Communications Engineering - Project Description
Information Optimal Signal Processing
In mobile radio communications, the trend to higher data rates and bandwidths is unbroken. The technological progress of recent decades has enabled a tremendous increase in data communications. Even modern communication networks suffer from temporal bottlenecks due to limited available bandwidth. Therefore, the use of higher frequency bands like mm-waves is discussed. However, larger bandwidths pose problems to mobile devices because AD converters with high amplitude resolution and simultaneously high sampling rates consume are energy hungry. Consequently, concepts working with low amplitude resolution at the receiver are investigated.
In this project, we try to answer the question if classical signal processing in digital receivers can be replaced by different structures which become advantages particularly for embedded systems with limited hardware resources. In principle, the receiver's task is to map coarsely quantized received signals onto bit tuples. Instead of using conventional signal processing methods to accomplish this goal, an implementation via lookup tables might offer advantages. The information bottleneck framework will serve as a unified design guideline preserving in every stage of the receiver an appropriately defined relevant information. Thereby, the flow of information is optimized using methods inspired from information theory.