Study and Development of Novel Techniques for PHY-Layer Optimization of Smart Terminals in the Context of Next-Generation Mobile Communications

Future mobile broadband communications working over wireless channels are required to provide high performance services in terms of speed, capacity, and quality. A key issue to be considered is the design of multi-standard and multi-modal ad-hoc network architectures, capable of self-configuring in an adaptive and optimal way with respect to channel conditions and traffic load. In the context of 4G-wireless communications, the implementation of efficient baseband receivers characterized by affordable computational load is a crucial point in the development of transmission systems exploiting diversity in different domains. This thesis proposes some novel multi-user detection techniques based on different criterions (i.e., MMSE, ML, and MBER) particularly suited for multi-carrier CDMA systems, both in the single- and multi-antenna cases. Moreover, it considers the use of evolutionary strategies (such as GA and PSO) to channel estimation purposes in MIMO multicarrier scenarios. Simulation results evidenced that the proposed PHY-layer optimization techniques always outperform state of the art schemes by spending an affordable computational burden. Particular attention has been used on the software implementation of the formulated algorithms, in order to obtain a modular software architecture that can be used in an adaptive and optimized reconfigurable scenario.