemes. The first part ...

Interaction between the Medium Access Control (MAC)-layer and the physical-layer routines is one of the basic concepts of modern wireless networks. Physical-layer dependent resource allocation and scheduling guarantee efficient network utilization. Accordingly, classical link-level analyses, focusing only on the physical-layer are not sufficient anymore for optimum transceiver structure and algorithm development. This thesis presents the development and application of a system-level description suitable for the downlink of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) enhanced High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), with particular focus on the Double Transmit Antenna Array (D-TxAA) transmission mode. The system-level model allows for investigating and evaluating transmission systems and algorithms in the context of cellular networks. Two separate models are proposed to obtain a complete system-level description: (i) a link-quality model, analytically describing the MIMO HSDPA link quality in a so-called equivalent fading parameter structure, and (ii) a link-performance model, ...

The fourth and fifth generation wireless communication systems (4G and 5G) use a physical layer (PHY) based on multicarrier modulations for data transmission using high bandwidth. This type of modulations has shown to provide high spectral efficiency while allowing low complexity radio channel equalization. These systems use OFDMA as a mechanism for distributing the available radio resources among different users. This allocation is done by assigning a subset of subcarriers to each user in a given instant of time. This provides great flexibility to the system that allows it to adapt to both the quality of service requirements of users and the radio channel state. The media access layer (MAC) of these systems is in charge of configuring the multiple OFDMA PHY layer parameters, in addition to managing the data flows of each user, transforming the higher layer packets into ...

In the last decade, one of the most significant technological developments that led to the new broadband wireless generation is the communication via multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. MIMO technologies have been adopted by many wireless standards such as Long Term Evolution (LTE), Wordlwide interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). This is mainly due to their ability to increase the maximum transmission rates, together with the achieved reliability and coverage of current wireless communications, all without the need for additional bandwidth nor transmit power. Nevertheless, the advantages provided by MIMO systems come at the expense of a substantial increase in the cost to deploy multiple antennas and also in the receiver complexity, which has a major impact on the power consumption. Therefore, the design of low-complexity receivers is an important issue which is tackled throughout this ...

This thesis is concerned with the use of multiple antenna elements in wireless communication over frequency non-selective radio channels. Both measurement results and theoretical analysis are presented. New transmit strategies are derived and compared to existing transmit strategies, such as beamforming and space time block coding (STBC). It is found that the best transmission algorithm is largely dependent on the channel characteristics, such as the number of transmit and receive antennas and the existence of a line of sight component. Rayleigh fading multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channels are studied using an eigenvalue analysis and exact expressions for the bit error rates and outage capacities for beamforming and STBC is found. In general are MIMO fading channels correlated and there exists a mutual coupling between antenna elements. These findings are supported by indoor MIMO measurements. It is found that the ...

The major contribution of this thesis is on the problem of transmit beamforming to multiple cochannel multicast groups. Two viewpoints are considered: i) minimizing total transmission power while guaranteeing a prescribed minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at each receiver; and ii) a "fair" approach maximizing the overall minimum SINR under a total power budget. The core problem is a multicast generalization of the multiuser downlink beamforming problem; the difference is that each transmitted stream is directed to multiple receivers, each with its own channel. Such generalization is relevant and timely, e.g., in the context of the emerging WiMAX and UMTS-LTE wireless networks. The joint multicast beamforming problem is in general NP-hard, motivating the pursuit of computationally efficient quasi-optimal solutions. In chapter 1, it is shown that semidefinite relaxation coupled with suitable randomization / cochannel multicast power control yield computationally efficient high-quality ...

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 ...

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) ...

In the last two decades, multicarrier modulations have emerged as a low complexity solution to combat the effects of the multipath in wireless communications. Among them, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is possibly the most studied modulation scheme, and has also been widely adopted as the foundation of industry standards such as WiMAX or LTE. However, OFDM is sensitive to time-selective channels, which are featured in mobility scenarios, due to the appearance of Inter-Carrier Interference (ICI). Implementation of hardware equipment for the end user is usually implemented in dedicated chips, but in research environments, more flexible solutions are preferred. One popular approach is the so-called Software Defined Radio (SDR), where the signal processing algorithms are implemented in reconfigurable hardware such as Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The aim of this work is two-fold. On 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 ...

VIDEO streaming over cellular networks has been made possible in the last years by better performing video codecs and wireless cellular networks oriented to data transmission. The interaction between two heterogeneous worlds, the telecommunication infrastructure and the coding video software, calls for advanced optimization mechanisms. The actors involved in the optimization process are the cellular system's access network, UMTS and HSDPA, the wireless transmission channel and the fi nal user equipped with a mobile device capable of decoding video sequences. The knowledge and characterization of each of the building blocks allow the optimization of each element to the specifi c needs of the others. This doctoral thesis discusses three main contributions. In the fi rst part, the e ffects of transmission errors on video streams are analyzed. Incorrectly received video packets are usually discarded by the lower layers and not ...