Wireless Communications - 5PMEWCO8

Goal(s)

Understanding of the physical layer for fixed (WiFi, UWB, Zigbee, DVB...) and mobile (2G, 3G, 4G) radio communications. Notions about medium access control (MAC) will also be presented. This lectures is dedicated to students being specialist of circuit/devices design for RF applications. A particular attention is paid to the impact of the radio channel on digitally modulated signals, modulations formats and techniques to deal with radio channel impact, architectures of RF modulators/demodulators, impact of the different RF components on the digitally modulated waveforms. This lecture is in close interaction with the project "Design of a WiFi emitter/receiver".

Content(s)

This lecture is divided is 3 main chapters:

• The first chapter deals with the understanding of the main properties of the radio channel leading to critical choices for digital modulation techniques to fight against channel impairments
• The second chapter describes the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing modulation technique. A simplified mathematical approach leads to the understanding of the interest of such waveforms in the radio context but also to the understanding of the digital hardware architecture of the radio emitter/receiver.
• The third chapter is about mobile communications. Cellular concept is exposed before investigating on the main modulation techniques used for 2G, 3G and 4G. Once again, digtal modulations are discuss along with hardware architecture as regards radio standard specifications. A few considerations about MIMO techniques are also discussed.

Basic knowledge of QAM digital modulations, signal to noise ratio, basic knowledge of signal processing techniques for communication systems (Nyquist filtering, matched filtering, intersymbol interferences, analog to digital conversion, digital to analog conversion).