Dans un contexte où les ressources énergétiques sont moindres et la demande en termes de débit de communication est forte, il est intéressant de proposer des solutions techniques au niveau de la couche physique permettant d’optimiser la consommation énergétique de systèmes. Actuellement, pour une localisation précise et un transfert de données entre voie et trains efficace, la signalisation ferroviaire exploite des balises disposées entre les rails. La durée possible de la communication entre trains et balises s’avère très brève et n’est effective que lorsque le train passe juste au-dessus de la balise. Celle-ci reste en état de veille jusqu’à ce que le train la télé alimente lors de son passage. Le temps de communication utile entre le train et la balise s’établit à 3-4 ms pour un train roulant à 300 km/h. Par conséquent, plusieurs équipements consécutifs doivent être installés si l’on veut accroître la durée d’échange ou encore la quantité de données échangées. En outre, le fait d’émettre continument un puissant signal de télé alimentation radiofréquence non exploité depuis tous les trains en circulation, la difficulté de maintenance liée à la présence de cet équipement entre les rails, ainsi que la portée et donc la capacité de communication réduites des balises actuelles constituent autant de limitations que nous tentons de pallier avec ce nouvel équipement. Dès lors, nous développons une nouvelle génération de balise ferroviaire fondée sur un lien radiofréquence qui possède une portée atteignant quelques mètres, nettement plus importante que celle exploitable actuellement. Cette balise est également située en bord de voie et non entre les rails pour des questions de facilité de maintenance. Nous utilisons une technique de focalisation du signal émis depuis la balise vers l’antenne embarquée sur le train. Puisque la distance de communication balise au sol - interrogateur est portée à quelques mètres, la télé alimentation par couplage inductif actuelle n’est plus possible. Disposer d’une infrastructure centrale pour alimenter toutes les balises présentes sur le réseau n’est pas réaliste non plus. Une solution raisonnable et économe consiste à générer de l’énergie électrique basse tension localement en utilisant des énergies renouvelables (solaire, éolienne…), et en limitant le plus possible la consommation d’énergie de l’électronique de la balise. Dans cette optique, la contribution scientifique présentée consiste à développer et à optimiser, en termes d’énergie consommée, la couche physique de communication de cet équipement. / In railway signaling, accurate and safe localization of trains is of paramount importance for the safe exploitation of railway networks. Therefore, train odometry has received considerable interest. Usually, train odometers manage different embarked sensors including wheel counters and Doppler radars that compute the position and the speed of the trains. However, as trains move, these proprioceptive sensors accumulate drifts and, as a consequence, train localization accuracy is compromised after several kilometers. In order to fix this drift problem, railway signaling uses beacons installed at ground, on the track, between the rails. Installed every several kilometers, they transmit absolute localization information to trains passing over them thus, bringing back locally the drifts to zero. These beacons constitute major components of railway signaling and also one of the very last equipment installed between the rails. Existing railway beacons are placed on the rails for two main reasons. First of all, since in these conditions the radio link between the train and the beacons remains very short, in the order of a few tens of centimeters, placing the beacons on the rails is very helpful to deliver an accurate local absolute localization to the train. Moreover using this very short radio communication range, while passing over them, trains can supply electrical energy to the beacons by magnetically coupling radiofrequency energy from the train to the beacon. This radiofrequency energy is detected and converted in DC power supply to feed the beacon electronics. This very short range leads to a satisfactory transfer of energy between train and beacon. As indicated previously, beacons can just be position indicators; however, they can also handle communication between grounds and trains using a peer to peer radio link. In this case, communication is only active when the train passes over the beacons, thus, the effective communication time is very short. As another major drawback of this particular implementation between the rails, track maintenance requires disassembling the beacons and then repositioning them safely and accurately.

Nowadays, multiuser Multiple-In Multiple-Out systems (MU-MIMO) are used in a new generation wireless technologies. Due to that wireless technology improvement is ongoing, the numbers of users and applications increase rapidly. Then, wireless communications need the high data rate and link reliability at the same time. Therefore, MU-MIMO improvements have to consider 1) providing the high data rate and link reliability, 2) support all users in the same time and frequency resource, and 3) using low power consumption. In practice, the interuser interference has a strong impact when more users access to the wireless link. Complicated transmission techniques such as interference cancellation should be used to maintain a given desired quality of service. Due to these problems, MU-MIMO with very large antenna arrays (known as massive MIMO) are proposed. With a massive MU-MIMO system, we mean a hundred of antennas or more serving tens of users. The channel vectors are nearly orthogonal, and then the interuser interference is reduced significantly. Therefore, the users can be served with high data rate simultaneously. In this thesis, we focus on the performance of the massive MU-MIMO downlink where the base station uses linear precoding techniques to serve many users over Rayleigh and Nakagami-m fading channels.

