From the perspective of increasingly data rate requirements in mobile communications, it is deemed necessary to do further research so that the future goals can be reached. To that end, the radio-based communications are resorting to multicarrier modulations and spatial diversity. Until today, the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation is regarded as the dominant technology. On one hand, the OFDM modulation is able to accommodate multiantenna configurations in a very straightforward manner. On the other hand, the poor stopband attenuation exhibited by the OFDM modulation, highlights that a definitely tight synchronization is required. In addition, the cyclic prefix (CP) has to be sufficiently long to avoid inter-block interference, which may substantially reduce the spectral efficiency. In order to overcome the OFDM drawbacks, the filter bank multicarrier modulation based on OQAM (FBMC/OQAM) is introduced. This modulation does not need any ...

To satisfy the continuously growing demands for higher data rates, modern radio communication systems employ larger bandwidths and more complex waveforms. Furthermore, radio devices are expected to support a rich mixture of standards such as cellular networks, wireless local-area networks, wireless personal area networks, positioning and navigation systems, etc. In general, a "smart'' device should be flexible to support all these requirements while being portable, cheap, and energy efficient. These seemingly conflicting expectations impose stringent radio frequency (RF) design challenges which, in turn, call for their proper understanding as well as developing cost-effective solutions to address them. The direct-conversion transceiver architecture is an appealing analog front-end for flexible and multi-standard radio systems. However, it is sensitive to various circuit impairments, and modern communication systems based on multi-carrier waveforms such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple ...

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 ...

The thriving development of wireless communications calls for innovative and advanced signal processing techniques targeting at an enhanced performance in terms of reliability, throughput, robustness, efficiency, flexibility, etc.. This thesis addresses such a compelling demand and presents new and intriguing progress towards fulfilling it. We mainly concentrate on two advanced multi-dimensional signal processing challenges for wireless systems that have attracted tremendous research attention in recent years, multi-carrier Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems and multi-dimensional harmonic retrieval. As the key technologies of wireless communications, the numerous benefits of MIMO and multi-carrier modulation, e.g., boosting the data rate and improving the link reliability, have long been identified and have ignited great research interest. In particular, the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)-based multi-user MIMO downlink with Space-Division Multiple Access (SDMA) combines the twofold advantages of MIMO and multi-carrier modulation. It is the essential element ...

Broadband wireless communication is a very fast growing communication area. Multicarrier modulation techniques like Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), Biorthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (BFDM), Pulse Shaping (PS) and Multi-Carrier Spread Spectrum (MCSS) have recently been introduced as robust techniques against intersymbol interference (ISI) and noise, compared to single carrier communication systems over fast fading multipath communication channels. Therefore, multicarrier modulation techniques have been considered as a candidate for new generation, high data rate broadband wireless communication systems and have been adopted as the related standards. Several examples are the European digital audio broadcasting (DAB) and digital video broadcasting (DVB), the IEEE standands for wireless local area networks (WLAN), 802.11a, and wireless metropolitan area networks (WMAN), 802.16a. However, Doppler frequency shifts, phase offset, local oscillator frequency shifts, and multi-path fading severely degrade the performance of multicarrier communication systems. For fast-varying channels, ...

This thesis investigates filter bank based multicarrier modulation using offset quadrature amplitude modulation (FBMC/OQAM), which is characterised by a critically sampled FBMC system that achieves full spectral efficiency in the sense of being free of redundancy. As a starting point, a performance comparison between FBMC/OQAM and oversampled (OS) FBMC systems is made in terms of per-subband fractionally spaced equalisation in order to compensate for the transmission distortions caused by dispersive channels. Simulation results show the reduced performance in equalising FBMC/OQAM compared to OS-FBMC, where the advantage for the latter stems from the use of guard bands. Alternatively, the inferior performance of FBMC/OQAM can be assigned to the inability of a per-subband equaliser to address the problem of potential intercarrier interference (ICI) in this system. The FBMC/OQAM system is analysed by representing the equivalent transmultiplexed channel including the filter banks as ...

In recent years, we have assisted to the dawn of many wireless and wireline communication technologies that have adopted multi-carrier modulation (MCM) at the physical layer. The basic idea ofMCMs is to transmit a high rate data stream by dividing it into low rate streams that are used to generate low rate signals each modulated at a given carrier frequency. The use ofMCMs allows for dividing the frequency selective channel into a set of narrow-band sub-channels. Consequently, the transmitted signal experiences, in each sub-channel, a quasi flat frequency response, so that, the equalization task simplifies to a sub-channel filtering. In addition to the simplification of the equalization task, there are several benefits deriving from the use of MCMs that, in general, depend upon the considered transmission medium. The most important ones are the low complexity digital implementation, and the possibility ...

