The GSM platform is a extremely successful wireless technology and an unprecedented story of global achievement. The GSM platform is growing and evolving and offers an expanded and feature-rich voice and data enabling services. General Packet Radio Service, (GPRS), will have a tremendous transmission rate, which will make a significant impact on most of the existing services. Additionally, GPRS stands ready for the introduction of new services as operators and users, both business and private, appreciate the capabilities and potential that GPRS provides. Services such as the Internet, videoconferencing and on-line shopping will be as smooth as talking on the phone. Moreover, the capability and ease of access to these services increase at work, at home or during travel. In this research the traffic channel of a GSM system was studied in detail and simulated in order to obtain a performance analysis. Matlab, software from Mathworks, was used for the simulation. Both the forward and the reverse links of a GSM system were simulated. A flat fading model was used to model the channel. Signal to Noise Ratio, (SNR), was the primary metric that was varied during the simulation. All the building blocks for a traffic channel, including a Convolutional encoder, an Interleaver and a Modulator were coded in Matlab. Finally the GPRS system, which is an enhancement of the GSM system for data services was introduced.

Abstract not available

Among various planar lightwave circuits for multiplexing/demultiplexing in an optical communication system, etched diffraction gratings (EDGs) have shown great potential due to their compactness and high spectral finesse. Conventional numerical methods for grating simulation cannot be used to simulate an EDG demultiplexer of large size (in terms of the wavelength). In the present thesis, the polarization-dependent characteristics of an EDG demultiplexer are analyzed with a boundary element method (BEM) for both an echelle grating coated with a metal and a dielectric grating with total internal reflection (TIR) facets. For EDGs with metal-coated facets, we use a more effective method, namely, method of moments (MoM). Futhermore, a fast simulation method for EDGs with TIR facets is presented based on the Kirchhoff–Huygens principle and the Goos-Hänchen shift. This simple method has a good agreement with a BEM over a wide range of practical parameters of the device. Several novel designs are presented in order to improve the performances of EDGs. (1) By making some appropriate roughness on the surface of the shaded facets, the PDL of the demultiplexer can be effectively reduced over a large bandwith. (2) For EDGs based on Si nanowire structures, we compensate the polarization-dependent wavelength dispersion (PDλ) in the whole operational spectrum by introducing a polarization compensation area in its free propagation region. (3) An EDG demultiplexer with suppressed sidelobe is designed. The designed EDG demultiplexer can give a crosstalk as small as 50 dB in theory. (4) By chirping the diffraction order for each facet, we minimize the envelope intensity for the other adjacent diffraction orders to achieve a negligible return loss in a large spectral width. (5) A design for EDG demultiplexers is presented to obtain both large grating facets and a larger free spectral range (FSR) using the optimal chirped diffraction orders for different facets. The influences of the fabrication errors (e.g., rounded effect, surface roughness and point defect in the waveguide) on the performance (such as the insertion loss, the polarization dependent loss and the chromatic dispersion) of an EDG demultiplexer are also analyzed in detail. Silicon nanowire waveguides and related EDGs are studied. An EDG demultiplexer with 10 nm spacing is finally fabricated and characterized. / QC 20100910

