Since they appeared, wireless technologies have deeply transformed our society. Today, wireless internet access and other wireless applications demandincreasingly more traffic. However, the continuous traffic increase can be unbearableand requires rethinking and redesigning the wireless technologies inmany different aspects. Aiming to respond to the increasing needs of wirelesstraffic, we are witnessing a rapidly evolving wireless technology scenario.This thesis addresses various aspects of the transmitters used in wireless communications.Transmitters present several hardware (HW) impairments thatcreate distortions, polluting the radio spectrum and decreasing the achievabletraffic in the network. Digital platforms are now flexible, robust and cheapenough to enable compensation of HW impairments at the digital base-bandsignal. This has been coined as ’dirty radio’. Dirty radio is expected in future transmitters where HW impairments may arise to reduce transmitter cost or to enhance power efficiency. This thesis covers the software (SW) compensation schemes of dirty radio developed for wireless transmitters. As describedin the thesis, these schemes can be further enhanced with knowledge of thespecific signal transmission or scenarios, e.g., developing cognitive digital compensationschemes. This can be valuable in today’s rapidly evolving scenarioswhere multiple signals may co-exist, sharing the resources at the same radiofrequency (RF) front-end. In the first part, this thesis focuses on the instrumentation challenges andHWimpairments encountered at the transmitter. A synthetic instrument (SI)that performs network analysis is designed to suit the instrumentation needs.Furthermore, how to perform nonlinear network analysis using the developedinstrument is discussed. Two transmitter HW impairments are studied: themeasurement noise and the load impedance mismatch at the transmitter, asis their coupling with the state-of-the-art digital compensation techniques.These two studied impairments are inherent to measurement systems and areexpected in future wireless transmitters. In the second part, the thesis surveys the area of behavioral modeling and digital compensation techniques for wireless transmitters. Emphasis is placed on low computational complexity techniques. The low complexity is motivated by a predicted increase in the number of transmitters deployed in the network, from base stations (BS), access points and hand-held devices. A modeling methodology is developed that allows modeling transmitters to achieve both reduced computational complexity and low modeling error. Finally, the thesis discusses the emerging architectures of multi-channel transmittersand describes their digital compensation techniques. It revises the MIMOVolterra series formulation to address the general modeling problem anddrafts possible solutions to tackle its dimensionality. In the framework of multi-channel transmitters, a technique to compensate nonlinear multi-carrier satellite transponders is presented. This technique is cognitive because it uses the frequency link planning and the pulse-shaping filters of the individual carriers. This technique shows enhanced compensation ability at reduced computational complexity compared to the state-of-the-art techniques and enables the efficient operation of satellite transponders. / <p>QC 20150526</p>

This thesis reports original work on digital compensation for frequency dependent transfer characteristics and errors in digital PAM/CPFSK (Pulse Amplitude Modulation/Continuous Phase Frequency Shift Keying) quadrature modulators.A particularly flexible and cost effective approach to the implementation of the base-band section of a radio transmitter is to synthesise base-band signals digitally using a DSP (Digital Signal Processor). This approach is limited, however, by the transfer characteristics and errors in the implementation of practical analogue sub-systems. These practical limitations result in undesirable in-band frequency-dependent shaping of the transmitted signals. In the case of FM (Frequency Modulation) signals, this leads to the generation of unwanted side-lobes in the transmitted RF signal spectrum that interfere with signals in adjacent frequency channels. This results in the transmitted signal failing to meet transmission standards requirements.The digital compensation techniques developed and presented in this thesis allow the reduction of undesirable in-band frequency-dependent signal shaping. It is shown that this enables strict requirements on the spectral emissions from the FM transmitter to be met using a flexible and cost effective DSP based modulator system.The contributions of the thesis are in three primary areas:(i) The development of a structure for frequency dependent digital compensation.(ii) The formulation and solution of an optimisation problem that allows the free parameters within the structure to be determined such that effective reduction of unwanted in-band frequency-dependent signal shaping is achieved.(iii) The development of techniques that allow the digital compensation procedure to be successfully implemented on a practical DSP platform.The new digital compensation structure that is proposed uses two digital FIR (Finite ++ / Impulse Response) filters in the digital base-band section of the quadrature modulator: one in the in-phase (I) channel and one in the quadrature (Q) channel. The tap-weights of the FIR filters are determined by solving two optimisation problems: one for each channel. The optimisation problems are formulated using a new approach that ensures that the degrees of freedom in the optimisation i.e., the FIR filter tap-weights, are used effectively to meet the objective of reducing in-band frequency-dependent signal shaping in analogue sub-systems further down the transmission path.A characterisation of the solutions to the optimisation problems enables the identification of techniques that need to be adopted to successfully implement the proposed digital compensation on a practical DSP-based system.The digital compensation technique is demonstrated by implementing and testing the technique on a DSP platform. The results of experimental studies are presented which clearly demonstrate that the digital compensation technique leads to substantial reductions in adjacent channel interference.

