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 work deals with the use of an antenna array at the base station of a mobile communication system for transmission. In reception, solutions that exploit the antenna array are now well established. In transmission, however, the problem remains open. Two approaches are possible : exploit the array by using beamforming techniques or by using diversity techniques. These two approaches are based on opposite assumptions about the channels correlation, which implies a greater or smaller distance between antennas, depending on the environment. In practice, these assumptions are not verified. Here, we aim to deal with the problem as a whole for better exploiting the antenna array. This work treats the mono-user case, as well as the multi-user scenario. In the mono-user case, we propose a transmission scheme composed of a classical transmit diversity technique applied to virtual antennas, which are ...

The emergence of very capable mobile terminals, e.g. smartphones or tablets, has dramatically increased the demand of wireless data traffic in recent years. Current growth forecasts elucidate that wireless communication standards will not be able to afford future traffic demands, thus many research efforts have been oriented towards increasing the efficiency of wireless networks. Wireless communications introduce many issues not present in wired systems, e.g. multipath effects or interference. Some of these issues may be tackled by the use of multiple antennas, i.e. MIMO technologies. This solution allows increasing not only the reliability and robustness of the communications, i.e. the diversity gain, but also its efficiency, i.e. the multiplexing gain or degrees of freedom (DoF). The DoF describe the slope of channel capacity at very high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) regime. For a point-to-point (P2P) communication, assuming that the wireless channel response ...

Multisensor systems are a key enabling technology in, e.g., radar, sonar, medical ultrasound, and wireless communications. Using multiple sensors provides spatial selectivity, improves the signal-to-noise ratio, and enables rejecting unwanted interference. Conventional multisensor systems employ a simple array of uniformly spaced sensors with a linear or rectangular geometry. However, a uniform array spanning a large electrical aperture may become prohibitively expensive, as many sensors and costly RF-IF front ends are needed. In contrast, sparse sensor arrays require drastically fewer resources to achieve comparable performance in terms of spatial resolution and the number of identifiable scatterers or sources. This is facilitated by the co-array: a virtual array structure consisting of the pairwise differences or sums of physical sensor positions. Most recent works on co-array-based sparse array design focus exclusively on passive sensing. Active sensing, where sensors transmit signals and observe their ...

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 ...

Antenna arrays sample propagating waves at multiple locations. They are employed e.g. in radar, sonar and wireless communication systems because of their capacity of spatial selectivity and localization of radiating sources. Current model-based algorithms make use of computationally demanding orthogonal matrix decompositions such as the singular value decomposition (SVD). On the other hand the data rates are often extremely high. Therefore, real-time execution of complex algorithms often requires parallel computing. We study the simultaneous design of new algorithms and parallel architectures for subspace tracking, for robust adaptive beamforming and for direction finding of narrow-band and wide-band sources. By structuring all recursive algorithms in a similar way, they can be mapped efficiently onto the Jacobi architecture, which was originally developed for SVD updating. The numerical and architectural aspects of this algorithm are improved by the use of a minimal parameterziation of ...

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 ...

This Dissertation addresses the synchronization problem using an array of antennas in the general framework of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers. Positioning systems are based on time delay and frequency-shift estimation of the incoming signals in the receiver side, in order to compute the user's location. Sources of accuracy degradation in satellite-based navigation systems are well-known, and their mitigation has deserved the attention of a number of researchers in latter times. While atmospheric-dependant sources (delays that depend on the ionosphere and troposphere conditions) can be greatly mitigated by differential systems external to the receiver's operation, the multipath effect is location-dependant and remains as the most important cause of accuracy degradation in time delay estimation, and consequently in position estimation, becoming a signal processing challenge. Traditional approaches to time delay estimation are often embodied in a communication systems framework. Indeed, ...

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 ...

This dissertation is the combination of three manuscripts –either published in or submitted to journals– on compressive sensing of propeller noise for detection, identification and localization of water crafts. Propeller noise, as a result of rotating blades, is broadband and radiates through water dominating underwater acoustic noise spectrum especially when cavitation develops. Propeller cavitation yields cyclostationary noise which can be modeled by amplitude modulation, i.e., the envelope-carrier product. The envelope consists of the so-called propeller tonals representing propeller characteristics which is used to identify water crafts whereas the carrier is a stationary broadband process. Sampling for propeller noise processing yields large data sizes due to Nyquist rate and multiple sensor deployment. A compressive sensing scheme is proposed for efficient sampling of second-order cyclostationary propeller noise since the spectral correlation function of the amplitude modulation model is sparse as shown in ...

Modern wireless communication systems utilize complex modulated signals such as OFDM signals to achieve increased data rates and spectral efficiency. These signals are characterized by a high peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR). Thus, highly linear transmitters are required to provide sufficient transmission signal linearity. Conventional linear PAs, such as Class A or Class AB, produce high efficiency only near or at the peak output power region. As a result, the average efficiency is quite low for high PAPR signals. For non-portable devices such as base stations or mobile devices like mobile phones, low PA efficiency means higher heat dissipation which is often a design criterion. In addition, in mobile devices, a direct consequence of the low PA efficiency is the reduced battery lifetime, especially when the mobile device is required to operate at quite different output power levels. This thesis addresses the ...

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 ...

In 1948, the Shannon’s work titled ”A mathematical theory of communication” completely revolutionized the way to understand the problem of the reliable communications. He showed that any communications system is able to transmit with an arbitrarily low error probability as long as the transmission rate is kept below a certain limit. The separation between the source and channel coding was also shown as the optimal strategy to achieve the theoretical limits. Those ideas inspire the development of a whole digital communication theory focused on building more and more sophisticated coding schemes. It leads to most of communication systems were designed according to a digital approach and the separation principle from that moment, whereas other alternatives were set aside. However, in the last years, communication systems based on a jointly optimization of the source and channel encoder has aroused the interest ...

This Dissertation addresses the signal acquisition problem using antenna arrays in the general framework of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers. GNSSs provide the necessary infrastructures for a myriad of applications and services that demand a robust and accurate positioning service. GNSS ranging signals are received with very low signal-to-noise ratio. Despite that the GNSS CDMA modulation offers limited protection against Radio Frequency Interferences (RFI), an interference that exceeds the processing gain can easily degrade receivers' performance or even deny completely the GNSS service. A growing concern of this problem has appeared in recent times. A single-antenna receiver can make use of time and frequency diversity to mitigate interferences, even though the performance of these techniques is compromised in the presence of wideband interferences. Antenna arrays receivers can benefit from spatial-domain processing, and thus mitigate the effects of interfering signals. ...

The use of low-cost CubeSats in the context of satellite formation flying appears favourable due to their small size, relatively low launch cost, short development cycle and utilisation of commercial off the shelf components. However, the task of managing complex formations using a large number of satellites in Earth orbit is not a trivial one, and is further exacerbated by low-power and processing constraints in CubeSats. With this in mind, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based system has been developed to provide next generation on-board computing capability. The features and functionality provided by this on-board computer, as well as the steps taken to ensure reliability, including design processes and mitigation techniques are presented in this work and compared to state of the art technology. Coupling reliable formation flying capabilities with the possibility of producing complex patterns using spacecraft will ...