Digital wireless communications

Developing a new transmission system requires overcoming a number of scientific and economic obstacles. The first limiting factor is the spectrum itself. First of all, we need to determine the transmission frequency and bandwidth required to provide the services envisaged. Once this portion of the spectrum has been identified and reserved, it's up to the standards bodies to specify the technology capable of:

- countering the attenuating effects of the propagation channel,
- complying with transmission constraints in terms of throughput, power or spectral occupancy.

When developing a new transmission system, it is essential to model the propagation environment correctly. Based on this modeling, we are then able to design a transmission system capable of protecting the information sufficiently at the transmitter (coding) to make its propagation robust. At the receiving end, we are then obliged to implement suitable decoding algorithms.
This course will enable you to examine in detail the principles most commonly used in digital wireless communications standards (GSM-EDGE-UMTS, IEEE 802.16x WiMax, IEEE 802.11x WiFi, DVB) to satisfy the criteria set out above. It is divided into 3 parts:

- The first part deals with the characterization of physical transmission channels, including free-space attenuation laws, multipath and fading phenomena.
- The second part is devoted to the presentation of techniques for equalizing the propagation channel
- The final part will be devoted to the presentation of multi-carrier systems used in most high-speed digital communications.

TS210, MA203, TS211

Part One: Propagation channels
I) Channel physicsII) Multipath channel modelingIII) Statistical modelingIV) Error probability and capacity
Part Two: Equalization
I) Linear equalization (ZF, MMSE)II) Non-linear equalization (DFE)III) Maximum likelihood detection
Part Three: Multi-carrier communications techniques
I) Introduction
II) Multi-carrier communications
III) OFDM and its applications
IV) Conclusion and outlook

Digital communications and signal processing

Course handouts, TD and TP topics