Alessio Filippi

• The present thesis deals with a novel approach to increase the resource usage in digital communications. In digital communication systems, each information bearing data symbol is associated to a waveform which is transmitted over a physical medium. The time or frequency separations among the waveforms associated to the information data have always been chosen to avoid or limit the interference among them. By doing so, n the presence of a distortionless ideal channel, a single receive waveform is affected as little as possible by the presence of the other waveforms. The conditions necessary to meet the absence of any interference among the waveforms are well known and consist of a relationship between the minimum time separation among the waveforms and their bandwidth occupation or, equivalently, the minimum frequency separation and their time occupation. These conditions are referred to as Nyquist assumptions. The key idea of this work is to relax the Nyquist assumptions and to transmit with a time and/or frequency separation between the waveforms smaller than the minimum required to avoid interference. The reduction of the time and/or frequency separation generates not only an increment of the resource usage, but also a degradation in the quality of the received data. Therefore, to maintain a certain quality in the received signal, we have to increase the amount of transmitted power. We investigate the trade-off between the increment of the resource usage and the correspondent performance degradation in three different cases. The first case is the single carrier case in which all waveforms have the same spectrum, but have different temporal locations. The second one is the multi carrier case in which each waveform has its distinct spectrum and occupies all the available time. Finally, the hybrid case when each waveform has its unique time and frequency location. These different cases are framed within the general system modelling developed in the thesis so that they can be easily compared. We evaluate the potential of the key idea of the thesis by choosing a set of four possible waveforms with different characteristics. By doing so, we study the influence of the waveform characteristics in the three system configurations. We propose an interpretation of the results by modifying the well-known Shannon capacity formula and by explicitly expressing its dependency on the increment of resource usage and on the performance degradation. The results are very promising. We show that both in the case of a single carrier system with a time limited waveform and in the case of a multi-carrier system with a frequency limited waveform, the reduction of the time or frequency separation, respectively, has a positive effect on the channel capacity. The latter, depending on the actual SNR, can double or increase even more significantly.
• Nicht-konventionelle Multiträger-Luftschnittstelle für Mobilfunksysteme