The wireless communication industry has seen a tremendous growth in the last few decades. The ever increasing demand to stay connected at home, work, and on the move, with voice and data applications, has continued the need for more sophisticated end-user devices. A typical smart communication device these days consists of a radio system that can access a mixture of mobile cellular services (GSM, UMTS, etc), indoor wireless broadband services (WLAN-802.11b/g/n), short range and low energy personal communications (Bluetooth), positioning and navigation systems (GPS), etc. A smart device capable of meeting all these requirements has to be highly flexible and should be able to reconfigure radio transmitters and receivers as and when required. Further, the radio modules used in these devices should be extremely small so that the device itself is portable. In addition, the device should also be economical ...

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 ...

This thesis investigates noncoherent multi-channel ultra-wideband receivers. Noncoherent ultra-wideband receivers promise low power consumption and low processing complexity as they, in contrast to coherent receiver architectures, relinquish the need of complex carrier frequency and phase recovering. Unfortunately, their peak data rate is limited by the delay spread of the multipath radio channel. Noncoherent multi-channel receivers can break this rate limit due to their capability to demodulate multi-carrier signals. Such receivers use an analog front-end to separate the received signals into their sub-channels. In this work, the modeling and optimization of realistic front-end components is addressed and their impact on the system performance of noncoherent multi-channel ultra-wideband receivers is analyzed. With a proposed generalized mathematical framework, it is shown that there exists a variety of noncoherent multi-channel receiver types with similar system performance which differ only in their front-end filters. It ...

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 implementation of wireless transceivers on a single chip in a single technology requires digital realizations of traditional analog building blocks such as phase-locked loops (PLLs). All-digital PLLs (ADPLLs) utilize the zero crossings of signals instead of their amplitudes to realize the frequency synthesizer entirely in digital CMOS technology. This thesis analyzes ADPLLs and highlights the system-level signal processing aspects. A z-domain model and a mixed-signal model are used to develop signal processing algorithms, to perform high-level simulations, and to evaluate the performance of ADPLLs. The impact of imperfections on the output phase noise spectrum are analytically described and compared to event-driven simulation outcomes. Oscillator noise, frequency quantization noise with sigma-delta noise shaping, and reference clock jitter raise the output phase noise level, whereas phase quantization and injection pulling manifest themselves as spurs in the output phase noise spectrum. Furthermore, ...

In a multipath dominated environment, ultra-wideband (UWB) systems that transmit trains of subnanosecond duration pulses exhibit the desirable property of fine resolution in time of the received paths, which as a result of the impulsive form of the transmitted signal go through fewer amplitude fluctuations than those emanating from systems with narrower bandwidths. Being distributed over a large number of resolvable paths, UWB signal energy is typically collected by the rake receiver. In this thesis, achievable information rates of time-hopping M-ary pulse position modulation UWB systems using either soft- or hard-decision outputs are calculated first, where one distinguishing characteristic observed for the hard-output systems is that increasing the constellation size is advantageous only at sufficiently large values of the code rate. Next, it is shown that with time division duplex UWB systems, for which channel information is available at the ...

Multi-Carrier (MC) modulation has various advantages that make it useful for a wide variety of digital communication systems. Actually, it has been chosen as the physical layer standard for a diversity of basic systems such as digital transmission over telephone lines, applications in broadcasting and in wireless networks. The most important advantage of the MC system is its robustness against interferences. In fact, the cyclic prefix (CP) insertion through MC symbols provides higher immunity against delay spread and interferences. Therefore, as long as channel dispersion is not longer than the CP, system performance does not degrade and the need of time-domain equalization is not usually immediate. However, highly time dispersive channel leads to a significant reduction of the transmission data rate since the received signal is corrupted by both inter-carrier and inter symbol interferences. To avoid such a performance degradation, ...

The aim of this thesis is to investigate key issues encountered in the design of transmission schemes and receiving techniques for Ultra Wideband (UWB) communication systems. Based on different data rate applications, this work is divided into two parts, where energy efficient and robust physical layer solutions are proposed, respectively. Due to a huge bandwidth of UWB signals, a considerable amount of multipath arrivals with various path gains is resolvable at the receiver. For low data rate impulse radio UWB systems, suboptimal non-coherent detection is a simple way to effectively capture the multipath energy. Feasible techniques that increase the power efficiency and the interference robustness of non-coherent detection need to be investigated. For high data rate direct sequence UWB systems, a large number of multipath arrivals results in severe inter-/intra-symbol interference. Additionally, the system performance may also be deteriorated by ...

