Title:  Physical Layer Design and Implementation of Distributed Arrays in Packet Networks

Committee:

Dr. Mary Ann Weitnauer, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. John Barry, ECE

Dr. Douglas Blough, ECE

Dr. Ragupathy Sivakumar, ECE

Dr. Yang Wang, CEE

Abstract:

The objective of this dissertation is developing the physical layer distributed array approaches by taking advantage of the cooperation of communications across multiple devices and the availability of software defined radio (SDR) technologies for both OFDM-based wideband transmission and MSK low data rate transmission. The main contributions of this dissertation are as follows. Novel synchronization strategies that provide diversity gain and robustness against interference in range extension scenarios have been created for the distributed MIMO system. Additionally, novel methods of time division cooperative transmission (TDCT) with diversity gain and multi-user MIMO with AF relaying for array gain are implemented and demonstrated on SDRs for the purpose of range extension. Moreover, ``capture and successive cancellation'' (C&S) and ``network MIMO'' (NMIMO) are combined to create a novel on-demand form of NMIMO, which can lower cost in LPWA applications, and the corresponding functionalities are tested on SDRs. Lastly, a hybrid method of selective application of nonlinear precoding (NLP) on top of IA beams over multi-user, multi-access point MIMO networks has been proposed for the purpose of more efficient interference cancellation. The NLP of Tomlinson-Harashima precoding scheme has been implemented on SDR to demonstrate real-time packet decoding performance.