INTRODUCTION

1.1 RADIO COMMUNICATION

Radio communication is a popular way of transmitting information between distant places.The unit of wireless radio communication is electromagnetic signals and it provides means to exchange information such as symbols, intelligence between two points - that is from a source to destination. 1.1.1 ELECTROMAGNETIC SIGNAL Light is a form of electromagnetic wave/signal. Another form of electromagnetic signal is used in radio broadcasting. Electromagnetic signal is oscillatory in nature. The graph displayed in this figure is a snapshot representing the strength of a signal.

Amplitude

Displacement Time

Figure 1.1: A typical electromagnetic signal The distance between two wave crests is the wavelength of this signal. The signal traverses at the velocity of light. A signal is qualified by its frequency oscillation that is, the number of oscillations per second. The usual frequency we get from the electric currents is our household connections is about 50/60 cycles per second. In radio (AM) broadcasting, frequency of the electromagnetic signal used is in the order of cycles per second. The frequency used for FM radio/TV is more than the radio broadcast and short waves/radar frequency is more than the frequency used for FM radio/TV. For reference, it can be stated that the further increase in the frequency of oscillation make electromagnetic signal visible by human eyes. The visible frequency is in the range of 5 x 1014 to 5 x 1015 cycles per second. The unit of frequency measure is Hertz (Hz); 1Hz represents the frequency of one cycle per second. The megahertz (MHz) is 106 Hz and gigahertz implies 109 Hz. That is, 1 MHz indicates that the signal completes one million cycles per second. The variable quality of the electromagnetic waves could also be the wavelength. The frequency is also inversely proportional to the wavelength. i.e. higher frequencies have shorter wavelength, while lower frequencies implies larger wavelength. The frequency (f) can be represented asf=/, where v= phase velocity of wave and =wavelength. In vacuum, v is the velocity of light. The radio

waves can be of wide range of wavelengths. The regular radio broadcasting wavelength is about 500 meters. The wavelength of short wave is in the order of millimeter. Further the frequency as f=1/T , Where T is the time between two consecutive occurrences of the event in wave propagation. Analog vs. Digital signal The signal can be either analog or digital. An analog signal is one in which the signal intensity varies in a smooth fashion (continuous) over time. On the contrary, a digital signal is one in which the signal intensity maintains a constant level (discrete) for some period of time and then changes to another constant level. Figure 1.2 shows a sample of analog and digital signals. a) Analog Signal

Strength of signal

Time

Digital Signal

Strength of signal

Time

Figure 1.2: Analog and Digital signal Spectrum/Bandwidth The electromagnetic waves cover a wide frequency range. The spectrum of a signal is the range of frequencies that it contains. If a frequency spectrum ranges from f to 3f, the absolute bandwidth of the signal is 3f-f=2f , the width of the spectrum. Many signals have an infinite bandwidth. However, most of the energy contains within a relatively narrow band of frequencies. This narrow band is referred to as the effective bandwidth or simply bandwidth. In radio, the width of the frequency spectrum can impart more information in communication process.

Table 1.1: The spectrum of electromagnetic signals with common nomenclature FREQUENCY < 30 kHz 30-300 kHz 300 kHz-3 MHz 3-30 MHz 30-300 MHz 300 MHz-3 GHz 3-30 GHz >30 GHz BAND Very Low Frequency(VLF) Low Frequency(LF) Medium Frequency(MF) High Frequency(HF) Very High Frequency(VHF) Ultra High Frequency(UHF) Super High Frequency(SHF) Extremely High Frequency (EHF) TYPE OF RADIATION Long radio wave Long radio wave Long radio wave Short radio wave Short radio wave Microwave Microwave Infrared- Gamma rays

Characteristics of electromagnetic signals Table 1.1 shows the spectrum of electromagnetic signals with common nomenclature. The signals have different characteristics and abilities for communication. The key considerations are: how far the waves can go, through what these can go through and how much data these can carry. All these have an impact on how useful a signal will be for different types of wireless communication. Range of transmission High frequencies (HF) are reflected by the ionosphere and bounce back and forth between the ionosphere and the earths surface. As a result the HF signal can convey information/data to thousands of kilometer. Further, a HF signal can penetrate obstructions such as buildings, mountains, etc. Such a frequency is typically used by the radio stations to broadcast programs worldwide. The higher frequencies such as SHF and EHF normally operate on a line-of-sight (LOS) basis. In LOS, the receiver receives the signal from the transmitter on a straight line. These frequencies do not bend around earths surface like HFs and therefore, require repeaters, every few tens of kilometers, to establish links between the nodes. Microwaves (SHFs) can pass right through some objects but are blocked by relatively solid objects like buildings and metal structures. The light waves behave like microwaves but light waves are even more restricted in distance travelled and comparatively less powerful to penetrate objects. The range of transmission not only depends on the characteristics of the signal but also on the parameters such as power of the transmitter, sensitivity of the receiver, antenna types, antenna height, quality of the transmission medium used, method used to send information, amount of interference present, atmospheric conditions, etc. Information - carrying capacity

