Estimation and detection techniques for doubly-selective channels in wireless communications

A fundamental problem in communications is the estimation of the channel. The signal transmitted through a communications channel undergoes distortions so that it is often received in an unrecognizable form at the receiver. The receiver must expend significant signal processing effort in order to be able to decode the transmit signal from this received signal. This signal processing requires knowledge of how the channel distorts the transmit signal, i.e. channel knowledge. To maintain a reliable link, the channel must be estimated and tracked by the receiver. The estimation of the channel at the receiver often proceeds by transmission of a signal called the 'pilot' which is known a priori to the receiver. The receiver forms its estimate of the transmitted signal based on how this known signal is distorted by the channel, i.e. it estimates the channel from the received signal and the pilot. This design of the pilot is a function of the modulation, the type of training and the channel. [Continues.

Doppler-Resilient Schemes for Underwater Acoustic Communication Channels.

In this thesis we consider Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technique by taking into account in the receiver design the fundamental and unique characteristics of Underwater Acoustic (UWA) channels in the context of Relay-Assisted (RA) systems. In particular, OFDM technique is used to combat the problem of Intersymbol Interference (ISI), while to handle the Intercarrier Interference (ICI), a pre-processing unit is used prior to the Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) frequency-domain equalization called Multiple Resampling (MR), which minimizes the effect of time variation. This pre-processor consists of multiple branches, each corresponds to a Doppler scaling factor of a path/user/cluster, and performs of frequency shifting, resampling, and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) operation. As a suboptimal alternative to MR pre-processing, Single Resampling (SR) pre-processing is also used to reduce the effect of ICI in the system, and it consists of only one branch that performs frequency shifting, resampling, and FFT operation, which corresponds to one approximated resampling factor, that is a function of one or more of the actual Doppler scaling factors. The problem of bandwidth scarcity is considered in the context of Two Way Relaying (TWR) systems in an attempt to increase the bandwidth efficiency of the system, while the problem of fading is considered in the context of Distributed Space-Time Block Coding (D-STBC) to boost the system reliability. Also, joint TWR-D-STBC system is proposed to extract the advantages of both schemes simultaneously. Second, motivated by the fact that OFDM is extremely sensitive to time variation, which destroys the orthogonality between the subcarriers, we consider another candidate to UWA channels and competitor to OFDM scheme, namely, block-based Single Carrier (SC) modulation with Frequency Domain Equalization (FDE). We start by the Point-to-Point (P2P) systems with path-specific Doppler model and Multiple Access Channel (MAC) system with user-specific Doppler model. The Maximum Likelihood (ML) receiver in each case is derived, and it is shown that a MR pre-processing stage is necessary to handle the effect of time variation, as it is the case in OFDM. Different from OFDM, however, the structure of this pre-processing stage. Specifically, it consists of multiple branches and each branch corresponds to a Doppler scaling factor per path or per user, and performs frequency shifting, resampling, and followed by and integration. FFT operation is not a part of the pre-processor. The goal of this pre-processing stage is to minimize the level of time variation in the time domain. So, the output of the pre-processor will still be time-varying contaminated by ISI, and hence an equalization stage is required. To avoid the complexity of the optimum Maximum Likelihood Sequence Detector (MLSD), we propose the use of MMSE FDE, where the samples are transformed to the frequency domain by means of FFT operation, and after the FDE transformed back to the time domain, where symbol-by-symbol detection becomes feasible. Also, the channels are approximated such that all paths or all users have the same Doppler scaling factor, and the pre-processing stage in this case consists of only one branch and it is called SR. Having the basic structure of SC-FDE scheme, we then consider the corresponding schemes that are considered for OFDM systems, namely: TWR, D-STBC, and TWR-D-STBC schemes. A complete complexity analysis, bandwidth efficiency, and extensive Average Bit Error Rate (ABER) simulation results are given. It is shown that MR schemes outperforms its SR counterparts within a given signaling scheme (i.e., OFDM or SC-FDE). However, this superiority in performance comes at the expense of more hardware complexity. Also, for uncoded systems, MR-SC-FDE outperforms its OFDM counterpart with less hardware complexity, because in SC-FDE systems, FFT operation is not part of the MR pre-processor, but rather a part of the equalizer. Finally, under total power constraint, it is shown that TWR-D-STBC scheme serves as a good compromise between bandwidth efficiency and reliability, where it has better bandwidth efficiency with some performance loss compared to D-STBC, while it has better performance and the same bandwidth efficiency compared to TWR

