This thesis presents a new design process in which design specifications and task distribution are determined from a parallel multi user prospective. Using this method, projects are more easily decomposed into tasks that can be performed concurrently, thus decreasing the design time. Also, a framework is provided to determine the correct distribution of available talent and stakeholders that can be utilized on a given project. The research suggests that by involving the necessary stakeholders in a multi user setting, changes can be made quickly and without additional approval wait time. By including individuals from the various areas of required talent, persons of expertise will be able to work together in a mode of shared design rather than an iterative design process. Decreasing iterations as well as reducing wait time for approval will reduce the overall design time significantly. This method has been tested and validated utilizing controlled tests simulating real life situations of much larger scale. The validation results show that the new method does in fact improve design time and overall achievement of initial design goals

The disconnect between the way CAD and analysis applications handle model geometry has long been a hindrance to engineering design. Current industry practices often utilize outdated forms of geometry transfer between these different engineering software applications such as neutral file formats and direct translations. Not only to these current practices slow the engineering design process but they also hinder the integration of design and analysis programs.This thesis proposes a new, multi-user, integrated design-analysis architecture which allows auxiliary functions such as analysis and computer-aided manufacturing to be better connected with the computer-aided design. It is hypothesized that this new architecture will reduce the time of design-analysis iterations and create more parallelization between CAD and auxiliary programs. A prototype of the proposed architecture was constructed and then tested to evaluate the hypotheses, from which it was discovered that the proposed architecture does indeed reduce the time of iterations in the design-analysis cycle and allows for the parallelization of some design and analysis tasks.

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The management of online learning environments so that they are effective and efficient presents a significant challenge for institutions and lecturers due to the complexity of requirements in the learning and teaching domain. The use of 3D Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) for education introduces a novel set of management challenges. MUVEs were designed to cater for entertainment and commercial needs and as such do not intrinsically support managed learning. When MUVEs are used for educational purposes, forming 3D Multi User Learning Environments (MULEs), user support for learning management becomes an important factor. This thesis highlights the importance of managed learning in MULEs. It proposes a coordinated approach which accommodates the existing education institutional infrastructure. The research has focused on two very widely used and closely compatible MUVEs, Second Life (SL) and OpenSim. The thesis presents system and user studies that have been carried out on these selected MUVEs. The findings reveal the challenges that academics and students can experience if they do not have sufficient knowhow to manage learning activities in SL/OpenSim. User guidance and training tools were then developed for supporting learning management strategies in the context of SL/OpenSim and demonstrated in exemplar use-case scenarios. The user support models and tools which were developed have been extensively evaluated for their usability and educational value using diverse participant groups. The results validate the efficacy of these contributions, defending the research thesis. These contributions can be used in future research on managing MUVE supported education.

Evolution of wireless services enabled the development of the advanced applications and shifted the paradigms of research in this field from voice to data centric. Such services are spreading like wildfire between users and hence, increasing the demand for large bandwidth. However, the frequency spectrum that is suitable for wireless mobile communications is already assigned to particular services from 400 MHz to several GHz. Also, allocating a large chunk of band continuously from the same part of the spectrum may not be possible due to spectral crowd. Therefore, meeting the demand for high data rate requiring wireless services within the accessible spectrum range becomes a challenging problem. The spectrum allocation policies are discussed by regulatory authorities and academia, and the idea of spectrum sharing systems are addressed as a solution. For instance, heterogeneous networks (HetNets) increase the number of available resources and improve the spectrum accessing capabilities of the wireless communication systems. To achieve this, HetNet nodes are deployed within the coverage of the macrocell regions. Thus, spectral efficiency is boosted via spatial reuse of the same spectral resources. On the contrary, HetNets preclude to fully exploit the resources because of serious interference problems between macrocell and HetNet nodes. Thus, wireless networks of the future will observe interference from even a larger number of sources. Due to co-channel HetNet deployment and denser frequency reuse, interference cancellation is expected to have significant importance for future wireless communication systems. The occupied resources can also be reused as a solution by conducting advanced signal processing algorithms at the receiver to increase the spectral efficiency. While doing so, the proposed approaches are expected to be easily integrated with the existing complementary approaches to improve the capacity further. Besides, new deployment strategies that allow spectrum access for non-licensed users to achieve larger bandwidth become important to increase the spectral efficiency of the HetNets. Within the scope of the dissertation, new solutions are developed for the aforementioned problems of the next-generation wireless communication systems. First, an interference cancellation receiver that exploits the unique characteristics of current waveforms is developed in Chapter 2. Also the unknown model of interference is converted to a known model and new algorithms are proposed to recover the desired signal. Then, another perspective is brought into the subject by transforming the interference problem to an interference advantage in Chapter 3. The idea of co-existence of different types of signals are analyzed to bring another degree of freedom as a solution. The proposed approaches are integrated to the existing complementary approaches, such as interference coordination and power control, to improve the capacity further. Finally, a cooperation mechanism is suggested to facilitate the transmission of signal which has a large bandwidth by integrating the idle bands in Chapter 4. By this way, geo-spatially idle bands within the coverage area are utilized and spectral efficiency is increased.

Employment of the multiple-antenna transmitters/receivers in communication systems is known as a promising solution to provide high-data-rate wireless links. In the multi-user environments, the problems of signaling and fairness for multi-antenna systems have emerged as challenging problems. This dissertation deals with these problems in several multi-antenna multi-user scenarios. In part one, a simple signaling method for the multi-antenna broadcast channels is proposed. This method reduces the MIMO broadcast system to a set of parallel channels. The proposed scheme has several desirable features in terms of: (i) accommodating users with different number of receive antennas, (ii) exploiting multi-user diversity, and (iii) requiring low feedback rate. The simulation results and analytical evaluations indicate that the achieved sum-rate is close to the sum-capacity of the underlying broadcast channel. In part two, for multiple-antenna systems with two transmitters and two receivers, a new non-cooperative scenario of data communication is studied in which each receiver receives data from both transmitters. For such a scenario, a signaling scheme is proposed which decomposes the system into two broadcast or two multi-access sub-channels. Using the decomposition scheme, it is shown that this signaling scenario outperforms the other known non-cooperative schemes in terms of the achievable multiplexing gain. In particular for some special cases, the achieved multiplexing gain is the same as the multiplexing gain of the system, where the full cooperation is provided between the transmitters and/or between the receivers. Part three investigates the problem of fairness for a class of systems for which a subset of the capacity region, which includes the sum-capacity facets, forms a polymatroid structure. The main purpose is to find a point on the sum-capacity facet which satisfies a notion of fairness among active users. This problem is addressed in the cases where the complexity of achieving interior points is not feasible, and where the complexity of achieving interior points is feasible. In part four, $K$-user memoryless interference channels are considered; where each receiver sequentially decodes the data of a subset of transmitters before it decodes the data of the designated transmitter. A greedy algorithm is developed to find the users which are decoded at each receiver and the corresponding decoding order such that the minimum rate of the users is maximized. It is proven that the proposed algorithm is optimal. The results of the parts three and four are presented for general channels which include the multiple-antenna systems as special cases.