published_or_final_version / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

With frequency selective fading, the SNRs of each sub-carrier would vary over the time and frequency. It would then cause fluctuations of the effective SNR. As the decision of MeS in LA is based on the effective SNR, the study of the statistical characterization of effective SNR over frequency selective fading channels would be very important, This problem forms the basis of investigation in this thesis. The methodology used in this thesis is generally divided into two parts. The first part is to investigate the method in obtaining the distribution of EESM over frequency selective fading channels. Such approach will be very helpful for the second part of the work which is to obtain the exact distribution of the EESM effective SNR for a specified fading model. In this case, Nakagami-m fading model is used. The choice of this model is based due to its simplicity and experimental consistency. One of the important features of the distribution is that the SNR of a signal under Nakagami fading is gamma distributed. Thus, in performance evaluation involving Nakagami fading, one can often rely on established results (in the statistics literature) of the gamma distribution. An important special case of the Nakagami distribution is the Rayleigh distribution, which arises in the situation of where the line-of-sight (LOS) component between the transmitter and the receiver is absent, i.e., when all of the received power stems from scattered components. The corresponding distribution for the SNR is the exponential distribution. The research in this thesis represents an effort to provide a statistical characterization of EESM effective SNR which has not appeared in any existing literatures. The goals of this thesis is to Characterize the statistics of EESM effective SNR over frequency selective channels. Obtain the distribution of EESM effective SNR over correlated Nakagami-m fading channels. Theoretically analyze the performance (Le. average SNR, outage probability and Symbol Error Rate (SER) etc.) of EESM over correlated Nakagami-m fading channels. Provide simple approximations to the proposed analytical results. Try to find extension and application of the results.

The initial design of an OFDM transceiver is described and the simulations using MATLAB’s Simulink Software and other FGPA based tools are presented. All components of a modern OFDM system were implemented in Simulink to provide an understanding of the various components of an OFDM system, provide a proof of concept in the design, and measure the theoretical performance of the system. In an effort to build the transceiver, the FFT and randomizer components were implemented in verilog and were successfully simulated using ModelSim Altera Starter Edition 6.5b. A commercially available OFDM core, which did not include forward error correction, was simulated to measure the performance of an OFDM system within Altera Stratix III devices and determine the overall logic utilization for OFDM modulation and demodulation. The goals of this report are to describe in detail the general effort made by the author to build an OFDM transceiver and serve as a driver for its eventual FPGA implementation. / text

In single-input multiple-output (SIMO) systems based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), adaptive beamforming at the receiver side can be used to combat the effect of directional co-channel interference (CCI). Since pilot-aided beamforming suffers from consuming precious channel bandwidth, there has been much interest in blind beamforming approaches that can adapt their weights by restoring certain properties of the transmitted signals. Within this class of blind algorithms, the recursive least squares constant modulus algorithm (RLS-CMA) is of particular interest due to its good overall CCI cancelation performance and fast convergence. Nevertheless, the direct use of RSL-CMA within a SIMO-OFDM receiver induces considerable computational complexity, since a distinct copy of the RLS-CMA must be run on each individual sub-carriers. In this thesis, we present two approaches to reduce the computational complexity of SIMO-OFDM beamforming based on the RLS-CMA, namely: frequency interpolation and distributed processing. The former approach, which exploits the coherence bandwidth of the broadband wireless channels, divides the sub-carriers into several contiguous groups and applies the RLS-CMA to a selected sub-carrier in each group. The weight vectors at other frequencies are then obtained by interpolation. The distributed processing approach relies on the partitioning of the receiving array into sub-arrays and the use of a special approximation in the RLS-CMA. This allows a partial decoupling of the algorithm which can then be run on multiple processors with reduced overall complexity. This approach is well-suited to collaborative beamforming i~ multi-node distributed relaying. Through numerical simulation experiments of a SIMO-OFDM system, it is demonstrated that the proposed modifications to the RLS-CMA scheme can lead to substantial computational savings with minimal losses in adaptive cancelation performance.

