A unified approach to wireless system design

Today wireless communication has become an important part of our everyday life. At the heart of any viable wireless technology is the wireless system design. Wireless system design is about finding the right communication algorithms to achieve certain communication goals, under specific radio channels, using certain analog circuits and components, and through implementation on specific digital hardware. Wireless system design is about trade-offs between algorithm complexity, digital hardware cost, and quality of analog circuits and components. Wireless system design is a complex problem. The complexity comes from the fact that it is an attempt to link together different domains of knowledge including radio channel characterization, analog circuit design, and digital hardware implementation, through the process of communication algorithm development.; In this research, we want study the knowledge domains that are relevant to wireless system design. We want to develop a wireless system whose design builds on top of the study of the relevant knowledge domains. Though the process, we also want to develop models, analysis techniques, and communication algorithm that are useful for future wireless system designs.; We start with the radio channel characterization through modeling, simulation, and measurement. Specifically, we have developed a radio propagation simulation tool—BWRSim—for fast and accurate channel simulation and conducted radio power measurements to verify the simulation result. We then perform a detailed channel capacity analysis for frequency-selective Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) channels. The analysis is important from a wireless system design perspective not only because it gives an upper bound on the maximum data rate achievable over certain channel condition but also because the analysis process itself gives valuable system design guidance. Once the theoretical capacity limit is derived and analyzed, we move to the practical side of system design by considering practical design issues of OFDM systems including inter-symbol-interference (ISI), inter-carrier-interference (ICI), frequency offset, and phase noise. Finally, a complete OFDM system including synchronization, channel estimation, an channel coding, is designed, which incorporates a number of novel approaches for timing, frequency offset estimation, phase tracking, channel estimation, and Viterbi decoding. The algorithms for multi-antenna receiver Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) are also designed for the OFDM system.