El acelerado crecimiento de las comunicaciones a través de plataformas de transmisión en banda ancha por vía alámbrica e inalámbrica, sumado al uso cada vez más extenso de modulaciones de amplitud no constante que, debido a su alta eficiencia espectral y bajo coste de implementación, han sido adoptadas en el marco de desarrollo de diversos estándares de transmisión, son aspectos que han servido de soporte y motivación fundamental para el presente trabajo de investigación en el campo de la compensación de distorsiones no lineales en sistemas de comunicación. El estudio de los efectos de la distorsión no lineal y su compensación ha sido desde hace ya muchos años objeto de atención para investigadores de diversas áreas. Hoy, en particular, este estudio sigue siendo fundamental ya que se encuentra directamente implicado en el desarrollo de tecnologías de última generación en el área de las comunicaciones. Los nuevos sistemas de transmisión digital, en especial aquellos basados en OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing), son capaces de ofrecer altos niveles de eficiencia espectral utilizando modulaciones lineales multinivel sobre un numeroso conjunto de subportadoras que, al ser (idealmente) ortogonales en frecuencia, pueden ser ubicadas en un ancho de banda muy reducido permitiendo así transmitir elevadas tasas de información por segundo y por ancho de banda. Sin embargo, y a consecuencia de esto, problemas como las interferencias por canal adyacente o la presencia de una distorsión no lineal en la cadena de transmisión afectan de manera crítica las prestaciones de estos sistemas imponiendo severos límites a su viabilidad. De hecho, en el campo de las comunicaciones móviles y satelitales, existen actualmente diversas aplicaciones donde estos esquemas de modulación y multicanalización están ya operativos. En estos casos, la eficiencia de potencia en transmisión resulta primordial para, entre otras razones, lograr una máxima autonomía del equipamiento. En este contexto, el comportamiento no lineal de los amplificadores de alta potencia utilizados en transmisión de radiofrecuencia, constituye el principal obstáculo (desde el punto de vista de la distorsión no lineal) para el buen funcionamiento de los sistemas de comunicación digital basados en OFDM. Afortunadamente, este nocivo efecto puede ser compensado mediante diversas técnicas clásicas de linealización cuyas variantes -ad-hoc' han sido propuestas y ampliamente investigadas, existiendo al día de hoy una nutrida literatura parte de la cual referimos a lo largo de este trabajo. Entre dichas técnicas, la pre-distorsión digital ofrece óptimas condiciones para el diseño de linealizadores adaptativos ya que puede ser implementada a muy bajo coste sobre la información discreta de las señales de banda base. El objetivo que se persigue, en general, es el de proveer las condiciones de linealidad necesarias para explotar las capacidades propias de las modulaciones de alta eficiencia espectral, y al mismo tiempo alcanzar un máximo aprovechamiento de la potencia disponible. En este trabajo de investigación, efectuamos inicialmente una revisión sintetizada de algunas importantes técnicas de linealización para luego dar paso a una revisión más detallada de dos modelos relevantes utilizados para caracterizar el comportamiento no lineal de los amplificadores de alta potencia (modelo se Series de Volterra y modelo de Saleh para amplificadores nolineales sin memoria). Junto con ello se examinan algunas interesantes propiedades estadísticas asociadas al fenómeno de la distorsión no lineal que han dado pie a considerar durante la investigación posibles nuevas aplicaciones en estrategias de pre-distorsión. Se ha querido también incluir la descripción, a nivel de sistema y modelo de señal, de un esquema de transmisión OFDM genérico incluyendo caracterizaciones analíticas detalladas del efecto no lineal a objeto de formalizar en propiedad un modelo discreto exacto que otorgue una visión más profunda para la comprensión del fenómeno estudiado. Finalmente se presenta el diseño y evaluación de un esquema de pre-distorsión basado en un algoritmo iterativo que considera, como principal aporte, la optimización bidimensional de un reducido número de coeficientes de interpolación que identifican de manera adaptativa la característica inversa de ganancia compleja de un amplificador, tanto en función de la particular morfología no lineal de dicha curva, como también de la distribución de probabilidad de las señales de entrada en banda base. / The rapid growth of wired and wireless broad-band communications and the pervasive use of spectrally efficient non-constant amplitude modulations, adopted in the framework of several standardized transmission formats, motivates and supports the present research work in the field of non-linear distortion in communication systems. The compensation of nonlinearities has received a lot of attention in past and recent years, presenting direct implications on industrial development of last generation communication technologies. New digital transmission systems, particularly those based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), feature high spectral efficiency as they exploit multilevel linear modulations to transmit at high information rates in combination with a dense allocation of a large number of (ideally) orthogonal sub-carriers in a relatively reduced bandwidth. As a result, problems such as adjacent channel interference and non-linear distortion become critical for system performance and, therefore, must be reduced to a minimum. Moreover, numerous applications of such transmission schemes are already operative in the field of satellite and mobile communications, where power efficiency is of primary concern due to, among other reasons, operation autonomy of the equipment and effective transmitted power. In this context, the non-linear behaviour of high power amplifiers (HPAs) constitutes a major impairment for OFDM-based digital communications systems. The compensation of these harmful effects can be achieved using a variety of techniques that have been proposed and widely dealt with in the literature. Among these techniques, digital pre-distortion, which can be carried out at a very low cost over the discrete base-band information, provides optimal features for the efficient implementation of adaptive linearization. Thence, in order to provide good conditions for the reliable use of high spectral efficiency modulations while taking the maximum advantage from the transmitting power budget, it is necessary to incorporate a suitable linearization technique.In the present work, we begin by reviewing some background on linearization techniques. This leads us to continue analyzing two relevant theoretical models typically used in characterizing memory and memoryless nonlinear HPAs (Volterra Series model and Saleh model for memoryless nonlinear HPAs). In addition to this a generic OFDM system and signal structure is described in detail by including the non-linear effect in the analytical model of the transmission chain. This is done in order to formalize an exact discrete OFDM model that help us in achieving a deeper understanding of the phenomenon under consideration. Then, some useful statistical properties and parameters associated to the nonlinear distortion are examined as well as the application of a CDF-based estimation of nonlinearities which is proposed as a new pre-distortion strategy. Finally, a new discrete adaptive pre-distortion scheme is formulated and then tested via simulation. The analysis and design of the main algorithm proposed considers the adaptive identification of the inverse complex gain characteristic of a nonlinear HPA. For this purpose, an iterative 2-D optimization of a reduced number of interpolation functions is formulated under a special two-fold criterion which accounts for the particular morphology of the HPA's nonlinear gain characteristic, as well as the probability distribution of the input base-band information.

