Title:
Communication Strategies for Single-User and Multiuser Slow Fading Channels

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Author(s)
Kannan, Arumugam
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Advisor(s)
Barry, John R.
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Supplementary to
Abstract
Technological progress in the field of wireless communications over the past few years has only been matched by the increasing demand for sophisticated services at lower costs. A significant breakthrough was achieved in the design of efficient wireless communication systems with the advent of the diversity concept. Spatial diversity exploits the availability of multiple spatial paths between the transmitter and receiver by placing antenna arrays at either end. In addition to improving the reliability of communication by creating redundant copies of the transmitted information at the receiver, wireless transceivers with multiple antennas exploit the spatial degrees of freedom to multiplex multiple streams of data and achieve significant gains in spectral efficiencies. In this thesis, we design spatial diversity techniques for slow-fading wireless channels. There are two parts to this thesis: In Part I we propose spatial diversity techniques for point-to-point single-user wireless systems, while in Part II we propose multiuser cooperative diversity techniques for multiuser wireless communication systems. In the first part, we propose a set of new wireless communication techniques for multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) channels over Rayleigh slow-fading wireless channels. We introduce MIMO transceivers that achieve high data rates and low error rates using a class of MIMO systems known as layered space-time (ST) architectures, which use low complexity, suboptimal decoders such as successive cancellation (SC) decoders. We propose a set of improved layered space-time architectures and show that it is possible to achieve near-optimal error performance over MIMO channels while requiring just SC decoding at the receiver. We show that these architectures achieve high rate and diversity gains. We also show that some of the proposed layered space-time architectures could find applications in multiple-access communications as low-complexity solutions for achieving near-optimum performance. In the second part of this thesis, we propose novel techniques for cooperative communication between terminals in multiuser wireless communication systems. Cooperative communication is a concept where neighboring terminals share their antennas and signal processing resources to create a virtual transmit array . In addition to transmitting their own information, users in a cooperative communication system listen to transmission from other users and relay this information to the destination, thus creating multiple paths between transmitter and receiver. This form of diversity, known as cooperative diversity, helps improve the overall reliability of all the users in a network. We start with a simple three node multiple-access system where two users are communicating with a common destination. We propose new high-rate cooperation strategies which achieve the full diversity gain offered by the cooperative channel for this simple system. We propose a new framework to address the tradeoff between cooperation and independent transmission over a multiple access channel and determine the conditions under which each idea is better than the other. Finally, we propose a high rate cooperation protocol which achieves the maximum diversity over a multiple access system with an arbitrary number of users and achieves high rates which scale favorably as the number of users increases.
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Date Issued
2007-08-27
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Dissertation
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