This thesis concerns the effect of phase noise (PHN) on multi-carrier systems such as OFDM and the detection of multi-carrier symbols affected by PHN. It is known that PHN causes mixing between sub-carriers resulting in inter-carrier interference (ICI) and rotates symbols on every sub-carrier by a certain angle called the common phase error (CPE). We explore how these two effects arise and show that these two effects are coupled to each other. We also note that higher order M-QAM constellations like 64-QAM are more sensitive to CPE than smaller constellations like 4-QAM. Based on our observations on CPE, we propose a blind CPE estimation algorithm. We then address the issue of ICI and propose a turbo receiver design to mitigate it.

This thesis concerns the effect of phase noise (PHN) on multi-carrier systems such as OFDM and the detection of multi-carrier symbols affected by PHN. It is known that PHN causes mixing between sub-carriers resulting in inter-carrier interference (ICI) and rotates symbols on every sub-carrier by a certain angle called the common phase error (CPE). We explore how these two effects arise and show that these two effects are coupled to each other. We also note that higher order M-QAM constellations like 64-QAM are more sensitive to CPE than smaller constellations like 4-QAM. Based on our observations on CPE, we propose a blind CPE estimation algorithm. We then address the issue of ICI and propose a turbo receiver design to mitigate it.

Multi-carrier systems suffer from several impairments, and communication system engineers use powerful signal processing tools to combat these impairments and keep up with the capacity/rate demands. Compressed sensing (CS) is one such tool that allows recovering any sparse signal, requiring only a few measurements in a domain that is incoherent with the domain of sparsity. Almost all signals of interest have some degree of sparsity, and in this work we utilize the sparsity of impairments in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and its variants (i.e., orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) and single-carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-FDMA)) to combat them using CS. We start with the problem of peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction in OFDM. OFDM signals suffer from high PAPR and clipping is the simplest PAPR reduction scheme. However, clipping introduces inband distortions that result in compromised performance and hence needs to be mitigated at the receiver. Due to the high PAPR nature of the OFDM signal, only a few instances are clipped, these clipping distortions can be recovered at the receiver by employing CS. We then extend the proposed clipping recovery scheme to an interleaved OFDMA system. Interleaved OFDMA presents a special structure that result in only self-inflicted clipping distortions. In this work, we prove that distortions do not spread over multiple users (while utilizing interleaved carrier assignment in OFDMA) and construct a CS system that recovers the clipping distortions on each user. Finally, we address the problem of narrowband interference (NBI) in SC-FDMA. Unlike OFDM and OFDMA systems, SC-FDMA does not suffer from high PAPR, but (as the data is encoded in time domain) is seriously vulnerable to information loss owing to NBI. Utilizing the sparse nature of NBI (in frequency domain) we combat its effect on SC-FDMA system by CS recovery.

The ever-increasing demand for private and sensitive data transmission over wireless networks has made security a crucial concern in the current and future large-scale, dynamic, and heterogeneous wireless communication systems. To address this challenge, wireless researchers have tried hard to continuously analyze the jamming threats and come up with improved countermeausres. In this research, we have analyzed the jamming-vulnerabilities of the leading multi-carrier communication systems, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Single-Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA). In order to lay the necessary theoretical groundwork, first we derived the analytical BER expressions for BPSK/QPSK and analytical upper and lower bounds for 16-QAM for OFDMA and SC-FDMA using Pilot Symbol Assisted Channel Estimation (PSACE) techniques in Rayleigh slow-fading channel that takes into account channel estimation error as well as pilot-jamming effect. From there we advanced to propose more novel attacks on the Cyclic Prefix (CP) of SC-FDMA. The associated countermeasures developed prove to be very effective to restore the system. We are first to consider the effect of frequency-selectivity and fading correlation of channel on the achievable rates of the legitimate system under pilot-spoofing attack. With respect to jamming mitigation techniques, our approaches are more focused on Anti-Jamming (AJ) techniques rather than Low Probability of Intercept (LPI) methods. The Channel State Information (CSI) of the two transceivers and the CSI between the jammer and the target play critical roles in ensuring the effectiveness of jamming and nulling attacks. Although current literature is rich with different channel estimation techniques between two legitimate transceivers, it does not have much to offer in the area of channel estimation from jammer's perspective. In this dissertation, we have proposed novel, computationally simple, deterministic, and optimal blind channel estimation techniques for PSK-OFDM as well as QAM-OFDM that estimate the jammer channel to the target precisely in high Signal-to-Noise (SNR) environment from a single OFDM symbol and thus perform well in mobile radio channel. We have also presented the feasibility analysis of estimating transceiver channel from jammer's perspective at the transmitter as well as receiver side of the underlying OFDM system. / Ph. D. / Susceptibility to interferences is one of the major inherent vulnerabilities of open and pervasive wireless communications systems. The recent trends to more and more decentralized and ad-hoc communication systems that allow various types of network mobile terminals to join and leave simply add to this susceptibility. As these networks continue to flourish worldwide, the issues of privacy and security in wireless communication networks have become a major research problem. The increasingly severe hostile environments with advanced jamming threats has prompted the corresponding advancement in jamming detection and mitigation techniques. This dissertation has analyzed the jamming-vulnerabilities of the leading multi-carrier communication systems of the modern world. We have designed some novel jamming attacks and the corresponding countermeasures. The performance of these novel more-effective techniques are compared with their less-effective conventional counterparts. The information of the channel between the legitimate transmitter-receiver pair and between the jammer and the target play critical roles in ensuring the effectiveness of these smart jamming attacks. Although current literature is rich with different channel estimation techniques between the legitimate pair, it does not have much to offer in the area of channel estimation from jammer’s perspective. In this dissertation, we have proposed novel channel estimation techniques from jammer’s perspective.

Multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) techniques have been proposed to meet the needs for higher data rates and lower delays in future wireless communication systems. The downlink capacity of multiuser MIMO systems is achieved when the system transmits to several users simultaneously. Frequently, many more users request service than the transmitter can simultaneously support. Thus, the transmitter requires a scheduling algorithm for the users, which must balance the goals of increasing throughput, reducing multiuser interference, lowering delays, ensuring fairness and quality of service (QoS), etc. In this thesis, we investigate the application of genetic algorithms (GAs) to perform scheduling in multiuser MIMO systems. GAs are a fast, suboptimal, low-complexity method of solving optimization problems, such as the maximization of a scheduling metric, and can handle arbitrary functions and QoS constraints. We first examine a system that transmits using capacity-achieving dirty paper coding (DPC). Our proposed GA structure both selects users and determines their encoding order for DPC, which affects the rates they receive. Our GA can also schedule users independently on different carriers of a multi-carrier system. We demonstrate that the GA performance is close to that of an optimal exhaustive search, but at a greatly reduced complexity. We further show that the GA convergence time can be significantly reduced by tuning the values of its parameters. While DPC is capacity-achieving, it is also very complex. Thus, we also investigate GA scheduling with two linear precoding schemes, block diagonalization and successive zero-forcing. We compare the complexity and performance of the GA with "greedy" scheduling algorithms, and find the GA is more complex, but performs better at higher signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and smaller user pool sizes. Both algorithms are near-optimal, yet much less complex than an exhaustive search. We also propose hybrid greedy-genetic algorithms to gain benefits from both types of algorithms. Lastly, we propose an improved method of optimizing the transmit covariance matrices for successive zero-forcing. Our algorithm significantly improves upon the performance of the existing method at medium to high SNRs, and, unlike the existing method, can maximize a weighted sum rate, which is important for fairness and QoS considerations. / Communications

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