The theory of lattices --- a mathematical approach for representing infinite discrete points in Euclidean space, has become a powerful tool to analyze many point-to-point digital and wireless communication systems, particularly, communication systems that can be well-described by the linear Gaussian vector channel model. This is mainly due to the three facts about channel codes constructed using lattices: they have simple structure, their ability to achieve the fundamental limits (the capacity) of the channel, and most importantly, they can be decoded using efficient decoders called lattice decoders. Since its introduction to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems, sphere decoders has become an attractive efficient implementation of lattice decoders, especially for small signal dimensions and/or moderate to large signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). In the first part of this dissertation, we consider sphere decoding algorithms that describe lattice decoding. The exact complexity analysis of the basic sphere decoder for general space-time codes applied to MIMO wireless channel is known to be difficult. Characterizing and understanding the complexity distribution is important, especially when the sphere decoder is used under practically relevant runtime constraints. In this work, we shed the light on the (average) computational complexity of sphere decoding for the quasi-static, LAttice Space-Time (LAST) coded MIMO channel. Sphere decoders are only efficient in the high SNR regime and low signal dimensions, and exhibits exponential (average) complexity for low-to-moderate SNR and large signal dimensions. On the other extreme, linear and non-linear receivers such as minimum mean-square error (MMSE), and MMSE decision-feedback equalization (DFE) are considered attractive alternatives to sphere decoders in MIMO channels. Unfortunately, the very low decoding complexity advantage that these decoders can provide comes at the expense of poor performance, especially for large signal dimensions. The problem of designing low complexity receivers for the MIMO channel that achieve near-optimal performance is considered a challenging problem and has driven much research in the past years. The problem can solved through the use of lattice sequential decoding that is capable of bridging the gap between sphere decoders and low complexity linear decoders (e.g., MMSE-DFE decoder). In the second part of this thesis, the asymptotic performance of the lattice sequential decoder for LAST coded MIMO channel is analyzed. We determine the rates achievable by lattice coding and sequential decoding applied to such a channel. The diversity-multiplexing tradeoff under such a decoder is derived as a function of its parameter--- the bias term. In this work, we analyze both the computational complexity distribution and the average complexity of such a decoder in the high SNR regime. We show that there exists a cut-off multiplexing gain for which the average computational complexity of the decoder remains bounded. Our analysis reveals that there exists a finite probability that the number of computations performed by the decoder may become excessive, even at high SNR, during high channel noise. This probability is usually referred to as the probability of a decoding failure. Such probability limits the performance of the lattice sequential decoder, especially for a one-way communication system. For a two-way communication system, such as in MIMO Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) system, the feedback channel can be used to eliminate the decoding failure probability. In this work, we modify the lattice sequential decoder for the MIMO ARQ channel, to predict in advance the occurrence of decoding failure to avoid wasting the time trying to decode the message. This would result in a huge saving in decoding complexity. In particular, we will study the throughput-performance-complexity tradeoffs in sequential decoding algorithms and the effect of preprocessing and termination strategies. We show, analytically and via simulation, that using the lattice sequential decoder that implements a simple yet efficient time-out algorithm for joint error detection and correction, the optimal tradeoff of the MIMO ARQ channel can be achieved with significant reduction in decoding complexity.

