Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, School of Education. / Also on film. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, School of Education. / Also on film.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / The performance of coherent and noncoherent RAKE receivers over a fading channel in the presence of pulse-noise interference and additive white Gaussian noise is analyzed. Coherent RAKE receivers require a pilot tone for coherent demodulation. Using a first order phase-lock-loop to recover a pilot tone with additive white Gaussian noise causes phase distortions at the phase-lock-loop output, which produce an irreducible phase noise error floor for soft decision Viterbi decoding. Both coherent and noncoherent RAKE receivers optimized for additive white Gaussian noise perform poorly when pulse-noise interference is present. When soft decision convolutional coding is considered, the performance degrades as the duty cycle of the pulse-noise interference signal decreases. The reverse is true for hard decision Viterbi decoding, since fewer bits experience interference and bit errors with high noise variance cannot dominate the decision statistics. Soft decision RAKE receiver optimized for pulse-noise interference and additive white Gaussian noise performed the best for both the coherent and noncoherent RAKE receivers. This receiver scales the received signal by the inverse of the variance on a bit-by-bit basis to minimize the effect of pulse-noise interference. The efficacy is demonstrated by analytical results, which reveal that this receiver reduces the probability of bit error down to the irreducible phase noise error floor when pulse-noise interference is present. This demonstrates how important it is to design the receiver for the intended operational environment. / Civilian, Department of Defense

This dissertation explores various aspects and potential of optical pulse generation based on active, passive, and hybrid mode-locked quantum dot semiconductor lasers with target applications such as optical interconnect and high speed signal processing. Design guidelines are developed for the single mode operation with suppressed reflection from waveguide discontinuities. The device fabrication procedure is explained, followed by characteristics of FP laser, SOA, and monolithic two-section devices. Short pulse generation from an external cavity mode-locked QD two-section diode laser is studied. High quality, sub-picosecond (960 fs), high peak power (1.2 W) pulse trains are obtained. The sign and magnitude of pulse chirp were measured for the first time. The role of the self-phase modulation and the linewidth enhancement factor in QD mode-locked lasers is addressed. The noise performance of two-section mode-locked lasers and a SOA-based ring laser was investigated. Significant reduction of the timing jitter under hybrid mode-locked operation was achieved owing to more than one order of magnitude reduction of the linewidth in QD gain media. Ultralow phase noise performance (integrated timing jitter of a few fs at a 10 GHz repetition rate) was demonstrated from an actively mode-locked unidirectional ring laser. These results show that quantum dot mode-locked lasers are strong competitors to conventional semiconductor lasers in noise performance. Finally we demonstrated an opto-electronic oscillator (OEO) and coupled opto-electronic oscillators (COEO) which have the potential for both high purity microwave and low noise optical pulse generation. The phase noise of the COEO is measured by the photonic delay line frequency discriminator method. Based on this study we discuss the prospects of the COEO as a low noise optical pulse source.

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / Wide local area networks (WLAN) are increasingly important in meeting the needs of next generation broadband wireless communications systems for both commercial and military applications. Under IEEE 802.11a 5GHz WLAN standard, OFDM was chosen as the modulation scheme for transmission because of its well-known ability to avoid multi-path effects while achieving high data rates. The objective of this thesis is to investigate the performance of the IEEE 802.11a WLAN standard receiver over flat fading Nakagami channels in a worst case, pulse-noise jamming environment, for the different combinations of modulation type (binary and non-binary modulation) and code rate specified by the WLAN standard. Receiver performance with Viterbi soft decision decoding (SDD) will be analyzed for additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) alone and for AWGN plus pulse-noise jamming. Moreover, the performance of the IEEE 802.11a WLAN standard receiver will be examined both in the scenario where perfect side information is considered to be available (optimum receiver) and when it is not (sub-optimum receiver). In the sub-optimum receiver scenario, the receiver performance is examined both when noise-normalization is utilized and when it is not. The receiver performance is severely affected by the pulse-noise jamming environment, especially in the suboptimum receiver scenario. However, the sub-optimum receiver performance is significantly improved when noise-normalization is implemented. / Lieutenant, Hellenic Navy

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