Canonical Time-Frequency Processing For Broadband Signaling Over Dispersive Channels

Even though broadband signaling and reception is often employed in practice for communication over time- and frequency -dispersive channels, existing receiver designs do not fully exploit the advantage of broadband signaling. We introduce a framework for time-frequency processing that is dictated by a canonical characterization of linear dispersive channels and fully utilizes the advantage of broadband signaling. The framework is based on processing in a natural time-frequency subspace defined by orthogonal time-frequency shifted copies of the transmitted broadband waveform. It generalizes existing receivers and suggests new designs that promise substantially improved performance compared to existing systems. 1. INTRODUCTION Signal propagation over time- and frequency-dispersive channels is encountered in many applications, including mobile wireless communications, underwater acoustical communications, and radar/sonar. In such scenarios, the channel is best described as a randomly tim..