PREMIUM · Power and rate efficient modulation in UHF-SHF multicarrier communications

Final Activity Report Summary - PREMIUM (Power and Rate Efficient Modulation in UHF-SHF Multicarrier Communications)

Modern wireless communication systems intend to deliver services characterized by a demand for high data transmission rates and efficient utilisation of the allocated bandwidth and energy. In conjunction with higher-layer protocols and parameters, the physical communication layer of such applications (determined by the transmission environment and transmitter/receiver design modules) critically affects the overall system performance. Besides the allocated bandwidth for each application within the UHF/SHF range, international standards have adopted recent achievement of digital communications technology such as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) -which is a special case of multicarrier transmission- and space-time block coding (STBC) -which is a special case of multiple-input multiple-output transmission- as the physical-layer components of most of them due to their robustness/resistance against multipath interference (which is a common characteristic of wireless transmissions in the UHF/SHF bands) and diversity gain. However, the capacity potential of such systems is limited by the complexity requirements that contemporary signal processing techniques at the transmitter and receiver ends induce, leading to higher power consumption and lower transmission rates than the theoretically promised ones. This research proposal investigated the potential of targeting multicarrier transmissions in the UHF/SHF bands, in which power and rate efficiency gain is in fact a problem of unlimited practical importance, and studying the development of new techniques that increase the data transmission rate in wireless communications systems. In particular, the project focused on the development of novel signal processing methodologies at both the transmitter and the receiver ends of the communication system, analysed the proposed methodologies both theoretically and through extensive simulation studies, and evaluated them through real-time applications over appropriate software-defined radio testbeds. Such developments lead to a new direction of a variety of promising problems and solutions. The proposed research identified the appropriate parameters to be tuned, determined the relevant optimisation criteria, developed methodologies to obtain practical schemes, and derived a framework for the evaluation of the proposed schemes in real problems of practical interest to demonstrate their quality. The work that was performed in the context of this project offers a significant contribution to the scientific community, since in the problems we studied we provided solutions that both increase the speed of data transmission in wireless systems and reduce the bit/symbol error rate for a given transmission power. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that the validation of our theoretic findings through both computer simulations and real-time test bed experiments increases the importance of the work that we performed in the context of this project.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union