The aim of this dissertation is the investigation of the key issues encountered in the development of wideband radio air-interfaces. Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is considered as the enabling technology for transmitting data at extremely high rates over time-dispersive radio channels. OFDM is a transmission scheme, which splits up the data stream, sending the data symbols simultaneously at a drastically reduced symbol rate over a set of parallel sub-carriers. The first part of this thesis deals with the modeling of the time-dispersive and frequency-selective radio channel, utilizing second order Gaussian stochastic processes. A novel channel measurement technique is developed, in which the RMS delay spread of the channel is estimated from the level-crossing rate of the frequency-selective channel transfer function. This method enables the empirical channel characterization utilizing simplified non-coherent measurements of the received power versus frequency. Air-interface and multiple ...

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 ...

Future wireless systems will be characterized by a large range of possible use cases. This requires a flexible allocation of the available time-frequency resources, which is difficult in conventional Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). Thus, modifications of OFDM, such as windowing or filtering, become necessary. Alternatively, one can employ a different modulation scheme, such as Filter Bank Multicarrier Modulation (FBMC). In this thesis, I provide a unifying framework, discussion and performance evaluation of FBMC and compare it to OFDM based schemes. My investigations are not only based on simulations, but are substantiated by real-world testbed measurements and trials, where I show that multiple antennas and channel estimation, two of the main challenges associated with FBMC, can be efficiently dealt with. Additionally, I derive closed-form solutions for the signal-to-interference ratio in doubly-selective channels and show that in many practical cases, one-tap ...

The ever-increasing growth of the wireless application and services affirms the importance of the effective usage of the limited radio spectrum. Existing spectrum management policies have led to significant spectrum under-utilization. Recent measurements showed that large range of the spectrum is sparsely used in both temporal and spatial manner. This conflict between the inefficient usage of the spectrum and the continuous evolution in the wireless communication calls upon the development of more flexible management policies. Cognitive radio (CR) with the dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is considered to be a key technology in making the best solution of this conflict by allowing a group of secondary users (SUs) to share the radio spectrum originally allocated to the primary user (PUs). The operation of CR should not negatively alter the performance of the PUs. Therefore, the interference control along with the highly ...

The widespread use of mobile internet and smart applications has led to an explosive growth in mobile data traffic. With the rise of smart homes, smart buildings, and smart cities, this demand is ever growing since future communication systems will require the integration of multiple networks serving diverse sectors, domains and applications, such as multimedia, virtual or augmented reality, machine-to-machine (M2M) communication / the Internet of things (IoT), automotive applications, and many more. Therefore, in the future, the communication systems will not only be required to provide Gbps wireless connectivity but also fulfill other requirements such as low latency and massive machine type connectivity while ensuring the quality of service. Without significant technological advances to increase the system capacity, the existing telecommunications infrastructure will be unable to support these multi-dimensional requirements. This poses an important demand for suitable waveforms with ...

In nowadays communication systems, error correction provides robust data transmission through imperfect (noisy) channels. Error correcting codes are a crucial component in most storage and communication systems – wired or wireless –, e.g. GSM, UMTS, xDSL, CD/DVD. At least as important as the data integrity issue is the recent realization that error correcting codes fundamentally change the trade-offs in system design. High-integrity, low redundancy coding can be applied to increase data rate, or battery life time or by reducing hardware costs, making it possible to enter mass market. When it comes to the design of error correcting codes and their properties, there are two main theories that play an important role in this work. Classical coding theory aims at finding the best code given an available block length. This thesis focuses on the ubiquitous Reed-Solomon codes, one of the major ...

In order to meet the diverse requirements imposed by a massive number of applications, the fifth generation (5G) New Radio (NR) Physical Layer (PHY) is designed to provide a highly flexible framework. This flexibility is made possible through a scalable numerology. The term numerology refers to the PHY waveform parametrization and allows the use of different subcarrier spacings, symbol and slot durations. In addition to an efficient support of various service requirements, employing a scalable numerology allows a better adjustment of the PHY waveform to different channel conditions, providing more robustness against channel variations. Despite increased flexibility provided by multiplexing different numerologies, there is also a drawback of this concept, i.e., Internumerology Interference (INI) caused by non-orthogonal subcarriers between different numerologies. In this thesis, a closed-form expression of INI is derived for both, Cyclic Prefix (CP)-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) ...

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 ...