Multi-input multi-output (MIMO) wireless networks and distributed MIMO relaying wireless networks have attracted significant attention in current generation of wireless communication networks, and will play a key role in the next generation of wireless net- works. The improvement of network capacity, data rate and reliability can be achieved at the cost of increasing computational complexity of employing space-time coding (STC) and distributed STC (DSTC) in MIMO and distributed MIMO relaying networks, respectively. Efficient designs and algorithms to achieve high diversity and coding gains with low computational complexity in encoding and decoding of STC and DSTC schemes are essential. In this thesis, DSTC designs with high diversity and coding gains and efficient detection and code matrices optimization algorithms in cooperative MIMO networks are proposed. Firstly, adaptive power allocation (PA) algorithms with different criteria for a coop- erative MIMO network equipped with ...

The aim of this dissertation is the study of cooperative communications in wireless networks. In cooperative networks, each user transmits its own data and also aids the communication of other users. User cooperation is particularly attractive for the wireless medium, where every user listens to the transmission of other users. The main benefit of user cooperation in wireless networks is, probably, its efficacy to combat the wireless channel impairments. Path loss and shadowing effects are overcome using intermediate nodes, with better channel conditions, to retransmit the received signal to the estination. Further, the channel fading effect can be also mitigated by means of cooperative spatial diversity (the information arrives at the destination through multiple independent paths). These benefits result in an increase of the users spectral efficiency and/or savings on the overall network power resource. Besides these gains, the simple ...

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 ...

Multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) systems deploy multiple antennas at either end of a communication link and can provide significant benefits compared to traditional single antenna systems, such as increased data rates through spatial multiplexing gain, and/or improved link reliability through diversity techniques. Recently, the natural extension of utilising multiple antennas in relay networks, known as MIMO relaying, has attracted significant research attention due to the fact that the benefits of MIMO can be coupled with extended network coverage through the use of relaying devices. This thesis concentrates on the design and analysis of different aspects of MIMO relay systems communicating over frequency selective channels with the use of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). The first focus of this thesis is on the development of training based channel estimation algorithms for two-hop MIMO OFDM relaying. In the first phase of channel ...

The majority of communication systems need the previous knowledge of the channel, which is usually estimated by means of a training sequence. However, the transmission of pilot symbols provokes a reduction in bandwidth efficiency, which precludes the system from reaching the limits predicted by the Information Theory. This problem has motivated the development of a large number of blind channel estimation and equalization techniques, which are able to obtain the channel or the source without the need of transmitting a training signal. Usually, these techniques are based on the previous knowledge of certain properties of the signal, such as its belonging to a finite alphabet, or its higher-order statistics. However, in the case of multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) systems, it has been proven that the second-order statistics of the observations provide the sufficient information for solving the blind problem. The aim ...

In the last years, research has focused on multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless technology due to the capacity and performance improvement it provides, offering a higher spectral efficiency. In addition, when multiple users take part in the network, the scenario becomes much more complex, since resources like bandwidth, time or transmission power must be shared. Furthermore, the performance of the system is degraded as a consequence of the noise and multiuser interference (MUI). When the transmission is conducted from a base station (BS) to multiple users, a pre-equalization stage called precoding is applied. By means of this, each user will be able to interpret the signal independently, without the knowledge of the channel. Precoding techniques are classified into linear and non-linear. In fact, the non-linear Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP) and vector precoding (VP) techniques have been shown to achieve very good results ...

Transmit diversity is a powerful technique for enhancing the channel capacity and reliability of multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems. This thesis considers extended orthogonal space-time block coding (EO-STBC) with beamsteering angles, which have previously been shown to potentially achieve full diversity and array gain with four transmit and one receive antenna. The optimum setting of beamsteering angles applied in the transmitter, which has to be calculated based on channel state information (CSI) at the receiver side, must be quantised and feed back to the transmitter via a reverse feedback link. When operating in a fading scenario, channel coefficients vary smoothly with time. This smooth evolution of channel coefficients motivates the investigation of differential feedback, which can reduce the number of feedback bits, while potentially maintaining near optimum performance. The hypothesis that the smooth evolution of channel coefficients translates into ...

The demand for mobile communication systems with high data rates has dramatically increased in recent years. New methods are necessary in order to satisfy this huge communications demand, exploiting the limited resources such as bandwidth and power as efficient as possible. MIMO systems with multiple an- tenna elements at both link ends are an efficient solution for future wireless communications systems as they provide high data rates by exploiting the spatial domain under the constraints of limited bandwidth and transmit power. Space-Time Block Coding (STBC) is a MIMO transmit strategy which exploits transmit diversity and high reliability. STBCs can be divided into two main classes, namely, Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes (OSTBCs) and Non-Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes (NOSTBCs). The Quasi-Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes (QSTBCs) belong to class of NOSTBCs and have been an intensive area of research. The OSTBCs achieve full ...

Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) channels are extensively proposed as a means to overcome the random channel impairments of wireless communications. Based upon placing multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver sides of the communication, their virtues are twofold. On the one hand, they allow the transmitter to code across antennas to overcome unknown channel fading. On the other hand, they permit the receiver to sample the signal on the space domain. This operation, followed by the coherent combination of samples, increases the signal-to-noise ratio at the input of the detector and provides large capacity, and reliability, gains. Nevertheless, equipping wireless handsets with multiple antennas is not always possible or worthwhile. Mainly, due to size and cost constraints, respectively. For these cases, the appropriate manner to exploit multi-antenna processing is by means of relaying. This consists of a set of wireless relay ...

Multi-input multi-output (MIMO) channels are known to increase the capacity of a transmission link. This can be exploited to increase either the multiplexing gain or the diversity gain, which leads to a higher data throughput or a better resilience of the link to fading, respectively. This thesis is concerned with the diversity gain, which, in a flat fading channel, can be maximised by Alamouti’s space-time block coding (STBC) scheme and a number of derivative techniques. For frequency selective fading, i.e. dispersive, MIMO channels, a few solutions have been reported in the literature including MIMO-OFDM, where the channel is decomposed into a number of narrowband problems, and a technique known as time-reversal STBC. For the latter, a number of blind adaptive algorithms have been derived, implemented and tested in order to avoid the requirement of explicit knowledge of the channel. The ...

Recently, many works have been accomplished on transmit diversity for a high-speed data transmission through the wireless channel. A Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system which employs multiple antennas at transmitter and receiver has been shown to be able to improve transmission data rate and capacity of the system. When the channel state information (CSI) is unknown at the transmitter, an multiple input single output (MISO) system combined with the transmit diversity of space time coding modulation known as space-time block coding (STBC) has taken a great attention. However, the performance of STBC is deteriorated under frequency selective fading due to inter symbol interference (ISI). An STBC employing tapped delay line adaptive array (STBC-TDLAA) is known as a solution for this problem since it utilizes the delayed signals to enhance the desired signal instead of excluding them as interferences. However, ...

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 ...

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems have recently emerged as one of the most significant wireless techniques, as they can greatly improve the channel capacity and link reliability of wireless communications. These benefits have encouraged extensive research on a virtual MIMO system where the transmitter has multiple antennas and each of the receivers has a single antenna. Single-antenna receivers can work together to form a virtual antenna array and reap some performance benefits of MIMO systems. The idea of receiver-side local cooperation is attractive for wireless networks since a wireless receiver may not have multiple antennas due to size and cost limitations. In this thesis we investigate a virtual-MIMO wireless system using the receiver-side cooperation with the compress-and-forward (CF) protocol. Firstly, to perform CF at the relay, we propose to use standard source coding techniques, based on the analysis of its expected ...

In multi-user (MU) downlink beamforming, a high spectral efficiency along with a low transmit power is achieved by separating multiple users in space rather than in time or frequency using spatially selective transmit beams. For streaming media applications, multi-group multicast (MGM) downlink beamforming is a promising approach to exploit the broadcasting property of the wireless medium to transmit the same information to a group of users. To limit inter-group interference, the individual streams intended for different multicast groups are spatially separated using MGM downlink beamforming. Spatially selective downlink beamforming requires the employment of an array of multiple antennas at the base station (BS). The hardware costs associated with the use of multiple antennas may be prohibitive in practice. A way to avoid the expensive employment of multiple antennas at the BS is to exploit user cooperation in wireless networks where ...

During the past years wireless communications have been exhibiting an increased growth rendering them the most common way for communication. The continuously increasing demand for wireless services resulted in limited availability of the wireless spectrum. To this end, Cognitive Radio (CR) techniques have been proposed in literature during the past years. The concept of CR approach is to utilize advanced radio and signal-processing technology along with novel spectrum allocation policies to enable new unlicensed wireless users to operate in the existing occupied spectrum areas without degrading the performance of the existing licensed ones. Moreover, the broadcast and fading nature of the wireless channel results in severe degradation on the performance of wireless transmissions. A solution to the problem is the use of multiple-antenna systems so as to achieve spatial diversity. However, in many cases, the communication devices' nature permit the ...