There is a direct relationship between the information-carrying capacity of a signal and its bandwidth. The information-related modifications made to the signal are normally tied to its frequency. The range of frequencies a signal contains is the bandwidth, i.e. a larger bandwidth means more information can be sent for a given period of time. Therefore, the greater the bandwidth, the higher the information-carrying capacity of a signal. For example, in broadband, information-carrying capacity (bits per second) is far more than that in narrowband. Channel capacity and noise An individual communication path that carries signals at a specific frequency is called a channel. For example, GSM uses two bands (890-915 MHz and 935-960 MHz) of 25 MHz each for the system use. Each of 25 MHz bands is divided into 200 KHz wide channels resulting 125 channels, i.e. in total, GSM uses 250 channels. A variety of impairments can distort or corrupt a signal. One of the major impairments is due to noise. Noise is the unwanted signal that combines to a desired signal and distorts it during transmission as well as at reception. Transmitted signal Noise Received signal

Figure 1.3: Signal distortion due to noise A noise affects and limits the data rate in transmission. Figure 1.3 shows how a transmitted signal is affected by noise in transmission medium. The channel capacity qualifies such effects of noise. The maximum rate, at which the data can be transmitted over a channel, under given conditions, is referred to as the channel capacity. It is the upper bound on the amount of information that can be reliably transmitted over a communication channel. On the other hand, signal strength is the magnitude of electric field at a reference location around the transmitting antenna.The greater signal strength improves the ability to receive data correctly in the presence of noise. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the ratio of power in a signal to the noise power (corrupting the signal at a particular point of transmission), is the measure of data received correctly and is defined as

(1.1) Pnoise Anoise P refers average power and A is the root mean square amplitude. It is usually expressed in terms of logarithmic scale. In decibel it is 10 times the logarithm of power ratio. That is,

SNR

Psignal

Asignal

Signal power (1.2) Noise power A high value of SNR means signal received is of high quality. The SNR is also referred to as the signal-to-interference ( S/I ). SNRdB 10log10
1.1.2 FULL-DUPLEX RADIO COMMUNICATION Based on the direction of communication, a radio communication system can be referred to as either simplex or duplex. A simplex system allows communication in one direction. Example of simplex system can be the pager. A duplex system, on the other hand, allows two way communications between two points. In half-duplex radio systems, the two way communication cannot occur simultaneously. The same halfduplex channel can be used for transmission as well as reception; but at any point of time either transmission or reception can take place. Walkie-talkie is an example of halfduplex system. In other words, communication is possible in both directions simultaneously. In wireless systems full duplexing is implemented either by providing two separate channels (one for transmission and other for reception) or by providing two adjacent time slots on a single radio channel. The former method of achieving full-duplex communication is called the Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) and the later one is called Time Division Duplexing (TDD). Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD): In case of FDD, signals are differentiated based on the frequencies. Two distinct set of frequencies are assigned for this purpose. Each such set of frequencies corresponds to a simplex channel in FDD and, therefore, a duplex channel consists of two simplex channels. FDD is most suitable for wireless wide area network, e.g. cellular network and for wireless metropolitan area network, e.g. Wireless Local Loop (WLL). Time Division Duplexing (TDD): In case of TDD, signals in forward and reverse directions are assigned separate time slots. A time slot is for a single block of frequencies and kept small so that both the transmission and reception appear to be simultaneous to a user. TDD is suitable for short distance and low power communication systems.

1.1.3 FUTURE MOBILE COMMUNICATION As we step forward into the new millennium with wireless technologies leading the way in which we communicate, it becomes increasingly clear that the dominant consideration in the design of systems employing such technologies will be their ability to perform with adequate margin over a channel perturbed by a host of impairments not the least of which is multipath fading. This is not to imply that multipath fading channels are something new to be reckoned with, indeed they have plagued many a system designer for well over 40 years, but rather, to serve as a motivation for their ever-increasing significance in the years to come. At the same time, we do not in any way wish to diminish the importance of the fading channel scenarios that occurred well prior to the wireless revolution, since indeed many of them still exist and will continue to exist in the future. In fact, it is safe to say that whatever means are developed for dealing with the more sophisticated wireless application will no doubt also be useful for dealing with the less complicated fading environments of the past. With the above in mind, what better opportunity is there than now to write a comprehensive book that provides simple and intuitive solutions to problems dealing with

