Contributions to Flexible Multirate Digital Signal Processing Structures

Abstract: A current focus among communication engineers is to design flexible radio systems in order to handle services among different telecommunication standards. Efficient support of dynamic interactive communication systems requires flexible and cost-efficient radio systems. Thus, low-cost multimode terminals will be crucial building blocks for future generations of multimode communication systems. Here, different bandwidths, from different telecommunication standards, must be supported and, thus, there is a need for a system which can handle a number of different bandwidths. This can be done using multimode transmultiplexers (TMUXs) which make it possible for different users to share a common channel in a time-varying manner. These TMUXs allow bandwidth-on-demand so that the resulting communication system has a dynamic allocation of bandwidth to users. Each user occupies a specific portion of the channel where the location and width of this portion 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 if a satellite is in orbit, customers only need to install a satellite terminal and subscribe to the service. Efficient utilization of the available limited frequency spectrum, by these satellites, calls for on-board signal processing to perform flexible frequency-band reallocation (FFBR).Considering these two focuses in one integrated system where the TMUXs operate on-ground and FFBR networks operate on-board, one can conclude that successful design of dynamic communication systems requires high levels of flexibility in digital signal processing structures. In other words, there is a need for flexible digital signal processing structures that can support different telecommunication scenarios and standards. This flexibility (or reconfigurability) must not impose restrictions on the hardware and, ideally, it must come at the expense of simple software modifications. In other words, the system is based on a hardware platform and its parameters can easily be modified without the need for hardware changes.This thesis aims to outline flexible TMUX and FFBR structures which can allow dynamic communication scenarios with simple software reconfigurations on the same hardware platform. 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 of the proposed multimode TMUXs and a simple software programming in the channel switch of the FFBR network. These do not require any hardware changes and can be performed online. However, the filter design problem is solved only once and offline.