BER Performance Improvement in UWA Communication via Spatial Diversity

In present era while wireless communication has become an integral part of our life, the advancements in underwater communications (UWA) is still seem farfetched. Underwater communication is typically essential because of its ability to collect information from remote undersea locations. It don’t use radio signals for signal transmission as they can propagate over extremely short distance because of degradation in signal strength due to salinity of water, rather it uses acoustic waves. The underwater acoustic channel has many characteristics which makes receivers very difficult to be realized. Some of the characteristics are frequency dependent propagation loss, severe Doppler spread multipath, low speed of sound. Due to motion of transmitter and receiver the time variability and multipath makes underwater channel very difficult to be estimated. There are various channel estimation techniques to find out channel impulse response but in this thesis we have considered a flat slow fading channel modeled by Nakagami-m distribution. Noise in underwater communication channel is frequency dependent in nature as for a particular range of frequency of operation one among the various noise sources will be dominant. Here they don’t necessarily follow Gaussian statistics rather follows Generalized Gaussian statistics with decaying power spectral density. The flexible parametric form of this statistics makes it useful to fit any source of underwater noise source. In this thesis we have gone through two step approach. In the first step, we have considered transmission of information in presence of noise only and designed a suboptimal maximum likelihood detector. We have compared the performance of this proposed detector with the conventional Gaussian detector where decision is taken based on a single threshold value and the threshold value is calculated by using various techniques. Here it is being observed that the ML detector outperforms the Gaussian detectors and the performance can be improved further by exploiting the multipath components. In the second step we have considered channel along with noise and have designed a ML detector where we have considered the receiver is supplied with two copies of the same transmitted signal and have gone through a two-dimensional analysis. Again we compared the performance with conventional maximal ratio combiner where we can observe the ML detector performance is better. Further we have incorporated selection combining along with these detectors and compared the performance. Simulation results shows that the proposed detector always outperforms the existing detectors in terms of error performance

Land Mobile Radio Systems - A Tutorial Exposition

An in-depth tutorial on land mobile radio system

A Space Communications Study Final Report, Sep. 15, 1965 - Sep. 15, 1966

Reception of frequency modulated signals passed through deterministic and random time-varying channel

Analysis of low-density parity-check codes on impulsive noise channels

PhD ThesisCommunication channels can severely degrade a signal, not only due to fading effects but also interference in the form of impulsive noise. In conventional communication systems, the additive noise at the receiver is usually assumed to be Gaussian distributed. However, this assumption is not always valid and examples of non-Gaussian distributed noise include power line channels, underwater acoustic channels and manmade interference. When designing a communication system it is useful to know the theoretical performance in terms of bit-error probability (BEP) on these types of channels. However, the effect of impulses on the BEP performance has not been well studied, particularly when error correcting codes are employed. Today, advanced error-correcting codes with very long block lengths and iterative decoding algorithms, such as Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes and turbo codes, are popular due to their capacity-approaching performance. However, very long codes are not always desirable, particularly in communications systems where latency is a serious issue, such as in voice and video communication between multiple users. This thesis focuses on the analysis of short LDPC codes. Finite length analyses of LDPC codes have already been presented for the additive white Gaussian noise channel in the literature, but the analysis of short LDPC codes for channels that exhibit impulsive noise has not been investigated. The novel contributions in this thesis are presented in three sections. First, uncoded and LDPC-coded BEP performance on channels exhibiting impulsive noise modelled by symmetric -stable (S S) distributions are examined. Different sub-optimal receivers are compared and a new low-complexity receiver is proposed that achieves near-optimal performance. Density evolution is then used to derive the threshold signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) of LDPC codes that employ these receivers. In order to accurately predict the waterfall performance of short LDPC codes, a nite length analysis is proposed with the aid of the threshold SNRs of LDPC codes and the derived uncoded BEPs for impulsive noise channels. Second, to investigate the e ect of impulsive noise on wireless channels, the analytic BEP on generalized fading channels with S S noise is derived. However, it requires the evaluation of a double integral to obtain the analytic BEP, so to reduce the computational cost, the Cauchy- Gaussian mixture model and the asymptotic property of S S process are used to derive upper bounds of the exact BEP. Two closed-form expressions are derived to approximate the exact BEP on a Rayleigh fading channel with S S noise. Then density evolution of different receivers is derived for these channels to nd the asymptotic performance of LDPC codes. Finally, the waterfall performance of LDPC codes is again estimated for generalized fading channels with S S noise by utilizing the derived uncoded BEP and threshold SNRs. Finally, the addition of spatial diversity at the receiver is investigated. Spatial diversity is an effective method to mitigate the effects of fading and when used in conjunction with LDPC codes and can achieve excellent error-correcting performance. Hence, the performance of conventional linear diversity combining techniques are derived. Then the SNRs of these linear combiners are compared and the relationship of the noise power between different linear combiners is obtained. Nonlinear detectors have been shown to achieve better performance than linear combiners hence, optimal and sub-optimal detectors are also presented and compared. A non-linear detector based on the bi-parameter Cauchy-Gaussian mixture model is used and shows near-optimal performance with a significant reduction in complexity when compared with the optimal detector. Furthermore, we show how to apply density evolution of LDPC codes for different combining techniques on these channels and an estimation of the waterfall performance of LDPC codes is derived that reduces the gap between simulated and asymptotic performance. In conclusion, the work presented in this thesis provides a framework to evaluate the performance of communication systems in the presence of additive impulsive noise, with and without spatial diversity at the receiver. For the first time, bounds on the BEP performance of LDPC codes on channels with impulsive noise have been derived for optimal and sub-optimal receivers, allowing other researchers to predict the performance of LDPC codes in these type of environments without needing to run lengthy computer simulations

Techniques of detection, estimation and coding for fading channels

The thesis describes techniques of detection, coding and estimation, for use in high speed serial modems operating over fading channels such as HF radio and land mobile radio links. The performance of the various systems that employ the above techniques are obtained via computer simulation tests. A review of the characteristics of HF radio channels is first presented, leading to the development of an appropriate channel model which imposes Rayleigh fading on the transmitted signal. Detection processes for a 4.8 kbit/s HF radio modem are then discussed, the emphasis, here, being on variants of the maximum likelihood detector that is implemented by the Viterbi algorithm. The performance of these detectors are compared with that of a nonlinear equalizer operating under the same conditions, and the detector which offers the best compromise between performance and complexity is chosen for further tests. Forward error correction, in the form of trellis coded modulation, is next introduced. An appropriate 8-PSK coded modulation scheme is discussed, and its operation over the above mentioned HF radio modem is evaluated. Performance comparisons are made of the coded and uncoded systems. Channel estimation techniques for fast fading channels akin to cellular land mobile radio links, are next discussed. A suitable model for a fast fading channel is developed, and some novel estimators are tested over this channel. Computer simulation tests are also used to study the feasibility of the simultaneous transmission of two 4-level QAM signals occupying the same frequency band, when each of these signals are transmitted at 24 kbit/s over two independently fading channels, to a single receiver. A novel combined detector/estimator is developed for this purpose. Finally, the performance of the complete 4.8 kbit/s HF radio modem is obtained, when all the functions of detection, estimation and prefiltering are present, where the prefilter and associated processor use a recently developed technique for the adjustment of its tap gains and for the estimation of the minimum phase sampled impulse response