CAREER: Signal Processing for Multiuser Multiantenna Wireless Communications

ABSTRACT

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Aylin Yener

Pennsylvania State University- Univ. Park

The importance of wireless access is ever increasing. The wide social impact of becoming tetherless ranges from providing constant reachability in emergency situations; to providing better educational services in schools with wireless network access. Future wireless systems are expected to provide much higher capacity due to emerging applications that demand data oriented and multimedia communications services. This research involves the exploration of attainable performance limits of wireless communication systems. The scarcity of wireless bandwidth dictates that future systems must utilize multiple antennas in addition to temporal and frequency resources. The premise of this research is that a significant improvement in wireless system capacity can be achieved by designing transmitters and receivers that jointly optimize all system resources.

The investigator considers interference limited multiuser wireless communication systems where users ``share'' the transmission medium in a non-partitioned manner. The signal processing framework developed is for a most general shared channel where multiple transmit and receive antennas are used, code division grants sharing of time and frequency resources, and multiple data streams are transmitted per user. The

focus is on understanding the performance limits under different channel/system constraints as well as methods that achieve these limits. The research issues considered include: characterization of the maximum number of users that can be supported when jointly optimum temporal-spatial transmission and temporal-spatial reception techniques are employed; characterization of the optimum transmitters

(and receivers) and design and analysis of algorithms that converge to these transmitters (and the corresponding receivers); investigation of the robustness of the techniques and results under different channel/system conditions as well as when partial/inaccurate information is available about these conditions; implementation of the resulting algorithms on a wireless testbed.