Equalization Techniques of Control and Non-Payload Communication Links for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In the next years, several new applications involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for public and commercial uses are envisaged. In such developments, since UAVs are expected to operate within the public airspace, a key issue is the design of reliable control and non-payload communication (CNPC) links connecting the ground control station to the UAV. At the physical layer, CNPC design must cope with time- and frequency-selectivity (so-called double selectivity) of the wireless channel, due to lowaltitude operation and flight dynamics of the UAV. In this paper, we consider the transmission of continuous phase modulated (CPM) signals for UAV CNPC links operating over doubly-selective channels. Leveraging on the Laurent representation for a CPM signal, we design a two-stage receiver: the first one is a linear time-varying (LTV) equalizer, synthesized under either the zero-forcing (ZF) or minimum mean-square error (MMSE) criterion; the second one recovers the transmitted symbols from the pseudo-symbols of the Laurent representation in a simple recursive manner. In addition to LTV-ZF and LTV-MMSE equalizers, their widely-linear versions are also developed, to take into account the possible noncircular features of the CPM signal. Moreover, relying on a basis expansion model (BEM) of the doubly-selective channel, we derive frequency-shift versions of the proposed equalizers, by discussing their complexity issues and proposing simplified implementations. Monte Carlo numerical simulations show that the proposed receiving structures are able to satisfactorily equalize the doubly-selective channel in typical UAV scenarios

CPM Training Waveforms With Autocorrelation Sidelobes Close to Zero

Continuous phase modulation (CPM) plays an important role in wireless communications due to its constant envelope signal property and tight spectrum confinement capability. Although CPM has been studied for many years, CPM training waveforms having autocorrelations with zero sidelobes have not been reported before, to the best of our knowledge. Existing works on the CPM system design mostly assume that the channel fading coefficients are either perfectly known at the receiver or estimated using random CPM training waveforms. In this correspondence paper, we propose a novel class of CPM training waveforms displaying autocorrelation sidelobes close to zero. The key idea of our construction is to apply differential encoding to Golay complementary pair having perfect aperiodic autocorrelation sum properties

Constant Envelope DCT- and FFT- based Multicarrier Systems

Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)- and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)- based Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems with a variety of angle modulations are considered for data transmission. These modulations are used with the purpose of achieving Constant Envelope (CE) transmitted signals, for superior power efficiency with nonlinear High Power Amplifier (HPA), typically used at the transmitter in OFDM systems. Specifically, four angle modulations are considered: i) Phase Modulation (PM); ii) Frequency Modulation (FM); iii) Continuous Phase Modulation (CPM); and iv) Continuous Phase Chirp Modulation (CPCM). Descriptions of DCT- and FFT- based OFDM systems with M-ary Pulse Amplitude Modulation (MPAM) mapper, with these modulations, are given and expressions for transmitted signals are developed. The detection of these signals in Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and multipath fading channels is addressed. The receiver structure consists of arctangent demodulator followed by the optimum OFDM receiver for memoryless PM and FM modulations. However, for CPM and CPCM modulations that have inherent memory, arctangent demodulator followed by correction with oversampling technique is used prior to the optimum OFDM receiver. Closed-form expressions for Bit Error Rate (BER) have been derived and are function of: i) Signal-to-Noise Ratio, (Eb/N0); ii) Modulation parameters; iii) Number of amplitude levels of M-PAM mapper; and iv) parameters of multipath fading environment. It is shown that, in general, BER performance of CE-DCT-OFDM system is superior compared to that of conventional DCT-OFDM system, when the effect of HPA in the system is taken into account. Also, it is observed that CE-DCT-OFDM system outperforms CE-FFT-OFDM system by nearly 3 dB. The DCT- and FFT- OFDM systems with CPM and CPCM modulations are superior in BER performance compared to PM and FM modulations in these systems. The use of CPCM in OFDM systems can provide attractive trade off between bandwidth and BER performance. The performance of CE-DCT-OFDM and CE-FFT-OFDM systems over Rayleigh and Rician frequency non-selective slowly-varying fading channels are illustrated as a function of channel parameters and the penalty in SNR that must be paid as consequence of the fading is determined

Towards low-cost gigabit wireless systems at 60 GHz

The world-wide availability of the huge amount of license-free spectral space in the 60 GHz band provides wide room for gigabit-per-second (Gb/s) wireless applications. A commercial (read: low-cost) 60-GHz transceiver will, however, provide limited system performance due to the stringent link budget and the substantial RF imperfections. The work presented in this thesis is intended to support the design of low-cost 60-GHz transceivers for Gb/s transmission over short distances (a few meters). Typical applications are the transfer of high-definition streaming video and high-speed download. The presented work comprises research into the characteristics of typical 60-GHz channels, the evaluation of the transmission quality as well as the development of suitable baseband algorithms. This can be summarized as follows. In the first part, the characteristics of the wave propagation at 60 GHz are charted out by means of channel measurements and ray-tracing simulations for both narrow-beam and omni-directional configurations. Both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) are considered. This study reveals that antennas that produce a narrow beam can be used to boost the received power by tens of dBs when compared with omnidirectional configurations. Meanwhile, the time-domain dispersion of the channel is reduced to the order of nanoseconds, which facilitates Gb/s data transmission over 60-GHz channels considerably. Besides the execution of measurements and simulations, the influence of antenna radiation patterns is analyzed theoretically. It is indicated to what extent the signal-to-noise ratio, Rician-K factor and channel dispersion are improved by application of narrow-beam antennas and to what extent these parameters will be influenced by beam pointing errors. From both experimental and analytical work it can be concluded that the problem of the stringent link-budget can be solved effectively by application of beam-steering techniques. The second part treats wideband transmission methods and relevant baseband algorithms. The considered schemes include orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) and single carrier with frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE), which are promising candidates for Gb/s wireless transmission. In particular, the optimal linear equalization in the frei quency domain and associated implementation issues such as synchronization and channel estimation are examined. Bit error rate (BER) expressions are derived to evaluate the transmission performance. Besides the linear equalization techniques, a low-complexity inter-symbol interference cancellation technique is proposed to achieve much better performance of code-spreading systems such as MC-CDMA and SC-FDE. Both theoretical analysis and simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme offers great advantages as regards both complexity and performance. This makes it particularly suitable for 60-GHz applications in multipath environments. The third part treats the influence of quantization and RF imperfections on the considered transmission methods in the context of 60-GHz radios. First, expressions for the BER are derived and the influence of nonlinear distortions caused by the digital-to-analog converters, analog-to-digital converters and power amplifiers on the BER performance is examined. Next, the BER performance under the influence of phase noise and IQ imbalance is evaluated for the case that digital compensation techniques are applied in the receiver as well as for the case that such techniques are not applied. Finally, a baseline design of a low-cost Gb/s 60-GHz transceiver is presented. It is shown that, by application of beam-steering in combination with SC-FDE without advanced channel coding, a data rate in the order of 2 Gb/s can be achieved over a distance of 10 meters in a typical NLOS indoor scenario