Spatial diversity in MIMO communication systems with distributed or co-located antennas

The use of multiple antennas in wireless communication systems has gained much attention during the last decade. It was shown that such multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems offer huge advantages over single-antenna systems. Typically, quite restrictive assumptions are made concerning the spacing of the individual antenna elements. On the one hand, it is typically assumed that the antenna elements at transmitter and receiver are co-located, i.e., they belong to some sort of antenna array. On the other hand, it is often assumed that the antenna spacings are sufficiently large, so as to justify the assumption of independent fading. In this thesis, the above assumptions are relaxed. In the first part, it is shown that MIMO systems with distributed antennas and MIMO systems with co-located antennas can be treated in a single, unifying framework. In the second part this fact is utilized, in order to develop appropriate transmit power allocation strategies for co-located and distributed MIMO systems. Finally, the third part focuses on specific synchronization problems that are of interest for distributed MIMO systems

Design and performance analysis of optical attocell networks

The exponentially increasing demand for high-speed wireless communications will no longer be satisfied by the traditional radio frequency (RF) in the near future due to its limited spectrum and overutilization. To resolve this imminent issue, industrial and research communities have been looking into alternative technologies for communication. Among them, visible light communication (VLC) has attracted much attention because it utilizes the unlicensed, free and safe spectrum, whose bandwidth is thousand times larger than the entire RF spectrum. Moreover, VLC can be integrated into existing lighting systems to offer a dual-purpose, cost-effective and energy-efficient solution for next-generation small-cell networks (SCNs), giving birth to the concept of optical attocell networks. Most relevant works in the literature rely on system simulations to quantify the performance of attocell networks, which suffer from high computational complexity and provide limited insights about the network. Mathematical tools, on the other hand, are more tractable and scalable and are shown to closely approximate practical systems. The presented work utilizes stochastic geometry for downlink evaluation of optical attocell networks, where the co-channel interference (CCI) surpasses noise and becomes the limiting factor of the link throughput. By studying the moment generating function (MGF) of the aggregate interference, a theoretical framework for modeling the distribution of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) is presented, which allows important performance metrics such as the coverage probability and link throughput to be derived. Depending on the source of interference, CCI can be classified into two categories: inter-cell interference (ICI) and intra-cell interference. In this work, both types of interference are characterized, based on which effective interference mitigation techniques such as the coordinated multipoint (CoMP), power-domain multiplexing and successive interference cancellation (SIC) are devised. The proposed mathematical framework is applicable to attocell networks with and without such interference mitigation techniques. Compared to RF networks, optical attocell networks are inherently more secure in the physical layer because visible light does not penetrate through opaque walls. This work analytically quantifies the physical-layer security of attocell networks from an information-theoretic point of view. Secrecy enhancement techniques such as AP cooperation and eavesdropper-free protected zones are also discussed. It is shown that compared to AP cooperation, implementing secrecy protected zones is more effective and it can contribute significantly to the network security