Measurements of radio channels and bit error rate estimation of IEEE802.16 standard in semi-rural environment at three frequencies in the 2–6 GHz frequency band

Simultaneous measurements with 10 MHz bandwidth at 2.5, 3.5 and 5.8 GHz were performed in a rural/semi-rural environment in the UK. The measurements were processed to generate power delay profiles to estimate the root mean square delay spread of the channel. The frequency range of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) symbol bandwidth that has dropped below a predefined level, termed herein as average fade bandwidth, and the corresponding level crossing are employed to quantify the severity of frequency selectivity. The channel data were used to estimate the bit error rate, for the 256 carrier-OFDM IEEE802.16 standard using a frequency domain channel simulator especially designed for the study. It was found that the performance of quasi-stationary wireless broadband systems depends mainly upon the frequency selectivity and the channel coding rate with 1/2 rate coding giving a superior performance to 3/4 rate coding. Puncturing was found to weaken the capability of forward error correction coding in the presence of series of deep fades in the channel transfer function

FMCW Signals for Radar Imaging and Channel Sounding

A linear / stepped frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) signal has for a long time been used in radar and channel sounding. A novel FMCW waveform known as “Gated FMCW” signal is proposed in this thesis for the suppression of strong undesired signals in microwave radar applications, such as: through-the-wall, ground penetrating, and medical imaging radar. In these applications the crosstalk signal between antennas and the reflections form the early interface (wall, ground surface, or skin respectively) are much stronger in magnitude compared to the backscattered signal from the target. Consequently, if not suppressed they overshadow the target’s return making detection a difficult task. Moreover, these strong unwanted reflections limit the radar’s dynamic range and might saturate or block the receiver causing the reflection from actual targets (especially targets with low radar cross section) to appear as noise. The effectiveness of the proposed waveform as a suppression technique was investigated in various radar scenarios, through numerical simulations and experiments. Comparisons of the radar images obtained for the radar system operating with the standard linear FMCW signal and with the proposed Gated FMCW waveform are also made. In addition to the radar work the application of FMCW signals to radio propagation measurements and channel characterisation in the 60 GHz and 2-6 GHz frequency bands in indoor and outdoor environments is described. The data are used to predict the bit error rate performance of the in-house built measurement based channel simulator and the results are compared with the theoretical multipath channel simulator available in Matlab