E2 251-O Communication Systems Design 3:1 (Summer 2022)

Course Instructor: A Chockalingam, ECE

Course description: The course gives a comprehensive treatment of how to design communication systems. Emphasis will be given to communication link design principles and communication transceiver design fundamentals. The course will introduce and elaborate on transmit/receive architectures and subsystem requirements/specifications for modern communication transceivers. A key component in the course is the modeling of impairments in the transmit and receive chains. Algorithms for the compensation of these impairments using digital processing techniques in the baseband is another highlight in the course. The role of deep neural networks (DNNs) in communication systems design will be introduced. Design of visible light communication links using LEDs and photodiodes will also be covered. There will be Matlab programming exercises and assignments.

Syllabus

  • Communication link design for AWGN channels; path loss models, noise figure, receiver sensitivity, pink noise, link budget for deep space communication - a case study.
  • Communication subsystem requirements/specifications and impairments modeling: analog front-end, up/down conversion architectures, oscillator phase noise, sampling jitter, IQ imbalance, carrier frequency offset (CFO), sampling frequency offset (SFO), error vector magnitude (EVM), DAC/ADC interface, quantization noise and clipping, dynamic range, ADC noise floor, non-linearities: 1 dB compression point, IIPn, power amplifier (PA) non-linearities, AM/AM, AM/PM.
  • Compensation techniques: Tx/Rx IQ imbalance estimation and compensation, effect of CFO in OFDM, CFO estimation and compensation in OFDM, SFO estimation and correction in OFDM.
  • Visible light wireless communications (VLC): transmitter, channel, receiver, VLC link design, MIMO-VLC.

Textbooks / References

  1. Lydi Smaini, RF Analog Impairments Modeling for Communication Systems Simulation: Application to OFDM-based Transceivers, John-Wiley & Sons, 2012.
  2. Tony J. Rouphael, Wireless Receiver Architectures and Design: Antenna, RF, Synthesizers, Mixed Signal and Digital Signal Processing, Academic Press, 2014.
  3. Abbas Mohammadi and Fadhel M. Ghannouchi, RF Transceiver Design for MIMO Wireless Communications, Springer-Verlag, 2012.
  4. Research papers in journals and conferences.

Prerequisites: None

Grading:

  • Matlab programming assignments (4 assignments, 10 marks each): 40%
  • Midterm 30%
  • Final exam 30%.