A complex exponential waveform embedded in white noise can be optimally detected by matched filtering which is equivalent to Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). However, if the input includes multiple complex exponentials, the DFT processing is not optimal. The frequency spectrum of the complex exponential signal with finite observation interval is not impulse. The spectrum includes side-lobes called spectral leakage.Because of the strong side-lobes, weak components can be masked, or side-lobes can be interpreted as independent complex exponentials causing false alarms. The conventional approach is to suppress side-lobes by using an amplitude weighting function, called a window function. However, windows reduce the signal to noise ratio at the output and also widens the main lobe in the spectrum resulting in a loss of frequency resolution. In this thesis, the problem of detection of a complex exponential signal under a secondary complex exponential interference is investigated. Alternative windowing techniques such as spatially variant apodization (SVA), dual apodization (DA) are studied in the context of detection of weak sinusoids under strong sinusoidal interference. The detection performance of SVA and DA is compared with the conventional methods and the optimal detector.

Capacity of CDMA system is limited to interference due to other users. System performance is degraded by near-far problem when undesired users are closer to base station. Beside, the channel parameters could not be estimated perfectly at receiver, refer to as mismatch problem, which would also degrade the system performance. We would like to consider the MAI and near-far interference cancellation by adaptive linear constraint algorithms to implement linear constraint minimum variance (LCMV) approach. To exploit the linearly constrained filtering, the structure of the generalized side-lobe canceller (GSC) has been employed, where the constrained problem is converted into an unconstrained form with fewer parameters. GSC structure is an indirect but simpler implementation of LCMV algorithm. Moreover, it is also known that the constant modulus (CM) criteria has advantage to combat the channel mismatch, and the performance of the adaptive constraint algorithm based on CM criteria will be investigate. In this thesis, we will derive a new GSC-IQRD-RLS algorithm to combat MAI and near-far problems by combining LC-IQRD-RLS algorithm [1][5] and GSC structure [17]; and prove that the GSC and LC structures based IQRD-RLS algorithms are equivalent, which means that the good performance of LC-IQRD-RLS algorithm can be achieved by a simpler GSC structure algorithm. We will also derive a new GSC-CM-IQRD-RLS algorithm to improve the system performance under mismatch problem by combining CM criteria [20] and GSC-IQRD-RLS algorithm.

In recent years, demands on all kinds of wireless communications become heavier due to the developments of new services and devices. At the same time, future wireless networks are expected to provide services with high quality and data rate. A possible solution which can attain these objectives is wireless communication systems that use multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas along with Alamouti¡¦s space-time block code and direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) modulation technique. In such systems, spatial diversity rendered by multiple antennas as well as coding in spatial and time domains are the keys to improve quality of transmission. Many multiuser detection techniques for the space-time block coded CDMA systems have been investigated. In [8], the blind Capon receiver was proposed, which consists of a two-branch filterbank followed by the blind Capon channel estimator. The design of blind Capon receiver is based on linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) criterion, which is known to be sensitive to inaccuracies in the acquisition or tracking of the desired user's timing, referred to as mismatch effect. In other words, the LCMV-based receiver may perform undesirably under mismatch effect. In this thesis, we propose a new blind adaptive MIMO-CDMA receiver based on the linearly constrained constant modulus (LCCM) criterion. This work is motivated by the robustness of LCCM approach to the mismatch effect. To reduce the complexity of receiver design, framework of the generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) associated with the recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm is adopted for implementing the adaptive LCCM MIMO-CDMA filterbank. Based on the GSC-RLS structure, we derive the proposed MIMO CM-GSC-RLS algorithm. For the purpose of comparison, an adaptive implementation of the blind Capon receiver proposed in [8] is also derived, which is referred to as the MIMO MV-GSC-RLS algorithm. We note that the signal model in [8] was constructed under assumption of frequency-flat channels. To obtain a more practical and realistic signal model, in this thesis we extend the system and channel model by including multipath effects in the beginning of our work. In completing this extension, inter-symbol interference (ISI) caused by the special coding scheme of ST-BC will be specifically analyzed. Finally, a full discussion of the multipath signal model will be provided, including necessity of truncating the received signals as well as modifications in the signal model when considering time-varying channels. Via computer simulations, advantages of the proposed scheme will be verified. Compared to the conventional blind Capon receiver, we will show that the performance of the proposed CM-GSC-RLS algorithm is better. This is especially true when mismatch problem is considered in the MIMO-CDMA systems of interest. The proposed scheme show more robustness against the mismatch effects than the conventional blind Capon receiver. Moreover, the benefit resulted by truncating the received signals is also demonstrated, especially for binary phase-shift-keying (BPSK) modulated source symbol. Finally, simulations considering time-varying channels are provided to reveal that our proposed scheme can adapt itself to the time-varying environments appropriately.