Cooperative Communication over Underwater Acoustic Channels

As diverse and data-heavy underwater applications emerge, demanding requirements are further imposed on underwater wireless communication systems. Future underwater wireless communication networks might consist of both mobile and stationary nodes which exchange data such as control, telemetry, speech, and video signals among themselves as well as a central node located at a ship or onshore. The submerged nodes, which can, for example, take the form of an autonomous underwater vehicle/robot or diver, can be equipped with various sensors, sonars, video cameras, or other types of data acquisition instruments. Innovative physical layer solutions are therefore required to develop efficient, reliable, and high-speed transmission solutions tailored for challenging and diverse requirements of underwater applications. Building on the promising combination of multi-carrier and cooperative communication techniques, this dissertation investigates the fundamental performance bounds of cooperative underwater acoustic (UWA) communication systems taking into account the inherent unique characteristics of the UWA channel. We derive outage probability and capacity expressions for cooperative multi-carrier UWA systems with amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward relaying. Through the derived expressions, we demonstrate the effect of several system and channel parameters on the performance. Furthermore, we investigate the performance of cooperative UWA systems in the presence of non-uniform Doppler distortion and propose receiver designs to mitigate the degrading Doppler effects

Spectrally efficient FDM communication signals and transceivers: design, mathematical modelling and system optimization

This thesis addresses theoretical, mathematical modelling and design issues of Spectrally Efficient FDM (SEFDM) systems. SEFDM systems propose bandwidth savings when compared to Orthogonal FDM (OFDM) systems by multiplexing multiple non-orthogonal overlapping carriers. Nevertheless, the deliberate collapse of orthogonality poses significant challenges on the SEFDM system in terms of performance and complexity, both issues are addressed in this work. This thesis first investigates the mathematical properties of the SEFDM system and reveals the links between the system conditioning and its main parameters through closed form formulas derived for the Intercarrier Interference (ICI) and the system generating matrices. A rigorous and efficient mathematical framework, to represent non-orthogonal signals using Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform (IDFT) blocks, is proposed. This is subsequently used to design simple SEFDM transmitters and to realize a new Matched Filter (MF) based demodulator using the Discrete Fourier Transforms (DFT), thereby substantially simplifying the transmitter and demodulator design and localizing complexity at detection stage with no premium at performance. Operation is confirmed through the derivation and numerical verification of optimal detectors in the form of Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Sphere Decoder (SD). Moreover, two new linear detectors that address the ill conditioning of the system are proposed: the first based on the Truncated Singular Value Decomposition (TSVD) and the second accounts for selected ICI terms and termed Selective Equalization (SelE). Numerical investigations show that both detectors substantially outperform existing linear detection techniques. Furthermore, the use of the Fixed Complexity Sphere Decoder (FSD) is proposed to further improve performance and avoid the variable complexity of the SD. Ultimately, a newly designed combined FSD-TSVD detector is proposed and shown to provide near optimal error performance for bandwidth savings of 20% with reduced and fixed complexity. The thesis also addresses some practical considerations of the SEFDM systems. In particular, mathematical and numerical investigations have shown that the SEFDM signal is prone to high Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) that can lead to significant performance degradations. Investigations of PAPR control lead to the proposal of a new technique, termed SLiding Window (SLW), utilizing the SEFDM signal structure which shows superior efficacy in PAPR control over conventional techniques with lower complexity. The thesis also addresses the performance of the SEFDM system in multipath fading channels confirming favourable performance and practicability of implementation. In particular, a new Partial Channel Estimator (PCE) that provides better estimation accuracy is proposed. Furthermore, several low complexity linear and iterative joint channel equalizers and symbol detectors are investigated in fading channels conditions with the FSD-TSVD joint equalization and detection with PCE obtained channel estimate facilitating near optimum error performance, close to that of OFDM for bandwidth savings of 25%. Finally, investigations of the precoding of the SEFDM signal demonstrate a potential for complexity reduction and performance improvement. Overall, this thesis provides the theoretical basis from which practical designs are derived to pave the way to the first practical realization of SEFDM systems

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