The course covers topics within multiple areas of knowledge such as electromagnetic wave propagation, antenna theory, digital radio communication, stochastic signal processing and probability theory.
The main topics of the course are given below in non-chronological order:
- Fundamental Electromagnetic Wave Propagation Concepts - The wave equation, plane, cylindrical and spherical wave solutions, wave polarization, free space propagation, reflection, transmission, refraction, diffraction, scattering, waveguiding and superposition principle
- Fundamental Antenna Concepts - Far-field, near-field, transmit antenna mode, receive antenna mode, antenna reciprocity, antenna radiation pattern, antenna gain, directivity, total radiated power, antenna array, antenna coupling, the dipole antenna
- Fundamental Multipath Channel Concepts - Small-scale fading, large-scale fading, pathloss, double-directional representation, angle-of-arrival, angle-of-departure, frequency selectivity, delay dispersion, spatial selectivity, angular dispersion, coherence bandwidth, coherence length, linear time-variant channel, linear time-invariant channel, cross-polarization ratio, channel reciprocity, uncertainty relationships
- Multidimensional System and Correlation Functions - Channel transfer function, channel impulse response, power delay profile, scattering functions, Doppler spectrum, power angle spectrum, polarimetric channel representation
- Multipath Propagation Characterization - The propagation channel as a stochastic process, wide-sense stationarity, uncorrelated scattering, homogeneous scattering, the WSSUS channel, 1st order statistics, signal envelope probability distribution function, 2nd order statistics, auto-correlation function, spatial correlation
- Channel Models - The two-path model, Saleh-Valenzuela channel model, line-of-sight propagation, non-line-of-site propagation, narrowband models, wideband models, ultra-wideband models, spatial models, deterministic models
- Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Channel Concepts - H-matrix, sampled signal model, channel normalization, full-correlation matrix, channel rank, diversity measure, multipath richness, degrees-of-freedom, channel capacity
- MIMO Channel Models - The i.i.d model, the Kronecker model, the Key-hole model, Weichselberger model, geometry based channel models
- Antenna-Channel Interaction Characterization - Mean effective gain, bounds on MEG, effective and apparent diversity gain, optimal antenna radiation patterns
- Environment- and System-Specific Propagation Channels - indoor, outdoor, indoor-to-outdoor, car-to-car, femto-, pico-, micro- and macro-cell propagation channels
- Channel Measurement Techniques - Time-domain methods, frequency-domain methods, spatially resolved methods
- Channel Estimation, Statistical Inference and Model Selection - Beamforming, ESPRIT, Capon's beamformer, Akaike information criterium, tests for gaussianity