The High Frequency (HF) band lies within 2-30 MHz of the electromagnetic spectrum. In this part of the spectrum, propagation via direct wave, surface wave, and ionospheric refraction mechanisms provides means of communications from line-of-sight to beyond-line-of-sight ranges. The characteristics of ionospheric channel impose fundamental limitations on the performance of HF communication systems. The major impairment is fading which results in random fluctuations in the received signal level and affects the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio. This requires the deployment of powerful diversity techniques to mitigate the degrading effects of fading on the performance. The range of wavelengths in HF band unfortunately restricts the use of spatial diversity (i.e., deployment of multiple antennas) for most practical purposes. This thesis focuses on an alternative method to exploit the spatial dimension of the HF channel. Specifically, we aim to extract distributed spatial diversity through relay-assisted transmission. Towards this main goal, we consider multi-carrier HF communication and investigate the performance of cooperative OFDM over HF channels.

The High Frequency (HF) band lies within 2-30 MHz of the electromagnetic spectrum. In this part of the spectrum, propagation via direct wave, surface wave, and ionospheric refraction mechanisms provides means of communications from line-of-sight to beyond-line-of-sight ranges. The characteristics of ionospheric channel impose fundamental limitations on the performance of HF communication systems. The major impairment is fading which results in random fluctuations in the received signal level and affects the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio. This requires the deployment of powerful diversity techniques to mitigate the degrading effects of fading on the performance. The range of wavelengths in HF band unfortunately restricts the use of spatial diversity (i.e., deployment of multiple antennas) for most practical purposes. This thesis focuses on an alternative method to exploit the spatial dimension of the HF channel. Specifically, we aim to extract distributed spatial diversity through relay-assisted transmission. Towards this main goal, we consider multi-carrier HF communication and investigate the performance of cooperative OFDM over HF channels.

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High Frequency (3-30 MHz) (HF) Ionospheric Channel is used for military, civilian and amateur communications. By using Ionosphere, communication for distances beyond the line of sight is achieved. The main advantage of this type of communication is that it does not to require a satellite to communicate with a point beyond the line of sight. Actually the Ionosphere is used instead of a satellite. To use Ionosphere but not a satellite means independent communication for a country. The disadvantage of HF Ionospheric Communication is that the characteristics of the reflecting media (i.e. channel&rsquo / s transfer function) depends on many variables, e.g. sun spot number, hour of the day, season, solar cycles etc., so that mathematically modeling the channel is very difficult. Since military standards like STANAG 4538, STANAG 4285, STANAG 4415, MIL-STD-188-110A and MIL-STD-188-141A define the required performance of an HF modem in terms of Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), Doppler Spread and Delay Spread according to desired conditions, a new approach to characterize the channel in terms of these three parameters is presented. In this thesis, HF Channel is considered as a system which involves various physical and chemical processes. A new method to characterize the HF channel to be used for modem performance evaluation is presented. In this study, it is aimed to relate modem/channel availability with the magnetic indices, which may be considered as the disturbances to the system. For this purpose the data taken from an HF communication experiment is used to model the channel to be used for modem availability calculations. The aim of the study is to asses the HF Channel Availability under Ionospheric Disturbances. This new technique will be a useful tool for HF Modem operators to select the optimum data rate or modulation method during HF Communication.

In this thesis, various pilot symbol aided channel estimation and tracking methods are investigated and their performances are compared for an OFDM system with packet based communication on HF channel. For the HF channel, Watterson HF channel model is used. The compared methods are least squares (LS) channel estimation, linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) channel estimation, least mean squares (LMS) channel tracking, recursive least squares (RLS) channel tracking, constant position model based Kalman filter channel tracking, and constant velocity model based Kalman filter channel tracking. For LMS and RLS methods some adaptive approaches are also investigated.