Time-Frequency Warped Waveforms

The forthcoming communication systems are advancing towards improved flexibility in various aspects. Improved flexibility is crucial to cater diverse service requirements. This letter proposes a novel waveform design scheme that exploits axis warping to enable peaceful coexistence of different pulse shapes. A warping transform manipulates the lattice samples non-uniformly and provides flexibility to handle the time-frequency occupancy of a signal. The proposed approach enables the utilization of flexible pulse shapes in a quasi-orthogonal manner and increases the spectral efficiency. In addition, the rectangular resource block structure, which assists an efficient resource allocation, is preserved with the warped waveform design as well.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures; accepted version (The URL for the final version: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8540914&isnumber=8605392

Low Complexity Wireless Communication Digital Baseband Design

abstract: This thesis addresses two problems in digital baseband design of wireless communication systems, namely, those in Internet of Things (IoT) terminals that support long range communications and those in full-duplex systems that are designed for high spectral efficiency. IoT terminals for long range communications are typically based on Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) and spread spectrum technologies. In order to design an efficient baseband architecture for such terminals, the workload profiles of both systems are analyzed. Since frame detection unit has by far the highest computational load, a simple architecture that uses only a scalar datapath is proposed. To optimize for low energy consumption, application-specific instructions that minimize register accesses and address generation units for streamlined memory access are introduced. Two parameters, namely, correlation window size and threshold value, affect the detection probability, the false alarm probability and hence energy consumption. Next, energy-optimal operation settings for correlation window size and threshold value are derived for different channel conditions. For both good and bad channel conditions, if target signal detection probability is greater than 0.9, the baseband processor has the lowest energy when the frame detection algorithm uses the longest correlation window and the highest threshold value. A full-duplex system has high spectral efficiency but suffers from self-interference. Part of the interference can be cancelled digitally using equalization techniques. The cancellation performance and computation complexity of the competing equalization algorithms, namely, Least Mean Square (LMS), Normalized LMS (NLMS), Recursive Least Square (RLS) and feedback equalizers based on LMS, NLMS and RLS are analyzed, and a trade-off between performance and complexity established. NLMS linear equalizer is found to be suitable for resource-constrained mobile devices and NLMS decision feedback equalizer is more appropriate for base stations that are not energy constrained.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Electrical Engineering 201

Orthogonal chirp division multiplexing for coherent optical fiber communications

In this paper, we propose an orthogonal chirp division multiplexing (OCDM) technique for coherent optical communication. OCDM is the principle of orthogonally multiplexing a group of linear chirped waveforms for high-speed data communication, achieving the maximum spectral efficiency (SE) for chirp spread spectrum, in a similar way as the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) does for frequency division multiplexing. In the coherent optical (CO)-OCDM, Fresnel transform formulates the synthesis of the orthogonal chirps; discrete Fresnel transform (DFnT) realizes the CO-OCDM in the digital domain. As both the Fresnel and Fourier transforms are trigonometric transforms, the CO-OCDM can be easily integrated into the existing CO-OFDM systems. Analyses and numerical results are provided to investigate the transmission of CO-OCDM signals over optical fibers. Moreover, experiments of 36-Gbit/s CO-OCDM signal are carried out to validate the feasibility and confirm the analyses. It is shown that the CO-OCDM can effectively compensate the dispersion and is more resilient to fading and noise impairment than OFDM

Chirp Spread Spectrum Signaling for Future Air-Ground Communications

In this paper, we investigate the use of chirp spread spectrum signaling over air-ground channels. This includes evaluation of not only the traditional linear chirp, but also of a new chirp signal format we have devised for multiple access applications. This new format is more practical than prior multi-user chirp systems in the literature, because we allow for imperfect synchronism. Specifically we evaluate multi-user chirp signaling over air-ground channels in a quasi-synchronous condition. The air-ground channels we employ are models based upon an extensive NASA measurement campaign. We show that our new signaling scheme outperforms the classic linear chirp in these air-ground settings.Comment: This paper published in IEEE Milcom conference November 2019. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1909.0988

Borehole communication via drill strings in oil wells

The performance of multichannel and single channel accelerometers used as uphole communication receivers is studied. Using measured channels from the drill string testbed, it is shown that one tri-axial accelerometer can provide nearly uncorrelated signals when compared to two single channel accelerometers. Having uncorrelated signals at the uphole receiver provides a diversity which in turn can lead to an increase in the communication system performance. The use of a strain sensor as a receiver in borehole communication is proposed. Using measured channels from the drill string testbed, the performance of a strain receiver with a single-accelerometer receiver is compared. The results show that the strain receiver has better performance than the single accelerometer receiver, and is further demonstrated that the strain channel impulse response has a better structure than a single-accelerometer channel impulse response. Furthermore, the multichannel reception using several receivers with the aim of improving communication system performance is studied. The combination of a strain sensor and a tri-axial accelerometer as a four-channel receiver is proposed. Given the complexity of studying the strain channel and the three acceleration channels analytically, experiments are conducted to obtain these channel impulse responses. The channel measurements show that these wireless channels are nearly uncorrelated and therefore can provide a diversity gain. This is further confirmed by the low bit error rates that this system provides. Comparison with single channel receivers shows the usefulness of the proposed system for wireless communication via drill strings

Sparse orthogonal circulant transform multiplexing for coherent optical fiber communication

