The detection performance of coherent OFDM receivers significantly depends on the accuracy of channel estimation. The accuracy of channel estimation can be improved by properly post-processing the channel estimate using a so-called channel estimation filter (CEF). Minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) filter is known optimum as the CEF, but it may not be practical due to its implementation complexity. We consider the use of a reduced-complexity CEF whose tap coefficient is real-valued and symmetrically weighted (RSW). The optimum RSW CEF is analytically designed using the SNR and multi-path intensity profile of the channel. For further improvement, we also propose a method to adapt the coefficient of the RSW CEF to the channel condition. Numerical results show that the proposed RSW CEF can provide channel estimation performance comparable to that of linear MMSE filter, while significantly reducing the computational complexity. In addition, the proposed RSW CEF can provide performance robust to unknown timing offset with a fractional dB loss compared to the optimum one.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems can realize large spectral efficiency and high performance communication links. For wideband transmissions, the combination of MIMO systems with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has recently attracted a lot of attention and it is well known as MIMO-OFDM. In MIMO-OFDM systems, the overlapped signals over each subcarrier need to be separated by the receiver. For fading coefficients based receivers, the performance of the receiver depends largely on the accuracy of the estimated channel. Especially, when the channel varies with time, accurate channel tracking is needed. Conventional optimized channel tracking has large computational complexity because large matrix inverse computation is required. In order to reduce the complexity, a simplified channel tracking scheme assuming PSK modulation has been considered. However, such a simplified scheme is found to suffer from large performance degradation when applied to multi-level QAM modulation. In this paper, we derive a new simplified but improved channel tracking scheme for MIMO-OFDM systems that can be applied to both PSK and multi-level QAM modulation. The performance and the complexity of the proposed scheme are evaluated with comparisons to conventional schemes.

RF diamond FETs have been realized on a hydrogen-terminated diamond surface conductive layer. By utilizing the self-aligned gate fabrication process which is effective for the reduction of the parasitic resistance, the transconductance of diamond FETs has been greatly improved. Consequently, the high frequency operation of 22 GHz has been realized in 0.2 µ m gate diamond MISFETs with a CaF2 gate insulator. This value is the highest in diamond FETs and is comparable to the maximum value of SiC MESFETs at present.

Hetero-interface properties of SiO2/4H-SiC on (0001), (11-20), and (03-38) crystal orientations are presented. Epitaxial growth on new crystal orientations, (11-20) and (03-38), is described by comparing with the growth on (0001). Using thermal oxidation with wet oxygen, metal-oxide-SiC (MOS) structure was fabricated. From high-frequency capacitance-voltage characteristics measured at 300 K and 100 K, the interface properties were characterized semi-quantitatively. The interface state density was precisely determined using the conductance method for the MOS structure at 300 K. The new crystal orientations have the lower interface state density near the conduction band edge than (0001). From the characteristics of inversion-type planar MOSFETs, higher channel mobilities were obtained on (03-38) and (11-20) than on (0001). The cause of the difference in the channel mobility is speculated by the difference bond configuration of the three crystal orientations.

High-frequency characterization and delay-time analysis have been performed for a short channel AlGaN/GaN heterojunction FET. The fabricated device with a short gate length (Lg) of 0.07 µm exhibited an extrinsic current gain cutoff frequency of 81 GHz and a maximum frequency of oscillation of 190 GHz with a maximum stable gain (MSG) of 8.2 dB at 60 GHz. A new scheme for the delay-time analysis was proposed, in which the effects of rather large series resistance RS + RD are properly taken into account. By applying the new scheme to a device with Lg=0.25 µm, we obtained an effective high-field electron velocity of 1.75107 cm/s, which is consistent with our previous results calculated using Monte Carlo simulation.

An approach to minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) decoding for vector quantization over channels with memory is presented. The decoder is based on the Gilbert channel model that allows the exploitation of both intra- and inter-block correlation of bit error sequences. We also develop a recursive algorithm for computing the a posteriori probability of a transmitted index sequence, and illustrate its performance in quantization of Gauss-Markov sources under noisy channel conditions.

In a fixed-channel-allocation (FCA) cellular network, a fixed number of channels are assigned to each cell. However, under this scheme, the channel usage may not be efficient because of the variability in the offered traffic. Different approaches such as channel borrowing (CB) and dynamic channel allocation (DCA) have been proposed to accommodate variable traffic. Our work expands on the CB scheme and proposes a new channel-allocation scheme--called mobile-assisted connection-admission (MACA) algorithm--to achieve load balancing in a cellular network, so as to assure network communication. In this scheme, some special channels are used to directly connect mobile units from different cells; thus, a mobile unit, which is unable to connect to its own base station because it is in a heavily-loaded "hot" cell, may be able to get connected to its neighboring lightly-loaded cold cell's base station through a two-hop link. Research results show that MACA can greatly improve the performance of a cellular network by reducing blocking probabilities.