communication system performance evaluation over fading channels. Indeed, as mentioned in the preface, the primary goal of this book is to present a unified method for arriving at a set of tools that will allow the system designer to compute the performance of a host of different digital communication systems characterized by a variety of modulation/detection types and fading channel models. By set of tools we mean a compendium of analytical results that not only allow easy, yet accurate performance evaluation but at the same time provide insight into the manner in which this performance depends on the key system parameters. To emphasize what was stated above, the set of tools developed in this book are useful not only for the wireless applications that are rapidly filling our current technical journals but also to a host of others, involving satellite, terrestrial, and maritime communications. Our repetitive use of the word performance thus far brings us to the purpose of this introductory chapter: to provide several measures of performance related to practical communication system design and to begin exploring the analytical methods by which they may be evaluated. While the deeper meaning of these measures will be truly understood only after their more formal definitions are presented in the chapters that follow, the introduction of these terms here serves to illustrate the various possibilities that exist, depending on both need and relative ease of evaluation 1.2 SYSTEM PERFORMANCE MEASURES 1.2.1 Average Signal-to-Noise Ratio(ASNR) Probably the most common and best understood performance measure characteristic of a digital communication system is signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Most often this is measured at the output of the receiver and is thus related directly to the data detection process itself. Of the several possible performance measures that exist, it is typically the easiest to evaluate and most often serves as an excellent indicator of the overall fidelity of the system. Although traditionally, the term noise in signal-to-noise ratio refers to the ever-present thermal noise at the input to the receiver, in the context of a communication system subject to fading impairment, the more appropriate performance measure is average SNR, where the word average refers to statistical averaging over the probability distribution of the fading. In simple mathematical terms, if _ denotes the instantaneous SNR [a random variable (RV)] at the receiver output, which includes the effect of fading, then
0

(1.3)

The average SNR, where P() denotes the probability density function (PDF) of . To begin to get a feel for what we will shortly describe as a unified approach to performance evaluation, we first rewrite (1.1) in terms of the moment generating function (MGF) associated with , namely
M s
0

es d

1.4

Taking the first derivative of (1.2) with respect to s and evaluating the result at s = 0 , we see immediately from (1.1) that dM s s 0 1.5 ds That is, the ability to evaluate the MGF of the instantaneous SNR (perhaps in closed form) allows immediate evaluation of the average SNR via a simple mathematical operation: differentiation. To gain further insight into the power of the foregoing statement, we note that in many systems, particularly those dealing with a form of diversity (multichannel) reception known as maximal-ratio combining (MRC), the output SNR, , is expressed as a sum

(combination) of the individual branch (channel) SNRs (i.e. ,

l

,where L denotes the

number of channels combined). In addition, it is often reasonable in practice to assume that the channels are independent of each other (i.e., the RVs l l 1 themselves independent). In such instances, the MGF M (s) can be expressed as the product of the MGFs associated
L

with each channel [i.e., M

s
l 1

s ], which for a large variety of fading channel

statistical models can be computed in closed form.1 By contrast, even with the assumption of channel independence, computation of the probability density function (PDF) p(), which
L

requires convolution of the various PDFs

l 1

pl

that characterize the L channels, can

still be a monumental task. Even in the case where these individual channel PDFs are of the same functional form but are characterized by different average SNRs, l , the evaluation of p() can still be quite tedious. Such is the power of the MGF-based approach; namely, it circumvents the need for finding the first-order PDF of the output SNR provided that one is interested in a performance measure that can be expressed in terms of the MGF. Of course,
L

for the case of average SNR, the solution is extremely simple, namely,
l 1

, regardless

of whether the channels are independent or not, and in fact, one never needs to find the MGF at all. However, for other performance measures and also the average SNR of other combining statistics [e.g., the sum of an ordered set of random variables typical of generalized selection combining (GSC)], matters are not quite this simple and the points made above for justifying an MGF-based approach are, as we shall see, especially significant.