This thesis puts focus on the technological challenges for Wavelength Division Multiplexed Passive Optical Network (WDM-PON) implementation, and presents novel semiconductor optical devices for deployment at the optical network unit (ONU). The first-ever reported L-band Reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA) is presented based on InP-base material. A theoretical model is developed to estimate the optical gain and the saturation power of this device compared to a conventional SOA. Experiments on this device design show long-range telecom wavelength operation, with polarization-independent gain of greater than 20 dB, and low saturation output power of 0 dBm suitable for PON applications. Next, the effect of the amplified spontaneous emission noise of RSOA devices on WDM-PON system is investigated. It is shown through theoretical modeling and simulations that the RSOA noise combined with receiver noise statistics increase probability of error, and induce considerable power penalties to the WDM-PON system. By improving the coupling efficiencies, and by distributing more current flow to the input of these devices, steps can be taken to improve device noise characteristics. Further, in spectrally-spliced WDM-PONs deploying RSOAs, the effect of AWG filter shape on system performance is investigated. Simulation modeling and experiments show that deployment of Flat-band AWGs is critical for reducing the probability of error caused by AWG spectral shape filtering. Flat-band athermal AWGs in comparison to Gaussin-shape counterparts satisfy the maximum acceptable error probability requirements, and reduce the power penalty associated with filtering effect. In addition, detuning between two AWG center wavelengths impose further power penalties to the WDM-PON system. In the last section of this thesis, motivated by RSOA device system limitations, a novel injection-locked Fabry-Perot (IL-FP) device is presented which consists of a gain section monolithically integrated with a phase section. The gain section provides locking of one FP mode to a seed source wavelength, while the phase modulator allows for adjusting the wavelength of the internal modes by tuning bias current to maintain mode-locking. This device counters any mode drifts caused by temperature variations, and allows for cooler-less operation over a wide range of currents. The devices and the performance metrics subsequently allow for a hybrid integration platform on a silicon substrate and integrate many functionalities like reflective modulator with thin film dielectric filter and receiver on a single chip for deployment at the user-end of future-proof low cost WDM-PONs.

