We describe a simplified receiver structure having several receiving antennas (i.e., an adaptive array antenna system) and using time-division-multiplexing (TDM) signal processing. Three simplified receiver structures were investigated for use in the antenna system. To confirm the feasibility of using a TDM receiver, both a TDM receiver and a conventional adaptive array receiver were constructed for testing. In our proposed system, several repetitions of the constant modulus algorithm (CMA) are used to reduce co-channel interference (CCI). The frame format used for both receivers was the same as that of the personal handy phone system in Japan. The laboratory testing was done using a fading simulator to enable measurement of the bit error rate. The results are very promising and show the feasibility of the TDM receiver.

This paper mainly concentrates on recent studies on land mobile propagation, considering new trends of the progress of digital and personal land mobile communications. High speed digital transmission for millimeter-wave indoor communication is of another current interest. Microcellular propagation in urban areas and indoor propagation are major research targets at present days. Multipath propagation characteristics such as delay-profiles becomes more and more important measuring items, and some signal processing methods like MUSIC method have been widely introduced to improve the time resolution against the limit of available radio bandwidth. Path-loss characteristics in mobile propagation are extended to the path-loss prediction and are going to be applied to cellular system design in connection with the design of directional base-station antennas. Another recent topic is an extension of target frequency bands for mobile propagation studies, which are spreading from VHP, UHF and SHF to EHF bands.

A system combining multicarrier modulation and adaptive modulation in which a suitable level of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) is selected for each subcarrier and time-slot, is proposed for high-bit-rate and high-quality digital land mobile communications. The advantages of the system are a mode in which information cannot be transmitted under adverse propagation conditions and a buffer memory to limit a transmission delay time. If the allowable delay time is small, such as in voice and video transmissions, the system tends to have a poor bit error rate (BER) because of the forcible QAM-level selection. Our new selection scheme improves the BER for small transmission delay time. Suitable distribution of the delay time among subcarriers is obtained by using the scheme where the QAM-level of each subcarrier is chosen collectively using the number of data bits stored in memory. Computer simulation of the systems BER performance showed that the system could provide a noticeable BER improvement over frequency-selective fading channels as well as flat Rayleigh fading channels. The QAM-level selection scheme was also effective for a low maximum Doppler frequency and a small memory size. The system could thus attain about 25-fold improvement in BER at Es/N030 dB compared to the multicarrier/16QAM system. It also attained about 60-fold and 3. 5-fold improvement in BER at fd=10Hz compared with the system with multicarrier/16QAM and without the QAM-level selection scheme, respectively.

MTDMA (Multimedia, Multimode TDMA) system has been developed for the 3rd generation mobile communications. An adaptive modulation technique is employed, which select 16 QAM or QPSK modulations fit for the O (Indoor Office)/P (Outdoor to Indoor and Pedestrian) communication environments. The maximum user rate of 4 Mbps is realized. Basic specification is described for O, P and V environments.

This paper gives laboratory as well as the results of field experiment and describes the implementation of a system developed to evaluate and demonstrate multimedia multimode time division multiple access (MTDMA). The equipment has been developed with the radio transmission technology for future public land mobile telecommunication systems (FPLMTS/IMT-2000) in mind. To meet FPLMTS/IMT-2000 requirements the system employs the following techniques: a hybrid multiplex modulation system consisting of quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) and 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM), a high data transmission bit rate of 2 Mbit/sec for QPSK, 4 Mbit/sec for 16QAM, and diversity combining and adaptive equalization technique. For the diversity adaptive equalization technique, we used a decision feedback equalizer (DFE) consisting of one feedback (FB) transversal filter and two feed-forward transversal (FF) filters. The output signals from two branches of space diversity reception antennas are then fed to the two FF filters of the DFE. For middle-speed mobile radio communication for a micro-cellular pedestrian environment, a QPSK modulation system is selected to obtain wide coverage, while for a pico-cellular indoor office environment, the delay spread is small, and a 16QAM modulation system is selected to achieve a high bit rate. The results given here of laboratory and field experiments show the technical feasibility of MTDMA for future public land mobile telecommunication systems.

A slow frequency-hopping/16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (slow-FH/16QAM) system based on time-division-multiple-access (TDMA) is appropriate for third-generation land mobile cellular communications because of its high immunity to interference. The system uses 16QAM for high spectral efficiency and slow-FH and forward-error-correction (FEC) for high-quality transmission. To reduce sensitivity to interference, the system uses an improved decoding scheme based on a minimum Euclidean-distance which is effective when the interference level is dispersed by FH. The bit error rate (BER) of the system due to interference has been evaluated in a previous study, both theoretically and by computer simulation. Although computer-simulated results showed that the system improved the BER, the hardware feasibility was not considered. This paper presents a hardware implementation of the system and the results of experimental transmission using equipment we developed to verify the system and to confirm the BER performance. The laboratory experimental results indicated that the system could provide high-quality transmission over a channel that has frequency-selective fading and co-channel interference. This system provided an Eb/N0 of 9 dB with space diversity and one of 15 dB without it, when BER=10-3 and fd=120 Hz. Field experiments were also conducted in a suburban area of Tokyo to demonstrate the BER performance. The results meant that the system could lower sensitivity to vehicle velocity more than a system without FH and that the BER performance of the system was improved notably against that of a system without FH, especially at low vehicle velocity.

This paper gives field experimental results on 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation/time division multiple access (16QAM/TDMA) and trellis coded 16QAM/TDMA systems for land mobile communications in order to evaluate its capability of achieving large capacity and high quality data transmission. Pilot symbol aided space diversity and symbol timing synchronization based on maximum likelihood (ML) estimation are applied to both 16QAM/TDMA and trellis coded 16QAM/TDMA to improve transmission quality. For the trellis coded 16QAM/TDMA, trellis coding with Viterbi decoding and 2-frame symbol interleaving are further employed. The field experiments were conducted in the Tokyo metropolitan area of Japan. The results show that 16QAM/TDMA and trellis coded 16QAM/TDMA are practical modulation/access schemes for land mobile communication systems.

A narrow-band digital land mobile system has been developed that operates in the frequency bands of 150 and 400 MHz, which are commonly used by transportation-related companies, local government, and public-sector organizations--and are therefore very congested. The number of users that can be accommodated in these bands is almost doubled by reducing the channel separation to 6.25 kHz, about half that of a conventional FM system. A carrier bit rate of 9.6 kbps is achieved by using π/4 shift QPSK modulation with a roll-off factor of 0.2. Laboratory and field testing showed that: (1) Without propagation delay spread, a BER of 10-2 was obtained without using space diversity. (2) With a propagation delay spread of 10 µs, a BER of 610-3 was obtained without space diversity. These measurements confirmed the technical feasibility of this narrow-band system. Its widespread implementation will help mitigate the congestion in private radio systems.