Wavelet based design of digital multichannel communications systems

The huge penetration of the personal communications systems in the market is constantly presenting new challenges to the research, aimed at satisfying people's needs and requirements for effective communication systems. At present, the cellular telephone network is perhaps the most evident example of communication system that has had a great impact on the lives of ordinary people and, at the same time, is the subject of interest of many researchers both at academic and industrial level. For the future, one of the main challenges in telecommunications will be the provision of ubiquitous broadband tetherless integrated services to mobile users. Such a pretentious goal cannot be achieved without a continuous research facing such problems as service quality, complete mobility support, and affordable complexity that are still open problems. However, present telecommunication problems are not only a matter of implementation or development of new services, exploiting a totally assessed doctrine. In order to respond to the mobility of the users personal communication systems have to deal with the wireless communication channel whereby mobility and non-stationarity of the propagation conditions require a stochastic description of the channel parameters. While this fact can be viewed as strong limitation to the development of a solid theory whose validity can be assesed in practice, on the other hand allows for an investigation and study of novel communication schemes, sometimes encompassing basic aspects of digital communications. This thesis, is the result of a research work that has investigated one of the basic building block of every communication systems, the modulation scheme, and the design of the pulse shape carrying the digital information. We have studied the design of multichannel communication scheme exploiting the mathematical theory of wavelets. Such a theory, developed recently, has had a great impact in many fields of engineering and of other scientific disciplines. In particular, wavelet theory has become very popular in the signal processing area; in fact it is a flexible toolbox for signal analysis allowing effective representation of signals for features extraction purposes. The main features that make wavelet waveforms suitable to be used as shaping pulses for modulation are their substantial compact support both in the time and frequency domains, and the fact that they are ISI-free pulses over frequency flat channels. The study presented in this thesis is focused on application of wavelet theory to design high-efficiency multichannel communication schemes and to the performance evaluation over linear and non-linear channels. We present a general method to design wavelet based multichannel communication schemes that we denoted Wavelet Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (WOFDM). We show that such schemes, having a largerspectral efficiency for a small number of channels, are a valid alternative to the classical OFDM. Potential advantage of wavelet modulation are shown presenting other applications examined in this thesis: a joint use of WOFDM and Trellis Coded Modulation to shape the power spectrum in order to match a frequency selective channel and minimize distortion, and application to spread spectrum modulation. Particular attention has been devoted to the timing recovery problem in multichannel communication schemes, exploiting the timing information of the different subchannels to improve the error variance in estimation of the sampling instant leading to a reduction of the adjacent channels interferenc

Performance Of IEEE 802.11 OFDM With Multiple Frequency Transforms And Pulse Shaping Schemes

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is employed in various communication systems such as the IEEE 802.11 wireless standards, in which both frequency transform, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and pulse shaping filter, Square Root Raised Cosine (SRRC) are used. The main contribution of this paper is the analysis of the performance of different combinations of frequency transforms and pulse shaping schemes for the 802.11n standard. The frequency transforms which have been used are: Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT), Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWT) and Discrete Hartley Transform (DHT). The pulse shaping filters are the Raised Cosine (RC), SRRC and Flipped Exponential Pulse (FEXP). The IEEE 802.11 WLAN system with Additive White Gaussian (AWGN) has been used as the modelling environment. The results showed that the DWT-based OFDM system has a better performance than the DHT and FFT schemes and upon comparing the pulse shaping filters, the SRRC filter outperforms the FEXP and RC filters

An Investigation of Orthogonal Wavelet Division Multiplexing Techniques as an Alternative to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex Transmissions and Comparison of Wavelet Families and Their Children

Recently, issues surrounding wireless communications have risen to prominence because of the increase in the popularity of wireless applications. Bandwidth problems, and the difficulty of modulating signals across carriers, represent significant challenges. Every modulation scheme used to date has had limitations, and the use of the Discrete Fourier Transform in OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) is no exception. The restriction on further development of OFDM lies primarily within the type of transform it uses in the heart of its system, Fourier transform. OFDM suffers from sensitivity to Peak to Average Power Ratio, carrier frequency offset and wasting some bandwidth to guard successive OFDM symbols. The discovery of the wavelet transform has opened up a number of potential applications from image compression to watermarking and encryption. Very recently, work has been done to investigate the potential of using wavelet transforms within the communication space. This research will further investigate a recently proposed, innovative, modulation technique, Orthogonal Wavelet Division Multiplex, which utilises the wavelet transform opening a new avenue for an alternative modulation scheme with some interesting potential characteristics. Wavelet transform has many families and each of those families has children which each differ in filter length. This research consider comprehensively investigates the new modulation scheme, and proposes multi-level dynamic sub-banding as a tool to adapt variable signal bandwidths. Furthermore, all compactly supported wavelet families and their associated children of those families are investigated and evaluated against each other and compared with OFDM. The linear computational complexity of wavelet transform is less than the logarithmic complexity of Fourier in OFDM. The more important complexity is the operational complexity which is cost effectiveness, such as the time response of the system, the memory consumption and the number of iterative operations required for data processing. Those complexities are investigated for all available compactly supported wavelet families and their children and compared with OFDM. The evaluation reveals which wavelet families perform more effectively than OFDM, and for each wavelet family identifies which family children perform the best. Based on these results, it is concluded that the wavelet modulation scheme has some interesting advantages over OFDM, such as lower complexity and bandwidth conservation of up to 25%, due to the elimination of guard intervals and dynamic bandwidth allocation, which result in better cost effectiveness

