EE 579

EE-579, Wireless and Mobile Communications, extends basic principles of communications systems and their associated performance into the world of wireless and mobile communications. This course has been designed primarily to provide a good understanding of fundamental problems and counter-measure techniques in digital communications over dispersive wireless mobile channels. It starts with a review of material necessary for advanced study in wireless communications: current wireless mobile systems and standards, frequency reuse and the cellular concept, co-channel interference and noise, receiver sensitivity and link budget calculations, coverage, and spectral efficiency and capacity.

Next, various types of propagation modeling are presented, such as large-scale fading, small-scale fading, and multiple scattering (multi-path) phenomena. Examples of Rayleigh, Rician, and Nakagami fading channels are discussed, and level crossing rates and fade durations are determined. This is followed by methods for developing laboratory fading channel simulators for both single- and multiple-paths channel models, including the laboratory simulation of shadowing. Conventional path-loss models in macro-cells such as Okumura-Hata and outdoors micro-cells, COST231-Hata, and Walfish-Ikegami models as well as path loss for indoor micro-cells are then detailed.

The next part of the course covers fundamental limits introduced by co-channel interference, as multiple lognormal interferers are introduced. Specifically, Fenton-Wilkinson, Schwartz and Yeh, Farley’s methods and a numerical comparison are presented. Outage probability evaluation is detailed. Modulation techniques used in wireless mobile applications and associated performance over fading channels are reviewed next, followed by a detailed investigation of diversity and combining techniques.

TDMA and CDMA Cellular systems are presented next. Topics covered here include: Spread spectrum systems including direct sequence, frequency hopping, fading channel applications, RAKE receiver concepts, multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) systems using antenna arrays, space-time coding and BLAST systems. As examples of mobile cellular architectures, TDMA (GSM) and CDMA cellular systems are covered.

Finally, in order to initiate hard or soft handoffs, link quality measurement techniques are discussed. Optimal resource allocation in terms of channel assignment techniques are presented and analyzed.

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