In this thesis, we present a new hybrid pre-coded direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) system framework that use the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas along with Alamouti¡¦s space-time block code (ST-BC). In the transmitter, the idea of hybrid pre-coded is exploited. It not only used to counteract the inter-symbol interference (ISI) introduced by the channel fading duo to multipath propagation but also very useful for exacting the phase of channel by appropriate design, which is not adopted in the conventional blind receiver. Under this structure, we propose a new blind adaptive MIMO-CDMA receiver based on the linearly constrained constant modulus (LCCM) criterion. To reduce the complexity of receiver design, framework of the generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) associated with the recursive least square (RLS) algorithm is adopted for implementing the LCCM MIMO-CDMA receiver, and use gradient method to track the desired user¡¦s amplitude, simultaneously. Via computer simulations, advantages of the proposed scheme will be verified. Compared to the conventional blind Capon receiver, we will show that the performance of the proposed scheme is more robust against inaccuracies in the acquisition of the desired user¡¦s timing.

In this dissertation, multicarrier schemes are reviewed within the framework of Gabor Systems. Their fundamental elements; what to transmit, i.e., symbols, how to transmit, i.e., filters or pulse shape, and where/when to transmit, i.e., lattices are investigated extensively. The relations between different types of multicarrier schemes are discussed. Within the framework of Gabor systems, a new windowing approach, edge windowing, is developed to address the out-of-band (OOB) radiation problem of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based multicarrier schemes. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time, the diversity on the range of the users is exploited to suppress the sidelobes of OFDM. In addition to that, the concept of using different filters in OFDM structure is proposed. Besides the improvement on the OOB radiation performance of OFDM via edge windowing, conventional lattice structure of OFDM frame is enhanced considering the diversity in the network. The lattice structure of an OFDM frame is designed based on the statistical characteristics of the range of the users and the mobility. The concept of channel-aware frame structure is developed, which allows more efficient and reliable transmission. In addition to the aforementioned improvements on OFDM, interference issues in uncoordinated networks are addressed in this dissertation considering different multicarrier schemes. It is stressed that the interference from other links in the network sharing the same spectrum might degrade the link performance between the devices in an uncoordinated network, significantly. Considering the degradation due to other-user interference, the concept of partially overlapping tones (POT) is proposed. With the concept of partially overlapping tones, the interference energy observed at the victim receiver is mitigated via an intentional frequency offset between the links. The usefulness of intentional frequency offset to combat with the asynchronous nature of other-user interference without any timing constraint between interfering signals is emphasized. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time, the efficacy of non-orthogonal schemes are shown along with POT to address the other-user interference, which relies on the fact that self-interference problem is easier than other-user interference problem in an uncoordinated network. In the last part of this dissertation, required number of equalizer taps for multicarrier schemes is investigated to address the potential self-interference problems (e.g. due to the non-orthogonal multicarrier schemes with the concept of POT). Composite impact of transmit pulse shape, communication medium, and receive filter on the characteristics of the interference among the symbols in time and frequency is analyzed. It is emphasized that while taking less number of taps into account for the channel estimation causes lack of description of the composite effect, using more number of taps folds the noise into the estimated channel. The number of interfering symbols and their locations are obtained in both time and frequency for a given multicarrier scheme and signal-to-noise ratio. It is shown that correct number of taps yields not only improvement on BER performance but also less complex equalizer structures in practice.

