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
   • Introduction of multipath propagation in time domain and frequency domain.
   • Path-loss model
   • Channel models (stochastic models, model parameters)
2. Modulation techniques
   • Higher order modulation schemes (review): BPSK, QPSK, M-PSK, M-FSk, M-QAM
   • Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DS-SS)
   • Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)
3. Diversity to increase robustness against transmission anomalies
   • Frequency/time/space diversity
   • antenna diversity: selection diversity, maximal ratio combining
4. Channel Coding
   • Characterization of error types, and basics of error control coding
   • Code design: trade-off between efficiency, reliability, complexity/delay
   • Block and convolutional codes
   • Viterbi decoding
   • Puncturing
   • Interleaving
5. Power-Bandwidth Trade-Off
   • M-ary Modulation
   • Bandwidth Efficiency
   • System Design Examples
6. Cellular System Design
   • Tele-traffic Engineering, Erlang B&C formulas
   • Frequency re-use
   • Co-channel interference
   • Sectoring
7. Network Coding
   • New communication paradigm
   • Encoding and decoding procedures

Teachers

dr.ir. Gerard Janssen

Physical layer communication; UWB; localization

dr.ir. Jos Weber

Network coding, channel coding, cyber security

Last modified: 2019-12-16