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 ...

An important specificity of wireless communication channels are the rapid fluctuations of propagation coefficients. This effect is called fading and is caused by the motion of obstacles, scatterers and reflectors standing along the different paths of electromagnetic wave propagation between the transmitting and the receiving terminal. These changes in the geometry of the wireless channel prompt the attenuation coefficients and the relative phase shifts between the multiple propagation paths to vary. This suggests to model the channel coefficients (the transfer matrix) as random variables. The present thesis studies information rates for reliable transmission of information over fading channels under the realistic assumption that the receiver has only imperfect knowledge of the random fading state. While the over-idealized assumption of perfect channel-state information at the receiver (CSIR) gives rise to many simple expressions and is fairly well understood, the settings with ...

Wireless broadband communications for users moving at vehicular speed is a cor- nerstone of future fourth generation (4G) mobile communication systems. We inves- tigate a multi-carrier (MC) code division multiple access (CDMA) system which is based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). A spreading sequence is used in the frequency domain in order to distinguish individual users and to take advantage of the multipath diversity of the wireless channel. The transmission is block oriented. A block consists of OFDM pilot and OFDM data symbols. At pedestrian velocities the channel can be modelled as block fading. We ap- ply iterative multi-user detection and channel estimation. In iterative receivers soft symbols are derived from the output of an soft-input soft-output decoder. These soft symbols are used in order to reduce the interference from other users and to enhance the channel estimates. We ...

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, ...

CDMA is the multiple access technique selected for the 3G mobile communications systems and it has a significant role in the research beyond 3G systems. CDMA systems over wireless channels have to cope with fading multipath propagation, which makes the channel estimation an important issue in CDMA receivers. Despite a significant amount of scientific literature on CDMA receivers, there are still open problems regarding the multipath delay and coefficient estimation in hostile environments and the design of low-complexity DSP-based channel estimators for CDMA applications. Good multipath delay estimation techniques can also find their applicability in mobile phone positioning, which is an area with many challenging questions. Additionally, theoretical measures of performance in CDMA detection in the presence of fading multipath channels have mainly been derived for ideal channel estimators. However, developing such analytical models in the presence of channel estimation ...

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 ...

The fabrication of miniature electronics and sensors has encouraged the creation of a wide range of wireless enabled devices designed to be worn on the human body. This has led to the prominence of so-called wearable communications, which have emerged to satisfy the demand for wireless connectivity between these devices and with external networks. The work in this thesis has focused on the characterization of the composite fading (i.e combined multipath and shadowing) observed in wearable communications channels. It has also investigated the mitigation of the deleterious effects of both of these propagation phenomena in wearable communications. In order to accurately characterize the behaviour of the composite fading signal observed in wearable communications channels, new fading models such as F, $\kappa$-$\mu$ / inverse gamma and $\eta$-$\mu$ / inverse gamma composite fading models, have been proposed. The generality and utility of ...

Throughout this work, channel estimation techniques have been analyzed and proposed for moderate and very high mobility DVB (digital video broadcasting) receivers, focusing on the DVB-T2 (Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial 2) framework and the forthcoming DVB-NGH (Digital Video Broadcasting - Next Generation Handheld) standard. Mobility support is one of the key features of these DVB specifications, which try to deal with the challenge of enabling HDTV (high definition television) delivery at high vehicular speed. In high-mobility scenarios, the channel response varies within an OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) block and the subcarriers are no longer orthogonal, which leads to the so-called ICI (inter-carrier interference), making the system performance drop severely. Therefore, in order to successfully decode the transmitted data, ICI-aware detectors are necessary and accurate CSI (channel state information), including the ICI terms, is required at the receiver. With 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 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 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 ...

The fourth and fifth generation wireless communication systems (4G and 5G) use a physical layer (PHY) based on multicarrier modulations for data transmission using high bandwidth. This type of modulations has shown to provide high spectral efficiency while allowing low complexity radio channel equalization. These systems use OFDMA as a mechanism for distributing the available radio resources among different users. This allocation is done by assigning a subset of subcarriers to each user in a given instant of time. This provides great flexibility to the system that allows it to adapt to both the quality of service requirements of users and the radio channel state. The media access layer (MAC) of these systems is in charge of configuring the multiple OFDMA PHY layer parameters, in addition to managing the data flows of each user, transforming the higher layer packets into ...

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 ...

Receiver synchronisation can be a major problem in a mobile radio environment where the communication channel is subject to rapid changes. Communication in spread spectrum systems is impossible unless the received spreading waveform and receiver-generated replica of the spreading waveform are initially synchronised in both phase and frequency. Phase and frequency synchronisation is usually accomplished by performing a two-dimensional search in the time/frequency ambiguity area. Generally, this process must be accomplished at very low SNRs, as quickly as possible, using the minimum amount of hardware. This thesis looks into techniques for improving spread spectrum receiver synchronisation in terms of the mean acquisition time. In particular, the thesis is focused on receiver structures that provide and/or use a priori information in order to minimise the mean acquisition time. The first part of this work is applicable to synchronisation scenarios involving LEO ...

Wireless Terabits per second (Tbps) link is needed for the new emerging data-hungry applications in Beyond 5G (B5G) (e.g., high capacity broadband, enhanced hotspot, 3D extended reality, etc.). The sub-GHz bands are scarce and overused, while the considered millimeter Wave bands in 5G are insufficient to reach the desired ultra-high throughput. Thus, the sub-THz/THz bands are envisaged as the next frontier for B5G wireless communication. Even though a wider bandwidth and large-scale MIMO are envisioned at sub-THz bands, but the system and waveform design should consider the channel characteristics, technological limitations, and high RF impairments. Based on these challenges, we proposed to use an energy-efficient low order single carrier modulation accompanied by spectral-efficient Index Modulation (IM) with advanced MIMO techniques In the first part of this thesis, the spectral-efficient MIMO Spatial Multiplexing (SMX) and Generalized Spatial Modulation (GSM), that generalizes ...