Collaborative beamforming is a powerful technique to increase communication energy efficiency and range in an energy-constrained network. To achieve high performance, collaborative beamforming requires accurate knowledge of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitters (collaborative nodes). In practice, however, such exact knowledge of CSI is not available. A robust transmitter design based on partial CSI is required to mitigate the effects of CSI mismatches. / This thesis focuses on the design and evaluation of a beamforming scheme that is robust to CSI mismatches for collaborative multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) wireless systems. Using a max-min robust design approach, the robust beamformer is designed to maximize the minimum (worst-case) received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) within a predefined uncertainty region at each OFDM subcarrier. In addition, several subcarrier power allocation strategies are investigated to further improve the robustness of collaborative systems. Numerical simulation results show that the robust beamformer offers improved performance over the nonrobust beamformers and the use of power allocation strategies among subcarriers further improves the system performance.

The ever increasing demand for fast and efficient broadband wireless communication services requires future broadband communication systems to provide a high data rate, robust performance and low complexity within the limited available electromagnetic spectrum. One of the identified, most-promising techniques to support high performance and high data rate communication for future wireless broadband services is the deployment of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) antenna systems with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). The combination of MIMO and OFDM techniques guarantees a much more reliable and robust transmission over a hostile wireless channel through coding over the space, time and frequency domains. In this thesis, two full-rate space-time coded OFDM systems are proposed. The first one, designed for two transmit antennas, is called extended super-orthogonal space-time trellis coded OFDM (ESOSTTC-OFDM), and is based on constellation rotation. The second one, called super-quasi-orthogonal space-time trellis coded OFDM (SQOSTTCOFDM), combines a quasi-orthogonal space-time block code with a trellis code to provide a full-rate code for four transmit antennas. The designed space-time coded MIMO-OFDM systems achieve a high diversity order with high coding gain by exploiting the diversity advantage of frequency-selective fading channels. Concatenated codes have been shown to be an effective technique of achieving reliable communication close to the Shannon limit, provided that there is sufficient available diversity. In a bid to improve the performance of the super orthogonal space-time trellis code (SOSTTC) in frequency selective fading channels, five distinct concatenated codes are proposed for MIMO-OFDM over frequency-selective fading channels in the second part of this thesis. Four of the coding schemes are based on the concatenation of convolutional coding, interleaving, and space-time coding, along multiple-transmitter diversity systems, while the fifth coding scheme is based on the concatenation of two space-time codes and interleaving. The proposed concatenated Super-Orthogonal Space-Time Turbo-Coded OFDM System I. B. Oluwafemi 2012 vii coding schemes in MIMO-OFDM systems achieve high diversity gain by exploiting available diversity resources of frequency-selective fading channels and achieve a high coding gain through concatenations by employing the turbo principle. Using computer software simulations, the performance of the concatenated SOSTTC-OFDM schemes is compared with those of concatenated space-time trellis codes and those of conventional SOSTTC-OFDM schemes in frequency-selective fading channels. Simulation results show that the concatenated SOSTTC-OFDM system outperformed the concatenated space-time trellis codes and the conventional SOSTTC-OFDM system under the various channel scenarios in terms of both diversity order and coding gain. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

