Advanced noncoherent receivers for mobile fading channels

• Main Author: Bouras, Dimitrios P.
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/7193

The purpose of this thesis, is to derive and evaluate the performance of noncoherent, maximum likelihood receivers with improved performance, for trellis coded PSK and QAM type signals, transmitted over Rician, correlated, fast, frequency non-selective and frequency selective fading channels, with and without diversity. First we derive the optimal, in the maximum likelihood detection sense, receiver structure for frequency non-selective Rician fading channels, employing diversity reception. In order to reduce the complexity of the optimal receiver, we propose and evaluate the performance of suboptimal receiver structures, which show significant performance improvements as compared to conventional techniques. Investigation of the effects on performance of the proposed algorithms, due to imperfect statistical knowledge of the fading channel typical for a real life environment, demonstrates very small sensitivity even to large errors in estimates of channel parameters. Complementing our work in frequency non-selective fading, we derive the optimal, in the maximum likelihood detection sense, receiver, for the correlated, fast, frequency selective Rician fading channel. In the interest of system simplicity, we propose and evaluate reduced complexity versions of the decoding algorithms. The impact of simplifying assumptions in the theoretical derivation, as well as the receiver sensitivity to non ideal channel knowledge, is investigated. The results show significant performance improvements over the fastest known channel equalization technique, accompanied by small sensitivity to imperfections. Last, we derive analytical performance bounds for simplified versions of the optimal diversity receiver, for frequency non-selective, Rician fading channels. The tightness and accuracy of the bounds is verified, through the excellent agreement between computer simulation results, and bound calculation. Performance evaluation demonstrates significant improvements, approaching the effectiveness of coherent detection in AWGN, even with a relatively small diversity order, for Rician, as well as shadowed EHF fading channels. === Applied Science, Faculty of === Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of === Graduate