Contributions to Reconfigurable Filter Banks and Transmultiplexers

A current focus among communication engineers is to design flexible radio systems to handle services among different telecommunication standards. Thus, lowcost multimode terminals will be crucial building blocks for future generations of multimode communications. Here, different bandwidths, from different telecommunication standards, must be supported. This can be done using multimode transmultiplexers (TMUXs) which allow different users to share a common channel in a time-varying manner. These TMUXs allow bandwidth-on-demand. Each user occupies a specific portion of the channel whose location and width may vary with time. Another focus among communication engineers is to provide various wideband services accessible to everybody everywhere. Here, satellites with high-gain spot beam antennas, on-board signal processing, and switching will be a major complementary part of future digital communication systems. Satellites provide a global coverage and customers only need to install a satellite terminal and subscribe to the service. Efficient utilization of the available limited frequency spectrum, calls for on-board signal processing to perform flexible frequency-band reallocation (FFBR). This thesis outlines the design and realization of reconfigurable TMUX and FFBR structures which allow dynamic communication scenarios with simple software reconfigurations. In both structures, the system parameters are determined in advance. For these parameters, the required filter design problems are solved only once. Dynamic communications, with users having different time-varying bandwidths, are then supported by adjusting some multipliers, commutators, or a channel switch. These adjustments do not require hardware changes and can be performed online. However, the filter design problem is solved offline. The thesis provides various illustrative examples and it also discusses possible applications of the proposed structures in the context of other communication scenarios, e.g., cognitive radios