A series of micromagnetic models including simulations of the 3D thin film write head field, the GMR read head, the thin film media and channel codes are utilized to study the recording performance in longitudinal hard disk drives (HDD) at extremely high densities. The (0, 4/4) encoder is utilized to translate the user data into (0, 4/4) constrained codes, before the write process is performed. The write current is achieved from the constrained code in the NRZ format. The read back voltage is reshaped to the PR-IV signal and the Viterbi detector is utilized to recover the data. In a medium of 10 nm grains, the recording linear density limits with the PRML method are about 1000 kfci, which is 1.5 times of those with the PD channel.

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of pilot channel-aided channel estimation for multicarrier direct-sequence (DS) code division multiple access (CDMA) communication system as proposed by Kondo and Milstein . We consider a multicarrier DS-CDMA system with different number of pilot and data channels. We investigate the optimum number of pilot channels for various coherence bandwidths and different number of subchannels. Keeping the total transmit bandwidth fixed, an optimum number of total subchannels and pilot channels exists under specific channel environment and transmitted energy. As the number of pilot channels increases, more accurate channel estimation is possible but the number of data channels decreases resulting a smaller diversity gain. We show that there is a tradeoff between the number of pilot channels and data subchannels, thereby requiring differing numbers of optimum pilot channels according to channel conditions.

In this letter, we propose an efficient channel estimation scheme using trigonometric polynomial approximation for OFDM systems with transmit diversity. While the conventional channel estimation scheme has a high computational complexity in given channel delay profiles, the proposed scheme is efficient in the computational complexity. Especially, for channels with smaller rms delay spreads, the proposed scheme has improved BER performance and complexity reduction. In addition, we evaluate the performance of maximum delay spread estimation in unknown channel. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by computer simulation in various multi-path fading environments.

In this paper, a novel algorithm is presented for blind estimation of the symbol timing and frequency offset for OFDM systems. Time-varying frequency-selective Rayleigh fading multipath channel is considered, which is characterized by the power delay profile and time-varying scattering function and has high reliability for real-world mobile environment. The estimators exploit the intrinsic structures of OFDM signals and rely on the second-order moment rather than the probability distribution function of the received signals. They are totally optimum in sense of minimum mean-square-error and can be implemented easily. In addition, we have presented an improved approach which not only preserves the merits of previously proposed method, but also makes the estimation range of the frequency offset cover the entire subcarrier spacing of OFDM signals and the timing estimator be independent of the frequency offset.

We present the channel capacity, specifically the mutual information, of an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel in the presence of phase noise, and investigate the effect of phase noise impairment on powerful error-correcting codes (ECCs) that normally operate in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions. This channel-induced impairment is common in digital coherent transmission systems and is caused by imperfect carrier tracking of the phase error detector for coherent demodulation. It is shown through semi-analytical derivation that decreasing the information rate from its ideal capacity to an information rate lower than its inherent capacity significantly mitigates the impairment caused by phase noise, and that operating systems in the low SNR region also lessen the phase noise impairment by transforming typical phase noise behavior into Gaussian-like behavior. We also demonstrate by computer simulation using turbo-trellis coded modulation (TTCM) with high-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals that the use of capacity-approaching codes (CACs) makes transmission systems invulnerable to phase noise. To verify the effect of CACs on phase noise, simulation results of TTCM are also compared to that of trellis-coded modulation (TCM), which is used as an example of a conventional ECC operating at a relatively high SNR.

A low complexity multi-user receiver with blind channel estimation and multiple access interference (MAI) suppression is proposed for a CDMA system under multipath fading and frequency offset. The design of the receiver involves the following procedure. First, a method of joint MAI suppression and channel estimation is developed based on the generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) technique. In particular, channel estimates are obtained blindly in the form of the effective composite signature vectors (CSV) of the users. Second, a low-complexity partially adaptive (PA) realization of the receiver is proposed which incorporates reduced-rank processing based on the information of multi-user CSV's. By a judiciously designed decorrelating procedure, a new PA receiver is obtained with a much lower complexity. Finally, pilot symbols assisted frequency offset estimation and channel gain compensation give the estimate of users' symbols. Further performance enhancement is achieved by a decision aided scheme in which the signal is reconstructed and subtracted from the receiver input data, leading to significantly faster convergence. The proposed receiver is shown to be robust to multipath fading and frequency offset, and achieves nearly the same performance of the optimal maximum SINR and MMSE receivers with a much lower overhead for pilot symbols.