The general objective of this proposed research is to design and develop signal acquisition and tracking algorithms for multiple input multiple output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems for fixed wireless access applications. The algorithms are specifically targeted for systems that work in time division multiple access and frequency division multiple access frame modes. In our research, we first develop a comprehensive system model for a MIMO-OFDM system under the influence of the radio frequency (RF) oscillator frequency offset, sampling frequency (SF) offset, RF oscillator phase noise, frequency selective channel impairments and finally the additive white Gaussian noise. We then develop the acquisition and tracking algorithms to estimate and track all these parameters. The acquisition and tracking algorithms are assisted by a preamble consisting of one or more training sequences and pilot symbol matrices. Along with the signal acquisition and tracking algorithms, we also consider design of the MIMO-OFDM preamble and pilot signals that enable the suggested algorithms to work efficiently. Signal acquisition as defined in our research consists of time and RF synchronization, SF offset estimation and correction, phase noise estimation and correction and finally channel estimation. Signal tracking consists of RF, SF, phase noise and channel tracking. Time synchronization, RF oscillator frequency offset, SF oscillator frequency offset, phase noise and channel estimation and tracking are all research topics by themselves. A large number of studies have addressed these issues, but usually individually and for single-input single-output (SISO) OFDM systems. In the proposed research we present a complete suite of signal acquisition and tracking algorithms for MIMO-OFDM systems along with Cramr-Rao bounds for the SISO-OFDM case. In addition, we also derive the Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimates of the parameters for the SISO-OFDM case. Our proposed research is unique from the existing literature in that it presents a complete receiver implementation for MIMO-OFDM systems and accounts for the cumulative effects of all possible acquisition and tracking errors on the bit error rate (BER) performance. The suggested algorithms and the pilot/training schemes may be applied to any MIMO OFDM system and are independent of the space-time coding techniques that are employed.

Photonic crystals (PCs), consisting of a periodic pattern of variations in the material properties, are one of the platforms proposed as synthetic optical materials to meet the need for optical materials with desired properties. Recently, applications based on dispersive properties of the PCs have been proposed in which PCs are envisioned as optical materials with controllable dispersive properties. Unlike the conventional use of PCs to achieve localization, in these new applications propagation inside the photonic crystal is studied, and their dispersive properties are utilized. Among these applications, the possibility of demultiplexing light using the superprism effect is of particular interest. Possibility of integration and compactness are two main advantages of PC-based wavelength demultiplexers compared to other demultiplexing techniques, for applications including compact spectrometers (for sensing applications), demultiplexers (for communications), and spectral analysis (for information processing systems). I develop the necessary simulation tools to study the dispersive properties of photonic crystals. In particular, I will focus on superprism-based demultiplexing in PCs, and define a phenomenological model to describe different effects in these structures and to study important parameters and trends. A systematic method for the optimization and design of these structures is presented. Implementation of these structures is experimentally demonstrated using the devices fabricated in a planar SOI platform based on designed parameters. In the next step, different approaches to improve the performance of these devices (for better resolution and lower insertion loss) are studied, and extension of the concepts to other material platforms is discussed.

This thesis considers the use of the tone reservation (TR) technique in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The nonlinear distortion is usually introduces by the high power amplifiers (HPA) used in wireless communications systems. It orders to reduce the inter-modulation distortion (IMD) in OFDM systems. In addition to the original peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR)-reduction criterion, we propose signal-to-distortion plus noise power ratio (SDNR) criterion and distortion power plus inverse of signal power (DIS) criterion. Based on these criteria, the cross-entropy (CE) algorithm is introduced to determine desired values of the peak reduction carriers (PRCs) to improve the bit error rate (BER) of nonlinearly distorted. Computational complexity is always the major concern of PAPR technique. Therefore, the real-valued PRCs and the modified transform decomposition (MTD) method are introduced here to dramatically decrease complexity of inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) operation with slightly performance loss. The simulation results show that the proposed criteria provide a better BER performance and a lower computational complexity.

One of the challenges of distributed cooperative orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems is that the multiple carrier frequency offsets (CFOs) simultaneously present at the receiver. According to our knowledge up to now, even the CFOs are known at the receiver, the way to perfectly eliminate the effect of CFOs is still an open problem. This thesis proposes a scheme to mitigate the effect due to multiple CFOs by using the concept of intercarrier interference self-cancellation in transitional OFDM systems, a scheme where the data are simultaneously modulated on symmetric subcarriers between two transmit antennas. Before processing FFT, two values related to CFOs are used to adjust the time-domain signal resulting in better signal-to-interference ratio in even and odd subcarriers respectively. After that, the data are combined by applying maximum ratio combining and then decoded. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme as compared to previous scheme.