ET4358 Fundamentals of wireless communications

When designing a wireless communication system, various aspects related to the physical layer play a role: propagation, modulation, coding, diversity. The main goal of this course is to extend the analytical knowledge obtained in the basic (telecommunication) courses to the synthetic skills of systems engineering and the design of means of digital transmission, used in modern public and business networks. The obtained knowledge and skills have to be demonstrated in a written exam in the format of a system design problem.

The following aspects will be covered in the course:

1. Radio propagation:
- review of radio propagation, link-budget model,
- path-loss and shadow fading,
- multipath propagation:
* time domain: rms-delay spread, signal dispersion, inter-symbol interference,
* frequency domain: frequency selectivity, coherence bandwidth,
- stochastic propagation models.

2. Modern modulation techniques:
- review of basic modulation techniques,
- Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM),
- Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DS-SS),
- Frequency Hopping.

3. Diversity:
- diversity domains: frequency/time/spatial/polarization diversity
- transmit and receive diversity,
- diversity techniques: selection diversity, maximal ratio combining, equal gain combining,
- MIMO (multiple input multiple output), fundamentals, capacity, space-time coding.

4. Channel Coding:
- characterization of error types, and basics of error control coding,
- code design: trade-off between efficiency, reliability, complexity/delay,
- block & convolutional codes,
- puncturing, interleaving,
- Turbo coding.

5. Multiple Access:
- multiplexing: FDMA, TDMA, CDMA,(O)FDMA, ALOHA,
- delay modeling in multiplexing: Little's theorem, review of continuous time Markov chains, M/M/1 system.

6. Cellular System Design:
- key cellular concepts, incl. frequency reuse, sectorisation and interference,
- coverage, capacity, quality trade-off,
- basic coverage planning using a link budget analysis,
- basic capacity planning using Erlang loss models.

The course is prerequisite for the courses on Wireless IoT and Local Area Networks (ET4394) and Mobile Networks (ET4396).

Teachers

Last modified: 2024-03-26