The study of the spatial aspects of multipath in wireless communications environments
is an increasingly important addition to the study of the temporal aspects
in the search for ways to increase the utilization of the available wireless channel
capacity. Traditionally, multipath has been viewed as an encumbrance in wireless
communications, two of the major impairments being signal fading and intersymbol
interference. However, recently the potential advantages of the diversity offered by
multipath rich environments in multiuser communications have been recognised.
Space time coding, for example, is a recent technique which relies on a rich scattering
environment to create many practically uncorrelated signal transmission
channels. Most often, statistical models have been used to describe the multipath
environments in such applications. This approach has met with reasonable success
but is limited when the statistical nature of a field is not easily determined or is
not readily described by a known distribution.¶
Our primary aim in this thesis is to probe further into the nature of multipath
environments in order to gain a greater understanding of their characteristics and
diversity potential. We highlight the shortcomings of beamforming in a multipath
multiuser access environment. We show that the ability of a beamformer to resolve
two or more signals in angle directly limits its achievable capacity.¶
We test the probity of multipath as a source of spatial diversity, the limiting
case of which is co-located users. We introduce the concept of separability to define
the fundamental limits of a receiver to extract the signal of a desired user from
interfering users signals and noise. We consider the separability performances of
the minimum mean square error (MMSE), decorrelating (DEC) and matched filter
(MF) detectors as we bring the positions of a desired and an interfering user closer
together. We show that both the MMSE and DEC detectors are able to achieve
acceptable levels of separability with the users as close as λ/10.¶
In seeking a better understanding of the nature of multipath fields themselves,
we take two approaches. In the first we take a path oriented approach. The
effects on the variation of the field power of the relative values of parameters such
as amplitude and propagation direction are considered for a two path field. The
results are applied to a theoretical analysis of the behaviour of linear detectors
in multipath fields. This approach is insightful for fields with small numbers of
multipaths, but quickly becomes mathematically complex.¶
In a more general approach, we take a field oriented view, seeking to quantify
the complexity of arbitrary fields. We find that a multipath field has an intrinsic
dimensionality of (πe)R/λ≈8.54R/λ, for a field in a two dimensional circular region, increasing only linearly with the radius R of the region. This result implies that there is no such thing as an arbitrarily complicated multipath field. That is, a field generated by any number of nearfield and farfield, specular and diffuse
multipath reflections is no more complicated than a field generated by a limited
number of plane waves. As such, there are limits on how rich multipath can
be. This result has significant implications including means: i) to determine a
parsimonious parameterization for arbitrary multipath fields and ii) of synthesizing
arbitrary multipath fields with arbitrarily located nearfield or farfield, spatially
discrete or continuous sources. The theoretical results are corroborated by examples
of multipath field analysis and synthesis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/216771 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Jones, Haley M., Haley.Jones@anu.edu.au |
| Publisher | The Australian National University. Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.anu.edu.au/legal/copyrit.html), Copyright Haley M. Jones |
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