Recently, interference alignment (IA) has emerged as a promising technique to effectively mitigate interference in wireless communication systems. It has also evolved as a powerful technique to achieve the optimal degrees of freedom of interference channel. IA can be constructed in many domains such as space, time, frequency and codes. Currently, most researches on developing IA assume that channel state information (CSI) is well-known at the transceiver. However, in practice, perfect CSI at the transceiver can¡¦t be obtained due to many factors such as channel estimation error, quantization error, and feedback error. Under our investigation, the performance of IA is very sensitive to imperfect CSI. Therefore, this thesis proposes a spatial domain IA scheme for the three-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink interference channels, and analyzes the effect of channel estimation errors by modeling the estimation error as independent complex Gaussian random variables. The approximated bit error rate (BER) for the system with MIMO Zero-Forcing equalizer using IA is derived.

The objective of the dissertation research is to understand the complex interaction between the algorithm and hardware aspects of symbol detection that is enhanced by lattice reduction (LR) preprocessing for wireless MIMO communication systems. The motivation for this work stems from the need to improve the bit-error-rate performance of conventional, low-complexity detectors while simultaneously exhibiting considerably reduced complexity when compared to the optimal method, maximum likelihood detection. Specifically, we first develop an understanding of the complex Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovász (CLLL) LR algorithm from a hardware perspective. This understanding leads to both algorithm modifications that reduce the required complexity and hardware architectures that are specifically optimized for the CLLL algorithm. Finally, we integrate this knowledge with an understanding of LR-aided MIMO symbol detection in a highly-correlated wireless environment, resulting in a joint LR/symbol detection algorithm that maps seamlessly to hardware. Hence, this dissertation forms the foundation for the adoption of lattice reduction algorithms in practical, high-throughput wireless MIMO communications systems.

Enabling multi-hop wireless mesh networks with multi-input multi-output (MIMO) functionality boosts network throughput by transmitting over multiple orthogonal spatial channels (spatial multiplexing) and by performing interference cancellation, to allow links within interference range to be concurrently active. Furthermore, if the channel is in a deep fade, then multiple antenna elements at the transmitter and/or receiver can be used to transmit a single stream, thereby improving signal quality (diversity gain). However, there is a fundamental trade-off between boosting individual link performance and reducing interference, which must be modeled in the process of optimizing network throughput. This is called the diversity-multiplexing-interference suppression trade-off. Optimizing network throughput therefore, requires optimizing the trade-off between the amounts of diversity employed on each link, the number of streams multiplexed on each link and the number of interfering links allowed to be simultaneously active in the network. We present a set of efficient heuristics for one-shot link scheduling and stream allocation that approximately solve the problem of optimizing network throughput in a single time slot. We identify the fundamental problem of verifying the feasibility of a given stream allocation. The problems of general link scheduling and stream allocation are very closely related to the problem of verifying feasibility. We present a set of efficient heuristic feasibility tests which can be easily incorporated into practical scheduling schemes. We show for some special MIMO network scenarios that feasibility is of polynomial complexity. However, we conjecture that in general, this problem, which is a variation of Boolean Satisablility, is NP-Complete.

Next generation wireless systems will use multiple antenna technologies, also known as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), to provide high data rates and robustness against fading. MIMO communication strategies for single user communication systems and their practical application in wireless networks are by now well known. MIMO communication systems, however, can benefit from multiuser processing by coordinating the transmissions to multiple users simultaneously. For numerous reasons, work on the theory of multiuser MIMO communication has yet to see broad adoption in wireless communication standards. For example, global knowledge of channel state information is often required. Such an unrealistic assumption, however, makes it difficult in practice to implement precoding techniques. Furthermore, the achievable rates of the conventional multiuser MIMO techniques are far from the theoretical performance bounds. These and other factors motivate research on practical multiuser communication strategies for the MIMO broadcast channel (point to multi-point communication) and the analysis of those strategies. The primary contributions of this dissertation are i) the development of four novel low complexity coordinated MIMO transceiver design techniques to approach the theoretical performance bound and ii) the investigation of the optimality of the proposed coordinated wireless MIMO networks. Several coordinated beamforming algorithms are proposed, where each mobile station uses quantized combining vectors or each base station uses limited feedback from the MS. The asymptotic optimality of the proposed coordinated beamforming system for the MIMO Gaussian broadcast channel is next investigated. For multi-stream transmission, a novel block diagonalized vector perturbation is proposed and the achievable sum rate upper bound of the proposed system is derived. Finally, for multi-cell environments, linear and non-linear network CBF algorithms supporting multiple cell-boundary users are proposed. The optimality of network coordinated beamforming in terms of the number of receive antennas is also investigated. / text

In multicell coordinated networks where multiple base stations cooperate to jointly combat interference from adjacent cells and fading to receivers, one of the outstanding questions is what is the role of receive antenna and receiver processing. Multiple receive antennas not only enable additional degrees of freedom at each receiver to combat the other-cell interference but also can change the transmitter design because transmitter and receiver beamforming design is often closely coordinated. In this dissertation, we investigate the role of the multiple receive antennas in multicell cooperative systems under different interference conditions. We then present novel non-iterative and iterative coordinated beamforming and precoding algorithms with different receiver processing. We present comprehensive performance comparison of various multicell cooperative systems and explore the feasibility of achieving much higher throughput via hyper-densification of heterogeneous and small cell networks with mandatory multicell cooperation. / text

