In cellular mobile radio systems, the directional inhomogeneity of the mobile radio channel can be exploited by smart antennas to increase the spectral efficiency. In this paper, a novel smart antenna concept applying receiver antenna diversity at the uplink receiver is investigated for a time-slotted code-division multiple-access (CDMA) mobile radio air interface termed time-division CDMA (TD-CDMA), which has been se- lected by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) in January 1998 to form part of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) air interface standard. First, a combined direction-of-arrival (DOA) and joint channel estimation scheme is presented, which is based on DOA estimation using the Unitary ESPRIT algorithm and maximum likelihood estimation of the channel impulse responses associated with the estimated DOA's, which can also be used as an input for advanced mobile positioning schemes in UMTS. The performance of the combined DOA and joint channel estimation is compared with the conventional channel estimation through simulations in rural and urban propagation environments. Moreover, a novel joint data detection scheme is considered, which explicitly takes into account the signal DOA's and the associated channel impulse responses. The link level performance of a TD-CDMA mobile radio system using these novel schemes is evaluated by Monte Carlo simulations of data transmission, and average bit error rates (BER's) are determined for rural and urban propagation environments. The simulation results indicate that, depending on the propagation environment, the exploitation of the knowledge of the directional inhomogeneity of the mobile radio channel can lead to considerable system performance enhancements.

In recent years the Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) Task Group (TG) has been working on proposing a series of standards to provide Ethernet with hard real-time guarantees, online management of the traffic and fault tolerance mechanisms. In this way the TG expects to create the network technology of future novel applications with real-time and reliability requirements. TSN proposes using spatial redundancy to increase the reliability of Ethernet networks, but using spatial redundancy to tolerate temporary faults is not a cost-effective solution. For this reason, we propose to use time redundancy to tolerate temporary faults in the links of TSN-based networks. Specifically, we have proposed the Proactive Transmission of Replicated Frames (PTRF) mechanism, which consists in transmitting several copies of each frame in a preventive manner. In this article we present for the first time a detailed description of the mechanism, with the three different approaches we have designed. We also present the implementation of PTRF in a real TSN prototype. Furthermore, we carry out a qualitative comparison of the different approaches of the mechanism and we experimentally evaluate the approaches of the mechanism in a quantitative manner from three perspectives: the end-to-end delay, the jitter and the bandwidth consumption.

For a given channel allocation, the capacity and quality of communications of cellular radio systems using direct sequence/code-division multiple-access (DS/CDMA) can be increased by using a transmitter power control scheme to combat the near-far problem. Centralized and distributed transmitter power control schemes used to minimize the outage probability due to cochannel interference in cellular radio systems have been investigated in previous papers. In these papers, however, the effect of adjacent channel interference (near-far problem) is neglected. The goal of our paper is, based on the previous papers models and ideas, to investigate transmitter power control strategies appropriate for DS/CDMA high capacity cellular radio systems. Monte-Carlo simulation results of these power control schemes indicate that substantial system capacity gains can be obtained with respect to conventional systems. It is also shown that the performance of properly designed distributed algorithms can closely approximate that of the optimum centralized power control scheme.