Time-Frequency Effects in Wireless Communication Systems

Abstract

Time-frequency effects in wireless communication systems caused by narrowband resonances and coupled with device nonlinearities are revealed as new sources of co-site interference, exploited for the metrology of bandpass circuits, and employed to linearize amplitude-modulated transmissions. The transient properties of bandpass filters are found to last much longer than traditional time/bandwidth rules-of-thumb. The cause of this long-tail behavior is attributed to the coupled-resonator structure of the filter circuit. A solution method which uses lowpass prototyping is developed to reduce, by a factor of two, the complexity of the differential equation set describing a narrowband filter's transient response. Pulse overlap caused by the frequency dependence of long tails produced by filters is shown to cause intersymbol interference and intermodulation distortion in RF front-ends during frequency-hopped communications. The same properties which cause the ISI and IMD are used to develop three new transient methods for measuring resonant circuit parameters and a one-port method for extracting the operating band of a filter. A new signal-processing technique which combines time- and frequency-selectivity, Linear Amplification by Time-Multiplexed Spectrum, is developed to reduce IMD associated with amplitude modulation. Distortion reduction is demonstrated experimentally for multisines up to 20 tones.