Wavelet based design of digital multichannel communications systems

The huge penetration of the personal communications systems in the market is constantly presenting new challenges to the research, aimed at satisfying people's needs and requirements for effective communication systems. At present, the cellular telephone network is perhaps the most evident example of communication system that has had a great impact on the lives of ordinary people and, at the same time, is the subject of interest of many researchers both at academic and industrial level. For the future, one of the main challenges in telecommunications will be the provision of ubiquitous broadband tetherless integrated services to mobile users. Such a pretentious goal cannot be achieved without a continuous research facing such problems as service quality, complete mobility support, and affordable complexity that are still open problems. However, present telecommunication problems are not only a matter of implementation or development of new services, exploiting a totally assessed doctrine. In order to respond to the mobility of the users personal communication systems have to deal with the wireless communication channel whereby mobility and non-stationarity of the propagation conditions require a stochastic description of the channel parameters. While this fact can be viewed as strong limitation to the development of a solid theory whose validity can be assesed in practice, on the other hand allows for an investigation and study of novel communication schemes, sometimes encompassing basic aspects of digital communications. This thesis, is the result of a research work that has investigated one of the basic building block of every communication systems, the modulation scheme, and the design of the pulse shape carrying the digital information. We have studied the design of multichannel communication scheme exploiting the mathematical theory of wavelets. Such a theory, developed recently, has had a great impact in many fields of engineering and of other scientific disciplines. In particular, wavelet theory has become very popular in the signal processing area; in fact it is a flexible toolbox for signal analysis allowing effective representation of signals for features extraction purposes. The main features that make wavelet waveforms suitable to be used as shaping pulses for modulation are their substantial compact support both in the time and frequency domains, and the fact that they are ISI-free pulses over frequency flat channels. The study presented in this thesis is focused on application of wavelet theory to design high-efficiency multichannel communication schemes and to the performance evaluation over linear and non-linear channels. We present a general method to design wavelet based multichannel communication schemes that we denoted Wavelet Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (WOFDM). We show that such schemes, having a largerspectral efficiency for a small number of channels, are a valid alternative to the classical OFDM. Potential advantage of wavelet modulation are shown presenting other applications examined in this thesis: a joint use of WOFDM and Trellis Coded Modulation to shape the power spectrum in order to match a frequency selective channel and minimize distortion, and application to spread spectrum modulation. Particular attention has been devoted to the timing recovery problem in multichannel communication schemes, exploiting the timing information of the different subchannels to improve the error variance in estimation of the sampling instant leading to a reduction of the adjacent channels interference.