The small target detection in High Frequency Surface Wave Radar is limited by the presence of various clutter and interference. Several novel signal processing techniques are developed to improve the system detection performance. As an external interference due to local lightning, impulsive noise increases the broadband noise level and then precludes the targets from detection. A new excision approach is proposed with modified linear predictions as the reconstruction solution. The system performance is further improved by de-noising the estimated covariance matrix through signal property mapping method. The existence of non-stationary sea clutter and ionospheric clutter can result in excessive false alarm rate through the high sidelobe level in adaptive beamforming. The optimum threshold discrete quadratic inequality constraints method is proposed to guarantee the sidelobe-controlling problem consistently feasible and optimal. This constrained optimization problem can be formulated into a second order cone problem with efficient mathematical solution. Both simulation and experimental results validate the improved performance and feasibility of our method. Based on the special noise characteristics of High Frequency radar, an adaptive switching Constant False Alarm Rate detector is proposed for targets detection in the beamformed range-Doppler map. The switching rule and adaptive footprint are applied to provide the optimum background noise estimation. For this new method about 14% probability of detection improvement has been verified by experimental data, and meanwhile the false alarm rate is reduced significantly compared to the original CFAR. The conventional Doppler processing has difficulty to recognize a target if its frequency is close to a Bragg line. One detector is proposed to solve this co-located co-channel resolvability problem under the assumption that target/clutter have different phase modulation. Moreover with the pre-whitening processing, the Reversible Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo method can provide target number and Direction-of-Arrival estimation with lower detection threshold compared to beamforming and subspace methods. RJMCMC is able to convergent to the optimal resolution for a data set that is small compared with information theoretic criteria.

Constantly increasing demand for wireless communications in various applications has always led to new ways of modulating the radio frequency (RF) carrier signal by advancing waveform structure throughout generations. Although communication data rates are limited by the theoretical capacity, specific signaling designs for the signal that experiences natural and artificial effects in the transmission medium such as multipath fading channel, hardware impairments and multiuser environment promised better solutions in providing improved wireless access to various type of users and networks. Besides communication capacity, broadcasting nature of radio signals poses the information security as another main concern in wireless communications. In this dissertation, new advanced methods for improving signal statistics in multiple domains are studied. Instead of focusing on a single aspect, the waveform design approaches studied in this dissertation tackle with improving the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based signaling in multiple perspectives such as out-of-band (OOB) emission reduction, peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) reduction, and secure transmission with minimum or no eect at the receiver side. Various concepts are coherently exploited while achieving aforementioned goals with minimal cost such as unexplored spaces in the signal space like (CP), guard band, multipath fading; multivariate nature of the multicarrier signals; time spreading and location uniqueness of the wireless channels. The proposed techniques are analyzed theoretically and performance results are presented including related previous works in the literature. It is worth noting that the methods presented in the dissertation can be easily applicable to conventional OFDM systems thanks to having no or minimal change in the receiver structure.

This thesis addresses radiation pattern synthesis problems for small linear periodic phased arrays (with array elements less then 10). Due to the small array size conventional pattern synthesis techniques fail to produce the required results. In the case of practical small arrays, mutual coupling and element pattern asymmetric effect degrade the array radiation performance. The main performance metrics considered in this thesis include side lobe level (SLL), gain, halfpower beamwidth (HPBW) and mainbeam scan direction. The conventional pattern synthesis approaches result in sub optimal gain, SLL and HPBW due to the limited number of elements and the mutual coupling involved. In case of difference pattern synthesis these factors resulted in lower difference pattern slope, degraded SLL and difference peak asymmetry. The sum and difference patterns are used in monopulse arrays and a simplified feed that could produce both patterns with acceptable radiation properties is of interest and has been examined (chapter 5). A conventional technique is applied to small arrays to synthesise a sector beam and there is limited control over the radiation pattern. It is shown that the mutual coupling has significant effect on the array radiation pattern and mitigation is necessary for optimum performance (chapter 6). Furthermore, wideband phased arrays may have a natural limitation of the HPBW in low gain applications and minimisation of the variation becomes important. Also the SLL variations for wideband antenna arrays in the presence of mutual coupling considerably degrade the radiation pattern. The mutual coupling degrades significantly the radiation pattern performance in case of small scanning wideband arrays (chapter 7). It is the primary goal of this thesis to develop an optimisation scheme thatis applied in the above scenarios (chapters 3 & 4). The only degree of freedom assumed is the array excitation. Optimised amplitude and phase for each element in the array are determined by the proposed scheme, concurrently. The deterministic optimisation techniques reported in the literature for the pattern synthesis may involve complicated problem modelling. The heuristic opti-misation techniques generally are computationally expensive. The proposedIntelligent z-space Boundary Condition-Particle Swarm Optimiser (IzBC-PSO)is based on a heuristic algorithm. This scheme can be applied to a wider rangeof problems without significant modifications and requires fewer computationscompared to the competing techniques.In order to verify the performance of IzBC-PSO antenna array measure-ments were performed in the receiving mode only using the online and offlinedigital beamforming setups described in chapter 8. The measurement resultsshow that the proposed scheme may be successfully applied with both onlineand offline digital beamformers for a practical small array (chapter 8).