This paper introduces a new multicarrier system, named sparse orthogonal circulant transform multiplexing (S-OCTM), for optical fiber communication. This technique uses an inverse sparse orthogonal circulant transform (S-OCT) matrix, which is simple and contains only two nonzero elements in each column, to multiplex information of different subcarriers. We compared the proposed scheme with conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), orthogonal chirp division multiplexing (OCDM), and discrete-Fourier-transform spreading OFDM (DFT-S-OFDM) in a coherent optical communication system. It is shown that S-OCTM, while exhibiting the complexity among the least, avoids the performance disadvantages of all investigated conventional schemes. It is theoretically proved that the S-OCT matrix equalizes the bandwidth limitation effect that degrades the performance of conventional OFDM. It also shows a greatly reduced peak-to-average power ratio and higher tolerance to fiber nonlinearity than OFDM and OCDM. On the other hand, compared to DFT-S-OFDM, S-OCTM shows a better dispersion tolerance under insufficient length of cyclic prefix and is more tolerable to strong optical filtering. The performance advantages and low complexity enable the proposed scheme to be a promising multicarrier solution for optical communications

Key Signal Processing Technologies for High-speed Passive Optical Networks

With emerging technologies such as high-definition video, virtual reality, and cloud computing, bandwidth demand in the access networks is ever-increasing. Passive optical network (PON) has become a promising architecture thanks to its low cost and easy management. IEEE and ITU-T standard organizations have been standardizing the next-generation PON, targeting on increasing the single-channel capacity from 10 Gb/s to 25, 50, and 100 Gb/s as the solution to address the dramatic increase of bandwidth demand. However, since the access network is extremely cost-sensitive, many research problems imposed in the physical layer of PON need to be addressed in a cost-efficient way, which is the primary focus of this thesis. Utilizing the low-cost 10G optics to build up high-speed PON systems is a promising approach, where signal processing techniques are key of importance. Two categories of signal processing techniques have been extensively investigated, namely optical signal processing (OSP) and digital signal processing (DSP). Dispersion-supported equalization (DSE) as a novel OSP scheme is proposed to achieve bit-rate enhancement from 10 Gb/s to 25 Gb/s based on 10G class of optics. Thanks to the bandwidth improved by DSE, the non-return-zero on-off keying which is the simplest modulation format is able to be adopted in the PON system without complex modulation or DSP. Meanwhile, OSP is also proposed to work together with DSP enabling 50G PON while simplifying the DSP complexity. Using both DSE and simple feed-forward equalizer is able to support 50 Gb/s PAM-4 transmission with 10G optics. For C-band 50 Gb/s transmission, injection locking techniques as another OSP approach is proposed to compress the directly modulated laser chirp and increase system bandwidth in the optical domain where a doubled capacity from 25 Gb/s to 50 Gb/s over 20 km fiber can be built on top of 10G optics. For DSP, we investigated the advantages of neural network (NN) on the mitigation of the time-varying nonlinear semiconductor optical amplifier pattern effect. In order to reduce the expense caused by the high computation complexity of NN, a pre- equalizer is introduced at the central office that allows cost sharing for all connected access users. In order to push the PON system line rate to 100 Gb/s, a joint nonlinear Tomlinson- Harashima precoding-Volterra algorithm is proposed to compensate for both linear and nonlinear distortions where 100 Gb/s PAM-4 transmission over 20 km fiber with 15 GHz system bandwidth can be achieved

The application of SOA for dispersion management of 2D-WH/TS codesin incoherent OCDMA system

In high data rate optical fibre communication networks, dispersion phenomenon plays a pivotal role. It is important to investigate the dispersion effects in a multi-wavelength picosecond optical code division multiple access (OCDMA) system. This research is focused on the analysis of the effects of fibre dispersion on the OCDMA autocorrelation; and how these effects can be resolved in a tuneable way so that the originally recovered OCDMA autocorrelation function at the decoder receiver can be revived without further manual adjustment of fibre (SMF-28) cable lengths.;The environmental effects and the subsequent mitigation process are also investigated further in this research. The chirp in OCDMA is examined experimentally and analytically in an initiative to find the more in-depth understanding of finely tuneable chromatic dispersion (CD) compensation technique in a coarsely compensated link by using semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). A practical investigation was carried over a partially CD compensated 17 km bidirectional testbed between the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow to perform the fine-tuning of CD adjustment using SOA.;A 19.5 km SMF-28 fibre spool was also used in an environmental chamber to investigate the temperature induced dispersion effects and subsequent mitigation. The tuneable dispersion compensation measures are vital to ensure the high data rate optical communication using an all-optical approach in future data network end-points where the advantages of ultra-high speed optical communication bandwidth are at present disrupted due to opto-electronic conversions commonly known as 'electronic bottlenecks'.In high data rate optical fibre communication networks, dispersion phenomenon plays a pivotal role. It is important to investigate the dispersion effects in a multi-wavelength picosecond optical code division multiple access (OCDMA) system. This research is focused on the analysis of the effects of fibre dispersion on the OCDMA autocorrelation; and how these effects can be resolved in a tuneable way so that the originally recovered OCDMA autocorrelation function at the decoder receiver can be revived without further manual adjustment of fibre (SMF-28) cable lengths.;The environmental effects and the subsequent mitigation process are also investigated further in this research. The chirp in OCDMA is examined experimentally and analytically in an initiative to find the more in-depth understanding of finely tuneable chromatic dispersion (CD) compensation technique in a coarsely compensated link by using semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). A practical investigation was carried over a partially CD compensated 17 km bidirectional testbed between the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow to perform the fine-tuning of CD adjustment using SOA.;A 19.5 km SMF-28 fibre spool was also used in an environmental chamber to investigate the temperature induced dispersion effects and subsequent mitigation. The tuneable dispersion compensation measures are vital to ensure the high data rate optical communication using an all-optical approach in future data network end-points where the advantages of ultra-high speed optical communication bandwidth are at present disrupted due to opto-electronic conversions commonly known as 'electronic bottlenecks'