The main contribution of this thesis is the statistical analysis of orthogonal frequency di- vision multiplexing (OFDM) systems operating over wireless channels that are both fre- quency selective and Rayleigh fading. We first describe the instantaneous capacity of such systems using a central limit theorem, as well as the asymptotic capacity of a power lim- ited OFDM system as the number of subcarriers approaches infinity. We then analyse the performance of uncoded OFDM systems by first developing bounds on the block error rate. Next we show that the distribution of the number of symbol errors within each block may be tightly approximated, and derive the distribution of an upper bound on the total variation distance. Finally, the central result of this thesis proposes the use of lattices for encodingOFDMsystems. For this, we detail a particular method of using lattices to encode OFDMsystems, and derive the optimalmaximumlikelihood decodingmetric. Generalised Minimum Distance (GMD) decoding is then introduced as a lower complexity method of decoding lattice encoded OFDM. We derive the optimal reliability metric for GMD decod- ing of OFDM systems operating over frequency selective channels, and develop analytical upper bounds on the error rate of lattice encoded OFDM systems employing GMD decod- ing.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has become a popular modulation method in high-speed wireless communications. By partitioning a wideband fading channel into flat narrowband channels, OFDM is able to mitigate the detrimental effects of multipath fading using a simple one-tap equalizer. However, in the time domain OFDM signals suffer from large envelope variations, which are often characterized by the peak-to-average ratio (PAR). High PAR signals, like OFDM, require that transmission amplifiers operate at very low power efficiencies to avoid clipping. In this dissertation, we explore the problems associated with transmitted OFDM signals through peak limited channels. A large part of this work deals with analyzing different distortion metrics and determining which metrics are most useful. We find that the signal-to-noise-plus-distortion ratio (SNDR) is one of the most important metrics in assessing distortion in nonlinear channels. As part of this analysis, we compare sample-based SNDR and symbol-based SNDR and find that using the more comprehensive symbol-based metric as the objective in SNDR maximization algorithms leads to only marginal SNDR improvements. The SNDR perspective is also applied to existing PAR-reduction techniques to compare existing schemes and proposed new schemes. Part of this work involves deriving a SNDR maximizing adaptation of the popular PAR-reduction scheme, selected mapping (SLM). We also compare another popular PAR-reduction method, partial transmit sequence (PTS), to SLM through a variety of metrics including SNDR and found that for any given amount of complexity or side information SLM provided better performance. The next major piece of work in this dissertation addresses synchronization and channel estimation in peak-limited channels for OFDM. We build off of existing work that shows that embedded synchronization energy is a more bandwidth efficient means of synchronization than preamble-base methods. With this, we demonstrate a method for generating embedded sequences that have low PAR, and thus minimize the PAR of the combination OFDM symbol/embedded sequence among all embedded sequences. Next, we extend this work to sequences called joint synchronization-pilot sequences (JSPSs) by deriving the symbol-estimate mean squared error (MSE) pilot placements for the JSPSs and by showing how the JSPSs can be used with SLM for blind detection. Finally, the dissertation concludes with a derivation of the SNDR-optimal transmitter/receiver pairs. Using functional analysis, we show that the SNDR-optimal receivers for peak-limited transmitters are not linear. Instead they follow non-linear functions that depend on the noise and signal distributions.

Block codes are one of the most widely used codes to improve reliability of data transmissions. They are used both independently as well as with other codes such as convolutional codes and have found many applications in many areas, ranging from space communications to digital versatile discs (DVD). More recently, powerful codes derived from block and iteratively decoded codes have also been adopted in serveral standards (e.g. DVB-S2). The first part of this thesis deals with the design of computationally efficient soft-decision decoding algorithms for block codes. / A bandwidth-efficient modulation technique called orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been adopted in many international standards to achieve high speed data transmissions over frequency selective fading channels. OFDM signals however, have high amplitude fluctuations. This is known as the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) problem. The second part of this thesis focuses on designing a coding scheme to simultaneously correct errors and reduce the PAPR of OFDM signals. / Soft-decision decoding of block codes provide significant performance gains over hard-decision decoding. However, optimal soft-decision decoding is an NP-hard problem, where the decoding complexity grows exponentially with the code length. This thesis develops two computationally efficient sub-optimal soft-decision decoding algorithms by formulating soft-decision decoding as an optimisation problem. The two algorithms are based on a compact genetic algorithm and a k shortest paths algorithm, respectively. The performance and complexity of these algorithms are investigated and compared with various other known decoding schemes. The results obtained show that the proposed decoding algorithm achieves large performance gains over the known decoding schemes. It is also observed that the proposed algorithms achieve near-optimal performance with manageable complexity. / In addition to these soft-decision decoding algorithms, this thesis also proposes a coding technique and an efficient encoding algorithm for joint error-correction and PAPR reduction of OFDM signals. The proposed coding technique is first expressed as an optimisation problem and a computationally efficient sub-optimal algorithm is then proposed to solve this problem. The PAPR reduction and error-correction performance of the proposed algorithm are studied. The results show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the system performance and also gives PAPR reductions comparable with other known PAPR reduction techniques. / Thesis (PhDTelecommunications)--University of South Australia, 2007.

The efficient use of radio resources is crucial in order for future wireless systems to be able to meet the demand for high speed data communication services. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is an important technology for future wireless systems as it offers numerous advantages over other existing technologies, such as robust performance over multipath fading channels and the ability to achieve high spectral efficiency. Dynamic resource allocation can fully exploit the advantages of OFDM, especially in multiple user systems. In this thesis, we investigate a resource allocation problem in a multiple user, multiple cell OFDM cellular network focusing on downlink communications. (For complete abstract open document)