In this thesis several asp ects of space-time pro cessing and equalization for wire-
less communications are treated. We discuss several di?erent metho ds of improv-
ing estimates of space-time channels, such as temp oral parametrization, spatial
parametrization, reduced rank channel estimation, b o otstrap channel estimation,
and joint estimation of an FIR channel and an AR noise mo del. In wireless commu-
nication the signal is often sub ject to intersymb ol interference as well as interfer-
ence from other users.
A wireless communication network can be viewed as a collection of nodes, located in some domain, which
can in turn be transmitters or receivers (depending on the network considered, nodes may be mobile users,
base stations in a cellular network, access points of a WiFi mesh etc.). At a given time, several nodes
transmit simultaneously, each toward its own receiver. Each transmitter–receiver pair requires its own
wireless link. The signal received from the link transmitter may be jammed by the signals received from
the other transmitters. Even in the simplest model where the signal power radiated from a point decays in
an isotropic way with Euclidean distance, the geometry of the locations of the nodes plays a key role since
it determines the signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) at each receiver and hence the possibility of
establishing simultaneously this collection of links at a given bit rate. The interference seen by a receiver is
the sum of the signal powers received from all transmitters, except its own transmitter.
In this book we focus on the basic signal processing that underlies current and
future ultra wideband systems. By looking at signal processing in this way we
hope this text will be useful even as UWB applications mature and change or
regulations regarding ultra wideband systems are modified. The current UWB
field is extremely dynamic, with new techniques and ideas being presented at every
communications and signal-processing conference. The basic signal-processing
techniques presented in this text though will not change for some time to come.
Thus, we have taken a somewhat theoretical approach, which we believe is longer
lasting and more useful to the reader in the long term than an up-to-the-minute
summary that is out of date as soon as it is published.
An acronym for Multiple-In, Multiple-Out, MIMO communication sends the same data as several signals
simultaneously through multiple antennas, while still utilizing a single radio channel. This is a form of
antenna diversity, which uses multiple antennas to improve signal quality and strength of an RF link. The
data is split into multiple data streams at the transmission point and recombined on the receive side by
another MIMO radio configured with the same number of antennas. The receiver is designed to take
into account the slight time difference between receptions of each signal, any additional noise or
interference, and even lost signals.
The use of light to send messages is not new. Fires were used for signaling in
biblical times, smoke signals have been used for thousands of years and flashing
lights have been used to communicate between warships at sea since the days of
Lord Nelson.
The idea of using glass fibre to carry an optical communications signal originated
with Alexander Graham Bell. However this idea had to wait some 80 years for
better glasses and low-cost electronics for it to become useful in practical
situations.
Visible light communications (VLC) is the name given to an optical wireless
communication system that carries information by modulating light in the visible spectrum
(400–700 nm) that is principally used for illumination [1–3]. The communications signal
is encoded on top of the illumination light. Interest in VLC has grown rapidly with the
growth of high power light emitting diodes (LEDs) in the visible spectrum. The
motivation to use the illumination light for communication is to save energy by exploiting
the illumination to carry information and, at the same time, to use technology that is
“green” in comparison to radio frequency (RF) technology, while using the existing
infrastructure of the lighting system.
A wireless ad-hoc network is a wireless network deployed without any infrastructure. In
such a network, there is no access point or wireless router to forward messages among the
computing devices. Instead, these devices depend on the ad-hoc mode of their wireless net‐
work interface cards to communicate with each other. If the nodes are within the transmis‐
sion range of the wireless signal, they can send messages to each other directly. Otherwise,
the nodes in between will forward the messages for them. Thus, each node is both an end
system and a router simultaneously.
Wireless communications, together with its applications and underlying technologies, is
among today’s most active areas of technology development. The very rapid pace of im-
provements in both custom and programmable integrated circuits for signal processing ap-
plications has led to the justfiable view of advanced signal processing as a key enabler of the
aggressively escalating capacity demands of emerging wireless systems. Consequently, there
has been a tremendous and very widespread effort on the part of the research community
to develop novel signal processing techniques that can fulfill this promise.
Digital radios have undergone an astonishing evolution in the last century. Born as a set of simple and
power-hungry electrical and electromechanical devices for low data rate transmission of telegraph data
in the Marconi age, they have transformed, thanks to substantial advances in electronic technology,
into a set of small, reliable and sophisticated integrated devices supporting broadband multimedia
communications. This, however, would not have been possible unless significant progress had been
made in recent decades in the field of signal processing algorithms for baseband and passband signals.
In fact, the core of any modern digital radio consists of a set of algorithms running over programmable
electronic hardware. This book stems from the research and teaching activities of its co-authors in
the field of algorithmic techniques for wireless communications. A huge body of technical literature
has accumulated in the last four decades in this area, and an extensive coverage of all its important
aspects in a single textbook is impossible. For this reason, we have selected a few important topics
and, for ease of reading, organized them into two parts.
The author’s group has developed various chipless RFID tags and reader architectures
at 2.45, 4–8, 24, and 60 GHz. These results were published extensively in the form of
books, book chapters, refereed conference and journal articles, and finally, as patent
applications. However, there is still room for improvement of chipless RFID sys-
tems. In this book, we proposed advanced techniques of chipless RFID systems that
supersede their predecessors in signal processing, tag design, and reader architecture.