Modern signal processing applications emerging in telecommunication and instrumentation industries need high-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), which can be achieved by employing a time-interleaved parallel array of ADCs (time-interleaved ADCs). The time interleaving of the channels allows to increase the sampling rate by the number of channels compared to a single channel. Unfortunately, time-interleaved ADCs suffer from channel mismatches that limit their performance, wherefore this thesis deals with the identification and compensation of channel mismatches in time-interleaved ADCs. By using nonlinear hybrid filter banks, we have modeled and analyzed channel mismatches in detail. The model covers linear and nonlinear channel mismatches, unifies, and extends the channel models found in the literature. A novel foreground channel mismatch identification method has been developed, which can be used to fully characterize dynamic linear mismatches. A background identification method provides accurate timing mismatch estimates. Finally, ...

The error vector magnitude (EVM) is a standard metric to quantify the performance of digital communication systems and related building blocks. Regular EVM measurements require expensive equipment featuring inphase and quadrature (IQ) demodulation, wideband analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), and dedicated receiver algorithms to demodulate the data symbols. With modern high data rate communication standards that require high bandwidths and low amounts of error, it is difficult to avoid bias due to errors in the measurement chain. This thesis develops and discusses measurement methods that address the above-described issues with EVM measurements. The first method is an extension of the regular EVM, yielding two results from a single measurement. One result equals the regular EVM result, whereas the other excludes potential errors due to mismatches of the I- and Q- paths of direct conversion transmitters and receivers (IQ imbalance). This can be ...

In the recent years, a significant portion of the research within the field of wireless communications has been motivated by two aspects: the constant increase in the number of wireless devices and the higher and higher data rate requirements of the individual applications. The undisputed outcome of these phenomena is the heavy congestion of the suitable spectral resources. This has inspired many innovative solutions for improving the spectral efficiency of the wireless communications systems by facilitating more simultaneous connections and higher data rates without requiring additional spectrum. These include technologies such as in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) modulation, multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems, and the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) waveform, among others. Even though these existing solutions have greatly improved the spectral efficiency of wireless communications, even more advanced techniques are needed for fulfilling the future data transfer requirements in the ultra high ...

Ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems use radio signals with a bandwidth in the range of some hundred MHz to several GHz. Radio channels with dense multipath propagation achieve high multipath diversity, which can be used to improve the robustness and capacity of the communication channel. Furthermore the large bandwidth allows to transmit signals with a small power spectral density such that the interference to other radio signals will be negligible, even if they lie within the same frequency band. In this work the focus is on low-complexity receiver architectures for communication systems in presence of multiple-access interference (MAI). The main objective of this thesis is to develop and to study a framework for communications for transmitted reference (TR) UWB systems and energy detection UWB systems. First, we study the hybrid matched-filter (HMF) receiver for TR UWB systems, which employs matched filters ...

It is well known that Ultra WideBand (UWB) transmission is inherently robust against small-scale-fading (SSF) that arises in multipath scattering environments, due to its large signal bandwidth. However, no model with a physical interpretation exists that relates the variations of received signal strength to the signal bandwidth and general channel parameters, like e.g. the average channel power delay profile. Such a model would be of relevance for e.g. system designers, who have to make tradeoffs between system aspects, like complexity and energy efficiency on one hand, and robustness against small-scale fading on the other hand. In this thesis, a model is presented that allows for such a tradeoff analysis, relating the average power delay profile parameters and signal bandwidth to the statistical properties of the SSF. Additionally, it is shown how the uncoded and coded BER of BPSK modulation can ...

This thesis includes a collection of papers that analyze and derive the properties of Ultra Wideband (UWB) radio systems that use Time Hopping for Multiple Access and binary Pulse Position Modulation. New families and generation methods of Time Hopping codes are proposed and properties in terms of cross -correlation, SNR, error probabilities are given. Moreover, interference issues are addressed and an analysis of radio frequency interference effects to a victim UWB receiver is presented. Finally, a cell search procedure in an asynchronous wireless network based on Ultra Wide Band (UWB) radio is proposed.

When exposed to noise, speakers will modify the way they speak in an effort to maintain intelligible communication. This process, which is referred to as Lombard effect (LE), involves a combination of both conscious and subconscious articulatory adjustment. Speech production variations due to LE can cause considerable degradation in automatic speech recognition (ASR) since they introduce a mismatch between parameters of the speech to be recognized and the ASR system’s acoustic models, which are usually trained on neutral speech. The main objective of this thesis is to analyze the impact of LE on speech production and to propose methods that increase ASR system performance in LE. All presented experiments were conducted on the Czech spoken language, yet, the proposed concepts are assumed applicable to other languages. The first part of the thesis focuses on the design and acquisition of a ...