Time-Varying Channels

Wireless communications has become a field of enormous scientific and economic interest. Recent success stories include 2G and 3G cellular voice and data services (e.g., GSM and UMTS), wireless local area networks (WiFi/IEEE 802.11x), wireless broadband access (WiMAX/IEEE 802.16x), and digital broadcast systems (DVB, DAB, DRM). On the physical layer side, traditional designs typically assume that the radio channel remains constant for the duration of a data block. However, researchers and system designers are increasingly shifting their attention to channels that may vary within a block. In addition to time dispersion caused by multipath propagation, these rapidly time-varying channels feature frequency dispersion resulting from the Doppler effect. They are, thus, often referred to as being “doubly dispersive.”