PERIODO: APRILE - MAGGIO 2017

Wireless communication systems had been designed primarily for voice services. First generation cellular systems were analog in nature, thus unsuitable for data transmission. The driving force for the following (digital) cellular generations was increased capacity to accommodate the high demand for new customers.
The explosion of Internet usage, with the ever increasing demand for the downloading of large bulks of data in multimedia services, on one hand, and the gradual predominance of wireless communication over the wired one, on the other hand, made second generation cellular systems fully inadequate. For this reason, third and even more fourth generation were designed focusing on multimedia Internet, rather than voice, services.
The resulting, high data rates that are needed to satisfy the users' requests, together with the severe limitations in the available bandwidth devoted to cellular services, force wireless communication systems to face ever increasing challenges on severe bandwidth and energy constraints. The present and future of wireless communication is then dependent on the possibility of fully exploiting the available bandwidth by increasing as much as possible the efficiency of its use. Moreover, the time-varying characteristics of the wireless channel, and its frequency selectivity induced by the multipath fading, pose severe challenges to the system designer in order to cope with the high quality of service required for multimedia applications. Recent transmitting and receiving techniques like adaptive coding and modulation, multi-antenna transmitter and receiver (MIMO), turbo and LDPC codes, iterative co-decoding and reception techniques based on the turbo principle are revolutionizing the theory and practice of digital communication.
This course focuses on techniques to reliably communicate digital information over the wireless channel. It provides the fundamental trade-offs between bandwidth, power, latency and performance, and explains in detail the main available techniques to improve the performance of digital wireless transmission, such as bandwidth-efficient modulation schemes, MIMO and space-time coding, turbo and LDPC codes, iterative demodulation and decoding, equalization, carrier and clock synchronisation .

Background
• The limits imposed by information theory to communication systems
• The wireless communication channel and its constraints
• Conventional signaling (modulation) techniques
• Conventional synchronization and equalization techniques
• Conventional coding techniques
• Multi-antenna and Multi-user systems
• Single user MIMO
• Space Time Codes
• Multi user MIMO
• Multiuser receivers

Turbo Codes and iterative decoders
• Parallel and Serial code concatenations (PCCC and SCCC): analysis, design and iterative decoder implementation
• Low-Density Parity-check Codes (LDPC): analysis, design and iterative decoder implementation
• Generalizations

Extension of the Turbo Principle
• Concatenated Coding schemes and iterative receivers for high spectral efficiencies
• Turbo synchronization schemes
• Turbo equalization schemes
• Iterative MIMO and multiuser receivers