1.2.2 Outage Probability Another standard performance criterion characteristic of diversity systems operating over fading channels is the outage probability denoted by Pout and defined as the probability that the instantaneous error probability exceeds a specified value or equivalently, the probability that the output SNR, , falls below a certain specified threshold, th . Mathematicallyspeaking,
Pout P[
th

th

p ( )d

(1.6)

which is the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of , namely, p(), evaluated at = th. dP ( ) Since the PDF and the CDF are related by p ( ) , and since p(0)=0, the Laplace ds transforms of these two functions are related by square p (s) P (s) (1.7) s Furthermore, since the MGF is just the Laplace transform of the PDF with argument reversed in sign [i.e. , p (s) transform of the ratio

M
M s

s ] the outage probability can be found from the inverse Laplace

s

evaluated at = th., that is,

(1.8) 2 j s where is chosen in the region of convergence of the integral in the complex s plane. Methods for evaluating inverse Laplace transforms have received widespread attention in the literature. One such numerical technique that is particularly useful for CDFs of positive RVs (such as instantaneous SNR). For our purpose here, it is sufficient to recognize once again that the evaluation of outage probability can be performed based entirely on knowledge of the MGF of the output SNR without ever having to compute its PDF.
j

Pout

es th ds

1.2.3 Average Bit Error Probability The third performance criterion and undoubtedly the most difficult of the three to compute is average bit error probability (BEP).3 On the other hand, it is the one that is most revealing about the nature of the system behavior and the one most often illustrated in documents containing system performance evaluations; thus, it is of primary interest to have a method for its evaluation that reduces the degree of difficulty as much as possible. The primary reason for the difficulty in evaluating average BEP lies in the fact that the conditional (on the fading) BEP is, in general, a nonlinear function of the instantaneous SNR, the nature of the nonlinearity being a function of the modulation/detection scheme employed by the system. For example, in the multichannel case, the average of the conditional BEP over the fading statistics is not a simple average of the per channel performance measure as was true for average SNR. Nevertheless, we shall see momentarily that an MGF-based approach is still quite useful in simplifying the analysis and in a large variety of cases allows unification under a common framework. Suppose first that the conditional BEP is of the form P E C e a1 (1.9)
b 1

such as would be the case for differentially coherent detection of phase-shift keying (PSK) or on coherent detection of orthogonal frequency-shift-keying(FSK). Then the average BEP can be written as P (E) P E P ( )d (1.10)
b 0 b

C1e

a1

p ( )d

C1M ( a1 )

(1.11)

where again M(s) is the MGF of the instantaneous fading SNR and depends only on the fading channel model assumed. Suppose next that the nonlinear functional relationship between P E and is such that it can be expressed as an integral whose integrand has an
b

exponential dependence on in the form of (1.7), that is. 2 Pb E C2 h ( ) e a 2 g ( ) d

1

(1.12)

1.3. WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

Wireless by definition is a very hostile environment. Here we do not have the luxury of fixed line copper or the luxury of large bandwidth like fiber. We have to deal with the uncertainties of the channel coupled with that of multipath propagation, attenuation, scattering, and host of other problems. The mobile radio channel places fundamental limitations on the performance of wireless communication systems. The Wireless transmission path may be of two types:

a) Line of Sight (LOS): It is the direct transmission between the transmitter and receiver. b) Non Line of Sight (NLOS): In this case the signal is either obstructed by buildings or foliage etc, even cars on the streets. In general we deal with NLOS in the cellular mobile systems. We do not have the luxury to be in direct LOS with the base-station. Propagation Basics When the electrons move they create electromagnetic waves that can propagate through space. By attaching an antenna of the appropriate size to an electrical circuit, the electromagnetic waves can be broadcast efficiently and received by a receiver some distance away. Antenna is an interface between channel and wireless circuit. If I deal with a lower frequency band i.e. larger wavelength then my antenna size will be large and viceversa. So as we translate to higher and higher frequencies my antenna size diminishes and hence my mobile hand set becomes smaller. The radio, microwave, infrared and visible light portions of the electromagnetic spectrum can all be used to transmit information. Information can be sent by modulating one of the properties of waveform i.e. amplitude, frequency, or phase of the waves. Properties of Radiowave a) Radio channels are random and often time-varying As it is random we need to use statistics to model it, but with time the statistics may change. This is a fundamental issue, how to make effectively a radio channel. Again another important issue is that the radio channels behave differently at different frequencies. b) Modeling radio channels have been one of the difficult parts of the mobile radio system design This is because when it is required to come up with a whole system model, one must plug in the channel characteristics, one should have reliable channel model so that the system may be simulated before implementing it. This is required as the mobile systems are expensive systems. It is not possible to shift a base station in the ground as enough power is not received. Hence measurements are carried on and based on this fundamental measurement one must try to come up with a reliable channel model. Most of the channels models are random and we will see as we move to higher and higher frequencies, i.e. lower wavelengths are for deterministic channel models. Random channel models are good for lower frequency band (900 MHz, 1000 MHz, and 2.4 GHz etc), higher (>10 GHz). c) Are easy to generate Since the properties are very old so we have master the technology. d) Can penetrate buildings I can sit on the basement and can still talk on my mobile phone. e) Behave more like radio at lower frequencies Due to this it can pass obstacles, power falls sharply with distance from source.