[Formulae and special characters can only be approximated here. Please see the pdf version of the abstract for an accurate reproduction.] In In-phase/Quadrature (IQ) modulator generating Continuous-Phase-Frequency-Shift-Keying (CPFSK) signals, shortcomings in the implementation of the analogue reconstruction filters result in the loss of the constant envelope property of the output signal. Ripples in the envelope function cause undesirable spreading of the transmitted signal spectrum into adjacent channels when the signal passes through non-linear elements in the transmission path. This results in the failure of the transmitted signal in meeting transmission standards requirements. Therefore, digital techniques compensating for these shortcomings play an important role in enhancing the performance of the IQ modulator. In this thesis, several techniques to compensate for the irregularities in the I and Q channels are presented. The main emphasis is on preserving a constant magnitude and linear phase characteristics in the pass-band of the analogue filters as well as compensating for the imbalances between the I and Q channels. A generic digital pre-compensation model is used, and based on this model, the digital compensation schemes are formulated using control and signal processing techniques. Four digital compensation techniques are proposed and analysed. The first method is based on H2 norm minimization while the second method solves for the pre-compensation filters by posing the problem as one of H∞ optimisation. The third method stems from the well-known principle of Wiener filtering. Note that the digital compensation filters found using these methods are computed off-line. We then proceed by designing adaptive compensation filters that runs on-line and uses the “live” modulator input data to make the necessary measurements and compensations. These adaptive filters are computed based on the well-known Least-Mean-Square (LMS) algorithm. The advantage of using this approach is that the modulator does not require to be taken off-line in the process of calculating the pre-compensation filters and thus will not disrupt the normal operation of the modulator. The compensation performance of all methods is studied analytically using computer simulations and practical experiments. The results indicate that the proposed methods are effective and are able to provide substantial compensation for the shortcomings of the analogue reconstruction filters in the I and Q channels. In addition, the adaptive compensation scheme, implemented on a DSP platform shows that there is significant reduction in side-lobe levels for the compensated signal spectrum.

<p>The advancements of computational power in low cost FPGAs are giving the opportunityto implement real-time compensation of loudspeakers and audio systems. The need for expensive commercial audio systems is reduced when the fidelity ofmuch cheaper audio systems easily can be improved by real-time compensation. The topic of this thesis is to investigate and evaluate methods for digital compensationof distortion in audio systems. More specifically, a VHDL module isimplemented to, when necessary, alleviate the problem of drastically deterioratingfidelity of the bass appearing when the input power is too high.</p>

The advancements of computational power in low cost FPGAs are giving the opportunityto implement real-time compensation of loudspeakers and audio systems. The need for expensive commercial audio systems is reduced when the fidelity ofmuch cheaper audio systems easily can be improved by real-time compensation. The topic of this thesis is to investigate and evaluate methods for digital compensationof distortion in audio systems. More specifically, a VHDL module isimplemented to, when necessary, alleviate the problem of drastically deterioratingfidelity of the bass appearing when the input power is too high.