<p> This thesis addresses the design of fractionally-spaced equalizers for a digital communication system which is susceptible to Adjacent Channel Interference (ACI). ACI can render an otherwise well designed system prone to excess bit errors. Algorithms for a trained adaptive FIR linear fractionally-spaced equalizer (FSE) with explicit sidelobe control are developed in order to provide robustness to ACI. The explicit sidelobe control is achieved by imposing a quadratic inequality constraint on the frequency response of the equalizer at a discrete set of frequency points in the sidelobe region.</p> <p> Algorithms are developed for both block adaptive and symbol-by-symbol adaptive modes. These algorithms use interior point optimization techniques to find the optimal equalizer coefficients. In the block adaptive mode, the problem is reformulated as a Second Order Cone Program (SOCP). In the symbol-by-symbol adaptive mode, the philosophy of the barrier approach to interior point methods is adopted. The concept of a central path and the Method of Analytic Centers (MAC) are used to develop two practically implementable algorithms, namely IPM2 and SBM, for performing symbol-by-symbol adaptive, fractionally-spaced equalization, with multiple quadratic inequality constraints.</p> <p> The performance of the proposed algorithms is compared to that of the Wiener filter, and the standard RLS algorithm with explicit diagonal loading. In the computer simulations, the proposed algorithms perform better in the sense that they provide the desired robustness when the communication model is prone to intermittent interferers in the sidelobe region of the frequency response of the FSE. Although the proposed algorithms have a moderately higher computational cost, their insensitivity to the deleterious effects of ACI make them an attractive choice in certain applications.</p> / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Collaborative Beamforming (CB) has been introduced in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) context as a long-distance and power-efficient communication scheme. One challenge for CB is the randomness of sensor node locations where different network realizations result in different CB beampatterns. First, we study the effect of sensor node spatial distribution on the CB beampattern. The characteristics of the CB beampattern are derived for circular Gaussian distributed sensor nodes and compared with the case of uniform distributed sensor nodes. It is shown that the mainlobe behavior of the CB beampattern is essentially deterministic. This suggests that the average beampattern characteristics are suitable for describing the mainlobe of a sample beampattern. However, the CB beampattern sidelobes are random and highly depends on the particular sensor node locations. Second, we introduce the multi-link CB and address the problem of random sidelobes where high level sidelobes can cause unacceptable interference to unintended Base Stations or Access Points (BSs/APs). Centralized sidelobe control techniques are impractical for distributed sensor nodes because of the associated communication overhead for each sensor node. Therefore, we propose a node selection scheme as an alternative to the centralized sidelobe control which aims at minimizing the interference at unintended BSs/APs. Our algorithm is based on the use of the inherent randomness of the channels and a low feedback that approves/rejects tested random node combinations. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed in terms of the average number of trials and the achievable interference suppression and transmission rate. Finally, we study CB with power control aiming at prolonging the lifetime of a cluster of sensor nodes in the WSN. The energy available at different sensor nodes may not be the same since different sensor nodes may perform different tasks and not equally frequently. CB with power control can be used to balance the individual sensor nodes' lifetimes. Thus, we propose a distributed algorithm for CB with power control that is based on the Residual Energy Information (REI) at each sensor node while achieving the required average SNR at the BS/AP. The effectiveness of the proposed CB with power control is illustrated by simulations. / Communications