Description

Modern wireless communications deals with the challenge of transmitting digital data across multipath radio channels without making transmission errors. The difficulty is due to that channel, which can lead to severe signal distortions (e.g. inter-symbol-interference) and signal fading (= rapid variations of received signal strength).

This project aims at making the effects of the radio channel visible and to illustrate their impact onto typical digital transmission schemes such as PAM/QAM, OFDM, or spread spectrum. A channel sounding hardware available at the SPSC lab will be used to measure the impulse response of the channel in realtime, at a time resolution better than 1 ns where individual multipath components can be observed. The impact of these measured channel responses onto the transmit signals can then be simulated in MATLAB, which allows full flexibility concerning the transmission scheme.

The student(s) will work on the implementation of digital transmission schemes in MATLAB to demonstrate these effects. To be able to experience and understand the ongoing effects, we aim at displaying different parameters and measurements in realtime, which is the expected outcome of the project. The project can be conducted alone (with limited set of goals) or by a team of two students.

Tasks

• Implementation of physical-layer digital communications schemes (such as PAM/QAM, OFDM, etc.)
• Integration of the channel sounder device in the application
• Illustration of channel effects by means of real-time displays in MATLAB

Requirements

• Fundamentals of digital communications (desirable)
• Mobile radio systems (desireable)