Special Topics in Communication

This course is meant to provide a strong foundation for graduate study and research in the area of communications. The main objective of this course is to fortify the understanding of advanced communication theories required to design and analyze digital communication systems, especially for memory channels

The course mainly covers the effective use of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antennas in wireless communications in order to enhance the system capacity and the link reliability. It also covers the review of basics in wireless communication systems, diversity gains, power gains, degree of freedom gains, and multiplexing capability of MIMO systems, the capacity of MIMO channel and the opportunistic communication for a fast fading channel, MIMO transmitter/receiver architectures, the outage performance, diversity-multiplexing tradeoff, and universal space-time codes for a slow fading channel, and the role of multiuser MIMO channel in uplink and downlink

The course briefly deals with fundamental stochastic processes such as Poisson, renewal, discrete-time Markov chain, continuous-time Markov chain, IBP, IPP, MMBP, MMPP, self-similar process. The course then covers various queueing systems and their applications such as Markovian BD queues, advanced Markovian models, M/G/1 priority queue, M/G/1 retrial queue, and M/G/1 queue with vacation.

The design and implementation of the physical layer, data link layer, and network layer protocols are explained. Also, client/server programming using UNIX and windows sockets is studied. Moreover, the architecture of SDR based terminal is investigated. Finally, this course involves protocol design, verification, and optimization.
(Prerequisite: EE527)