OSTBC MIMO Transceiver System For Radio Signal Propagation Challenges Over Irregular Terrain In The Northern Cape, South Africa

Abstract

The Northern Cape Province in South Africa, along the Orange River valley, has radio signal reception challenges due to high mountain ranges. The South African Electricity Authority- Eskom has High Voltage assets to monitor in this region. However, due to radio signal reception challenges, it is impossible to monitor their assets via the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. This research aims at developing a Very-High Frequency Orthogonal Space – Time Block Code Multiple-In Multiple-Out (VHF OSTBC MIMO) transceiver simulation model over a Rayleigh fading channel to address the radio communication challenges along the Orange River. The transceiver simulation model will resemble the harsh multipath environment presented by the mountainous terrain in the Northern Cape Province. In environments with irregular terrain such as hills and mountains, the radio signal comes across phenomena such as reflection, refraction, diffraction and scattering. Therefore, the transmitted radio signal undergoes heavy fading and inter-symbol interference (ISI), thus negatively impacting radio link performance. However, the Multiple-input- multiple-output (MIMO) system, which uses multiple antennas both at the transmitter and receiver, takes advantage of this drawback and makes use of the high levels of multi-paths to operate at an optimum. MIMO creates spatial diversity which accounts for better radio link performance, it also yields increased capacity and improves Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) while reducing bit errors. Therefore, MIMO is one of the systems of interest considered best to exploit in this research. Space- time coding (STC) has also been considered because of its ability to increase the reliability of the channel and for its signal decoding simplicity at the receiver. A suitable lower frequency band to use for this research was also investigated. The most attractive characteristic of the low frequency (LF) band that was sought after was its ability to easily diffract over large obstacles than higher frequencies. The Very High Frequency (VHF) band at 70 MHz was found to meet the requirements for the model used. Therefore, this dissertation presents the simulation results of a VHF OSTBC MIMO transceiver model over a Rayleigh fading channel that is typical of the mountainous regions of the Northern Cape Province in South Africa, to help overcome radio signal reception challenges. The following are the different component blocks that made up the model: Random Binary Generator (RBG), Quadrature Phase Shift Key (QPSK) Modulator, Orthogonal Space-Time Block Code (OSTBC) Encoder, Multiple-In Multiple-Out (MIMO) Rayleigh Fading Channel, Added White Gaussian Noise (AWGN), Orthogonal Space-Time Block Code (OSTBC) Decoder and a Quadrature Phase Shift Key (QPSK) Demodulator. The simulation results in this research were generated using the following software packages namely: Matlab/Simulink, Atoll Wireless Network and Pathloss 4 Network. The Matlab/Simulink software was used to determine the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of four different OSTBC MIMO systems, each using different antenna arrays. TheMatlab RF Propagation Tool-SiteViewer was used to generate coverage predictions and receive signal strength (RSS) levels of three VHF OSTBC MIMO systems operating at three different low VHF frequency bands. The Atoll Wireless Network software was used to generate coverage plot predictions. The Pathloss 4 software was used to generate Line of Sight (LoS) predictions. The results have shown that employing the low band VHF OSTBC MIMO transceiver system in irregular terrain environments can greatly improve radio signal reception, data speeds, bandwidth efficiency and link reliability.