Fundamentals of Wireless Communications

The Fundamentals of Wireless Communications course provides a selection of fundamental topics of modern wireless communication systems. The course is prerequisite for the courses on Wireless IoT and Local Area Networks (ET4394) and Mobile Networks (ET4396).

The following aspects will be covered in this course.

1. Radio propagation:

- review of radio propagation, link-budget model,

- path-loss and shadow fading,

- multipath propagation:

* time domain: rms-delay spread, signal dispersion, inter-symbol interference,

* frequency domain: frequency selectivity, coherence bandwidth,

- stochastic propagation models.

2. Modern modulation techniques:

- review of basic modulation techniques,

- Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM),

- Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DS-SS),

- Frequency Hopping.

3. Diversity:

- diversity domains: frequency/time/spatial/polarization diversity

- transmit and receive diversity,

- diversity techniques: selection diversity, maximal ratio combining, equal gain combining,

- MIMO (multiple input multiple output), fundamentals, capacity, space-time coding.

4. Channel Coding:

- characterization of error types, and basics of error control coding,

- code design: trade-off between efficiency, reliability, complexity/delay,

- block en convolutional codes,

- puncturing, interleaving,

- Turbo coding.

5. Multiple Access:

- multiplexing: FDMA, TDMA, CDMA,(O)FDMA, ALOHA,

- delay modeling in multiplexing: Little's theorem, review of continuous time Markov chains, M/M/1 system.

6. Cellular System Design:

- basic cellular networking concepts

- coverage-capacity-quality trade-off

- network planning aspects: site density, sectorisation, frequency reuse

- link budget analysis

- traffic engineering: Erlang-B model