Design, Analysis and Prototyping of Spectrally Precoded OFDM

Despite shifting towards mm-wave bands, the sub 6-GHz band will continue tobe a fundamental spectral band in 5G. Yet, the severe crowdedness of this bandmakes a well constrained spectrum one of the critical 5G requirements. A wellconstrained spectrum means that the communications regimes should dwell politelywithin their dedicated spectral bands and not interfere with other systems workingon neighboring bands. Consequently, communications community seeks convenientmodulation schemes.Accordingly, high Out Of Band (OOB) emission phenomenon in Orthogonal Fre-quency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is unfavorable for some regimes operating in5G. Therefore, to legitimize OFDM with all 5G regimes, we need to suppress OFDMOOB emission.Since the discontinuous nature of the OFDM signal is the main reason for the highOOB emission, one solution is to render the discontinuous OFDM signal continuous.Two factors control this discontinuity: the physical shape of the modulated signaland the correlation property of the data symbols that modulate the OFDM signal.While most of the traditional approaches focus on reshaping the OFDM signalto render it continuous, in this work we give our attention to the spectral precod-ing approaches. These approaches manipulate the correlation property of the datasymbols to control the high OOB emission in OFDM.On the other hand, tweaking the correlation property of the modulating datasymbols will violate their orthogonality. This violation will yield in-band interfer-ence within the OFDM signal which would degrade the bit error performance of thereceived data.The thesis explains the spectral precoding techniques from conceptual and math-ematical point of view. We discuss the OOB emission suppression capability of theprecoding techniques and study their drawbacks and limitations. We provide ana-lytical trade o study between precoding approaches and classical OFDM treatmentapproaches at the level of OOB emission suppression and in-band interference. Weshow that the in-band interference in precoding techniques is independent on thecommunications channel behavior contrary to that of classical techniques. More-over, we dene the optimal precoder that minimizes the in-band interference. Con-sequently, we design a novel practical precoder that approaches the performanceof the optimal precoder. Furthermore, we analyze the complexity of the precodingapproaches and study the implementation computational requirements.Finally, we test the real time performance of these precoding techniques usingSoftware Designed Radio (SDR) Universal Software Radio Peripherals (USRPs). Wespotlight the hardware limitations and show that despite these limitations, the spec-tral precoder is able to suppress the OOB emissions by tens of decibels. We check the reliability of spectral precoding in practical over air communications systems bysetting up the rst spectral precoding proof of concept prototype. The prototypeproves that precoded OFDM systems cause less OOB interference on neighboringcommunications systems