The use of multiple antennas to improve the reliability and capacity of wireless communication has been around for a while, leading to the concept of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications. To enable full MIMO potentials, the precoding design has been recognized as a crucial component. This thesis aims to design multiuser MIMO precoders of practical interest to achieve high reliability and capacity performance under various real-world constraints like inaccuracy of channel information acquired at the transmitter, hardware complexity, etc. Three prominent cases are considered which constitute the mainstream evolving directions of the current cellular communication standards and future 5G cellular communications. First, in a relay-assisted multiuser MIMO system, heavily quantized channel information obtained through limited feedback contributes to noticeable rate loss compared to when perfect channel information is available. This thesis derives an upper bound to characterize the system throughput loss caused by channel quantization error, and then develops a feedback quality control strategy to maintain the rate loss within a bounded range. Second, in a massive multiuser MIMO channel, due to the large array size, it is difficult to support each antenna with a dedicated radio frequency chain, thus making high-dimensional baseband precoding infeasible. To address this challenge, a low-complexity hybrid precoding scheme is designed to divide the precoding into two cascaded stages, namely, the low-dimensional baseband precoding and the high-dimensional phase-only processing at the radio frequency domain. Its performance is characterized in a closed form and demonstrated through computer simulations. Third, in a mmWave multiuser MIMO scenario, smaller wavelengths make it possible to incorporate excessive amounts of antenna elements into a compact form. However, we are faced with even worse hardware challenges as mixed signal processing at mmWave frequencies is more complex and power consuming. The channel sparsity is taken advantage of in this thesis to enable a simplified precoding scheme to steer the beam for each user towards its dominant propagation paths at the radio frequency domain only. The proposed scheme comes at significantly reduced complexity and is shown to be capable of achieving highly desirable performance based on asymptotic rate analysis. / Graduate

Several efficient low complexity interference management techniques were developed for improving the performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) networks. Sub-optimal techniques involving optimal antenna selection-aided stream control were proposed for joint optimization of co-channel MIMO links in a space division multiple access (SDMA) network. Results indicated that the use of the SDMA scheme along with partial channel state information at the transmitters significantly reduces the signaling overhead with minimal loss in throughput performance. Next, a mean squared error (MSE) based antenna selection framework was presented for developing low complexity algorithms for finite complexity receivers. These selection algorithms were shown to provide reasonable bit-error rate performance while keeping the overall system complexity low. Furthermore, some new algebraic properties of linear orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs) were utilized to develop a single-stage and minimum MSE optimal detector for two co-channel users employing unity rate real and derived rate-1/2 complex OSTBCs. A sub-optimal space-time interference cancellation (IC) technique was also developed for a spatial-multiplexing link subjected to Alamouti interference. The performance of proposed interference management techniques and their implications for future research are discussed.

In the field of wireless multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications, remarkable capacity enhancements may be achieved in certain environments relative to single-antenna systems. In a non-line of sight (NLOS) environment with rich multipath, the capacity potential is typically very good, but in a line of sight (LOS) environment with a high Rician K-factor, the capacity improvement may be severely limited or almost disappear. The objective of the research described in this dissertation has been to develop a more thorough understanding of the capacity limitations of MIMO in a LOS environment and explore methods to improve that capacity. It is known that for a LOS link with a given range, an optimal antenna configuration, which usually involves large antenna spacings, can be computed to maximize the capacity. A method is here proposed for achieving near-maximum MIMO capacity in LOS environments with suboptimal array configurations. Suboptimal arrays may include small antenna spacings and/or arrays rotated off normal. The method employs single-antenna full-duplex, amplify-and-forward relays, otherwise known as "wireless repeaters." We have designated this concept repeater-assisted capacity enhancement (RACE) for MIMO. Potential applications include tower-mounted or building-top cellular backhaul and high-speed wireless bridge links (explored in Chapter 5) and ground-to-air sensor network backhaul links and base-to-mobile links in a cellular configuration (explored in Chapter 7). We have analyzed this concept in simulation for point-to-point and point-to-multipoint links and have found the following critical parameters for system design and deployment: orientation, antenna spacing, and antenna patterns of the transmit (TX)/receive (RX) MIMO arrays; and position, noise figure, TX/RX isolation, and antenna patterns associated with the repeater(s). Simulation results for an n[subscript R] xn[subscript T] MIMO link demonstrate nearly a factor of n=min{n[subscript R], n[subscript T] } improvement in capacity relative to a single-input single-output (SISO) link using n-1 optimally placed wireless repeaters supporting the link. Other portions of analysis presented include the development of a determinant-based metric for capacity (D) and an exploration of upper and lower bounds of capacity as a function of D. The position of repeaters is analyzed theoretically and a metric introduced based on D intended to quickly and intuitively determine optimal positions for repeaters assisting a given MIMO link based on TX/RX node steering vectors.