Channel characterization in wireless mm-wave communication and radio over fibre systems

In the past decades, there has been a paramount evolution in multimedia services as well as in internet usages. At the same time, the motivation of solution providers to integrate different access network devices in one mobile platform leads to exploring a new technology which converges between wire and wireless services by satisfying the increasing demands of bandwidths required by such applications. Radio over Fiber (RoF) is expected to be one of the most promising broadband communication technologies for the current and next decades. The hybrid use of fiber-optic as wired medium and millimeter wave as wireless medium allows to integrate the superabundant bandwidth provisioned by fiber and mobility feature provided by wireless link in one platform. There are some impacts due to the inherent nature of the fiber cable itself. Chromatic dispersion (CD) is considered as one of the most important effects, which affects the distance that can be reached as well as the quality of the received signal. The scope of the thesis focuses on two main pillars: RoF system setup and offline processing applied to the received data signal to recover the carrier in terms of phase shift and frequency offset. Regarding for the RoF setup, a set of simulations and measurements have been performed to optimize the setup, characterize the generated 60 GHz carrier, applying advanced modulation format like QPSK , and investigating optical modulation options (optical single sideband (OSSB) / optical double sideband (ODSB)). Phase and frequency estimator algorithms that can be realized in DSP or FPGA have been comprehensively studied analytically, in simulations and experiments. Finally, the offline processing module is represented as a cascade of a frequency estimator, which works as coarse compensator followed by an adapted Viterbi & Viterbi algorithm as a fine compensator to remove the residuals.