Design of FIR digital filters for pulse shaping and channel equalization using time-domain optimization

Three algorithms are developed for designing finite impulse response digital filters to be used for pulse shaping and channel equalization. The first is the Minimax algorithm which uses linear programming to design a frequency-sampling filter with a pulse shape that approximates the specification in a minimax sense. Design examples are included which accurately approximate a specified impulse response with a maximum error of 0.03 using only six resonators. The second algorithm is an extension of the Minimax algorithm to design preset equalizers for channels with known impulse responses. Both transversal and frequency-sampling equalizer structures are designed to produce a minimax approximation of a specified channel output waveform. Examples of these designs are compared as to the accuracy of the approximation, the resultant intersymbol interference (ISI), and the required transmitted energy. While the transversal designs are slightly more accurate, the frequency-sampling designs using six resonators have smaller ISI and energy values

NOVEL OFDM SYSTEM BASED ON DUAL-TREE COMPLEX WAVELET TRANSFORM

The demand for higher and higher capacity in wireless networks, such as cellular, mobile and local area network etc, is driving the development of new signaling techniques with improved spectral and power efficiencies. At all stages of a transceiver, from the bandwidth efficiency of the modulation schemes through highly nonlinear power amplifier of the transmitters to the channel sharing between different users, the problems relating to power usage and spectrum are aplenty. In the coming future, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology promises to be a ready solution to achieving the high data capacity and better spectral efficiency in wireless communication systems by virtue of its well-known and desirable characteristics. Towards these ends, this dissertation investigates a novel OFDM system based on dual-tree complex wavelet transform (D

A Necessary Condition for Waveforms with Better PAPR than OFDM

International audienceThis paper establishes a necessary condition that must be satisfied by the modulation waveforms of any generalized waveforms for multicarrier (GWMC) system with better peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) than conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). GWMC systems include in particular all classical multicarrier modulation systems. As a consequence, we show that OFDM has the best PAPR performance over all GWMC systems that do not satisfy this necessary condition. We also identify an infinite family of GWMC systems with the same PAPR performance as OFDM. To illustrate our results, we present simulations of the PAPR behaviour for different GWMC systems, including some with better PAPR performance than OFDM

Interference mitigation techniques for wireless OFDM

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a promising multicarrier wireless system for transmission of high-rate data stream with spectral efficiency and fading immunity. Conventional OFDM system use efficient IFFT and FFT to multiplex the signals in parallel at the transmitter and receiver respectively. On the other hand, wavelet based OFDM system uses orthonormal wavelets which are derived from a multistage tree-structured wavelet family. The Fourier based and wavelet based OFDM systems are studied in this dissertation. Two types of QAM schemes, circular and square modulations are used to compare the performance in both OFDM systems. A new approach of determining exact BER for optimal circular QAM is proposed. In addition, the presence of narrowband interference (NBI) degrades the performance of OFDM systems. Thus, a mitigation technique is necessary to suppress NBI in an OFDM system. Recent mitigation techniques can be broadly categorized into frequency domain cancellation, receiver windowing and excision filtering. However, none of the techniques considers wavelet based OFDM. Therefore, an interference cancelation algorithm has been proposed to work for both OFDM platforms. The performance results of two OFDM schemes applicable to digital video broadcasting (DVB)-terrestrial system and under the effect of impulsive noise interference are also studied. BER performances are obtained in all results. It has been shown that wavelet based OFDM system has outperformed Fourier based OFDM system in many cases

The Automation of Electrophysiological Experiments and Data Analysis

The role of computation in science is continually growing and neuroscience is no exception. Despite this, a severe lack of scientific software infrastructure persists, slowing progress in many domains. In this thesis, we will see how the combination of neuroscience and software engineering can build infrastructure that enables discovery. The first chapter discusses the Turtle Electrophysiology Project, or TEP, an experiment-automation and data-management system. This system has allowed us to automate away some of the most tedious tasks involved in conducting experiments. As a result, we can collect more data in less time, and with fewer errors related to the loss of metadata: information about how the data were collected). Also, since all of the metadata is automatically digitized during the experiment we can now completely automate our analyses. Chapters two and three are examples of research conducted using the ever-evolving TEP system. In the first instance, we used TEP to deliver visual stimuli and handle data-management. In chapter three, the experiments involved delivering electrical stimuli instead of visual stimuli, and much more rigorous analysis. And even though TEP was not specifically designed to handle collecting data this way, the flexible tags system enabled us to do so. Finally, chapter four details the construction of a robust analysis tool called Spikepy. Whereas TEP is specially designed for the turtle preparation we have, Spikepy is a general-purpose spike-sorting application and framework. Spikepy takes flexibility to the extreme by being a plugin-based framework, yet maintaining a very easy to use interface