The bit error rate (BER) for an uplink multicell multicarrier code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) system in Nakagami-m fading channels is derived and expressed in the form of a single integral. The result is obtained without the approximation for the ratio of the interference power from other-cell to the power from the user-of-interest. Numerical results demonstrate the impacts of other-cell interference and power control errors on the BER.

Digital watermarking systems are required to embed as much information as possible in a digital media without the perceptual distortion as well as to extract it correctly with high probabilities, even though the media is subjected to many kinds of operations. To this end, guided scrambling (GS) techniques, usually used for a recording channel, are applied to digital watermarking systems. A simple GS scheme can make the power of a watermark signal larger against the power of media noise under the condition of preserving the perceptual fidelity, resulting in smaller error probabilities of the retrieved watermark bits. In addition, watermarking systems based on the GS can have more robustness to some specified operations if the prior information on the operations is given to the embedder. JPEG compression is a good example of such an operation when still images are transmitted over the Internet. In order for watermark signals to be more tolerable to the known JPEG attack, the GS-based watermark embedder is informed of advance knowledge of the JPEG compression. Further, a configuration of the GS concatenated with turbo coding is introduced to lower the bit error rate more.

General packet radio service (GPRS) uses a two-stage mechanism to allocate uplink radio resource to mobile stations (MSs). In stage-1, the base station (BS) assigns several packet data channels (PDCHs) to an MS. Furthermore, a PDCH may be assigned to multiple MSs. In stage-2, therefore, the BS selects one of the multiplexed MSs in a PDCH to use the radio resource. In this paper, maintaining a load balance between PDCHs in stage-1 is examined and several selection schemes to lower the mis-selection rate in stage-2 are proposed. From our simulation results, the cost deduced from the poor load balancing and selection schemes render a lower system throughput and a non-negligible increase in packet queuing delay. Among the various stage-2 selection policies, round robin with linearly-accumulated adjustment (RRLAA) has the lowest mis-selection rate and outperforms the one without any heuristic by up to 50%.

In this letter, we propose a robust IFDD scheme employing an interference canceller, which is used for mitigating interferences from the transmitting signal instead of complex filter bank to reduce the complexity, for the OFDM system using feedback information. According to simulation results, the proposed IFDD OFDM system does not show significant performance degradation but maintains the robustness against the fast time-varying multipath channel, while the TDD OFDM system estimating feedback information from receiving block makes serious performance degradation.

A technique for the design of circular- and racetrack-shaped NRD guide ring resonators was developed based on the mode coupling theory. Besides the operating mode, a parasitic mode is generated at curved sections of the resonator as a result of the mode conversion. Resonance of the NRD guide ring resonator is derived by characteristic equations of the coupled modes and then employed in making the design diagrams, which are useful for determining the dimensions of the ring resonators. It is shown that the discrepancy between the experimental results and previous theory can be resolved by using the present theory. Low loss, small-sized ring resonators with curvature radii of less than 5.3 mm were fabricated at 60 GHz and a band rejection performance of more than 30 dB was observed. Moreover, a procedure for the design of the channel dropping filter was developed and a 2-pole filter, which has great advantages such as a low insertion loss of 1.2 dB and a compact size smaller than that of a golf ball, was successfully developed by using two racetrack-shaped ring resonators.

With the growing demand for mobile communications, multicarrier (MC) schemes are receiving an increasing amount of attention, primarily because they handle frequency selective channels better than ordinary single-carrier schemes. However, despite offering several advantages, MC systems have certain weak points. One is a high sensitivity to interchannel interference (ICI). Using a Markov chain approach, we synthesized an optimal receiver for a situation where interference affects three adjacent subchannels. Simulation results showed that the proposed 'turbo scheme' provided better BER performance than a conventional receiver, especially at higher signal-to-noise ratios. The implementation of the turbo algorithm is independent of the transmitted signal, providing complete OFDM reception compatibility.

This paper presents a new modulation scheme for Very-High Speed Digital Subscriber Lines (VDSL) modem, featuring a Multi-Code Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC2-CDMA) modulation. The system takes advantage from both the CDMA modulation and the Multi-Carrier transmission, and furthermore the channel throughput is increased adopting a multi-code approach. Starting from an overview of this novel scheme, encompassing the transmitter, channel and receiver description, a brief review of the equalization techniques is also considered and a proper bit-loading algorithm is derived to find out the achievable overall channel rate. The aim of this paper, besides introducing this novel scheme, is to demonstrate its suitability for a VDSL environment, where the achievable channel rate represents a real challenge. By means of a further optimisation, a general improvement of the system performance with respect to the standardized Discrete Multi Tone (DMT) modulation is also demonstrated.