In order to meet ever-growing needs for capacity in wireless networks, transmission techniques and the system models used to study their performances have rapidly evolved. From single-user single-antenna point-to-point communications to modern multi-cell multi-antenna cellular networks there have been large advances in technology. Along the way, several assumptions are made in order to have either more realistic models, but also to allow simpler analysis. We analyze three aspects of actual networks and try to benefit from them when possible or conversely, to mitigate their negative impact. This sometimes corrects overly optimistic results, for instance when delay in the channel state information (CSI) acquisition is no longer neglected. However, this sometimes also corrects overly pessimistic results, for instance when in a broadcast channel (BC) the number of users is no longer limited to be equal to the number of transmit antennas ...

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 ...

Signal processing techniques for multiple-antenna transmission can exploit the spatial dimension of the wireless channel to serve multiple users simultaneously, achieving high spectral efficiencies. Realizing such gains; however, is strongly dependent on the availability of highly accurate and up-to-date Channel State Information at the Transmitter (CSIT). This stems from the necessity to deal with multiuser interference through preprocessing; as receivers cannot coordinate in general. In wireless systems, CSIT is subject to uncertainty due to estimation and quantization errors, delays and mismatches. This thesis proposes optimized preprocessing techniques for broadcasting scenarios where a multi-antenna transmitter communicates with single-antenna receivers under CSIT uncertainties. First, we consider a scenario where the transmitter communicates an independent message to each receiver. The most popular preprocessing techniques in this setup are based on linear precoding (or beamforming). Despite their near-optimum rate performances when highly accurate CSIT ...

Wireless communications have gone through an exponential growth in the last several years and it is forecast that this growth will be sustained for the coming decades. This ever-increasing demand for radio resources is now facing one of its main limitations: inter-user interference, arising from the fact of multiple users accessing the propagation medium simultaneously which limits the total amount of data that can be reliably communicated through the wireless links. Traditionally, interference has been dealt with by allocating disjoint channel resources to distinct users. However, the advent of a novel interference coordination technique known as interference alignment (IA) brought to the forefront the promise of a much larger spectral efficiency. This dissertation revolves around the idea of linear interference alignment for a network consisting of several mutually interfering transmitter-receiver pairs, which is com-monly known as interference channel. In particular, ...

This work considers a Broadcast Channel (BC) system, where the transmitter is equipped with multiple antennas and each user at the receiver side could have one or more antennas. Depending on the number of antennas at the receiver side, such a system is known as Multiple-User Multiple-Input Single-Output (MU-MISO), for single antenna users, or Multiple-UserMultiple-InputMultiple-Output (MU-MIMO), for several antenna users. This model is suitable for current wireless communication systems. Regarding the direction of the data flow, we differentiate between downlink channel or BC, and uplink channel or Multiple Access Channel (MAC). In the BC the signals are sent from the Base Station (BS) to the users, whereas the information from the users is sent to the BS in the MAC. In this work we focus on the BC where the BS applies linear precoding taking advantage of multiple antennas. 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 ...

The envisioned rapid and exponential increase of wireless data traffic demand in the next years imposes rethinking current wireless cellular networks due to the scarcity of the available spectrum. In this regard, three main drivers are considered to increase the capacity of today's most advanced (4G systems) and future (5G systems and beyond) cellular networks: i) use more bandwidth (more Hz) through spectral aggregation, ii) enhance the spectral efficiency per base station (BS) (more bits/s/Hz/BS) by using multiple antennas at BSs and users (i.e. MIMO systems), and iii) increase the density of BSs (more BSs/km2) through a dense and heterogeneous deployment (known as dense heterogeneous cellular networks). We focus on the last two drivers. First, the use of multi-antenna systems allows exploiting the spatial dimension for several purposes: improving the capacity of a conventional point-to-point wireless link, increasing the number ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) is a promising 5G and beyond-5G wireless access technology that can provide huge throughput, compared with the current technology, in order to satisfy some requirements for the future generations of wireless networks. The research described in this thesis proposes the design of some applications of the massive MIMO technology that can be implemented in order to increase the spectral efficiency per cell of the future wireless networks through a simple and low complexity signal processing. In particular, massive MIMO is studied in conjunction with two other topics that are currently under investigation for the future wireless systems, both in academia and in industry: the millimeter wave frequencies and the distributed antenna systems. The first part of the thesis gives a brief overview on the requirements of the future wireless networks and it explains some ...

In the last few years, wireless devices have evolved to unimaginable heights. Current forecasts suggest that, in the near future, every device that may take advantage of a wireless connection will have one. In addition, there is a gradual migration to smart devices and high-speed connections, and, as a consequence, the overall mobile traffic is expected to experience a tremendous growth in the next years. The multiuser interference will hence become the main limiting factor and the most critical point to address. As instrumental to efficiently manage interference between different systems, this thesis provides a thorough study on cooperative techniques. That is, users share information and exploit it to improve the overall performance. Since multiuser cooperation represents a very broad term, we will focus on algorithm design and transceiver optimization for three cooperative scenarios that capture some of the main ...

In the last decade, cooperation among multiple terminals has been seen as one of the more promising strategies to improve transmission speed in wireless communications networks. Basically, the idea is to mimic an antenna array and apply distributed versions of well-known space-diversity techniques. In this context, the simplest cooperative scheme is the relay channel: all the terminals (relays) that overhear a point-to-point communication between a source and a destination may decide to aid the source by forwarding (relaying) its message. In a mobile system, it is common to assume that the relays do not have any information about the channel between them and the destination. Under this hypothesis, the best solution to exploit the diversity offered by multiple transmitting antennas is to use space-time coding (STC). However, classical STC's are designed for systems with a fixed and usually low number ...