Time-Frequency Foundations of Communications

Abstract: In the tradition of Gabor's 1946 landmark paper [1], we advocate a time-frequency (TF) approach to communications. TF methods for communications have been proposed very early (see the box History). While several tutorial papers and book chapters on the topic are available (see, e.g., [2]-[4] and references therein), the goal of this paper is to present the fundamental aspects in a coherent and easily accessible manner. Specifically, we establish the role of TF methods in communications across a range of subject areas including TF dispersive channels, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), information-theoretic limits, and system identification and channel estimation. Furthermore, we present fundamental results that are stated in the literature for the continuous-time case in simple linear algebra terms.