Fruit quality of Italian pomegranate (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Punica granatum</Emphasis> L.) autochthonous varieties

Pomegranate is getting an increasing attention for its health-promoting effects. Collection and characterization of plants of local sources has been performed, and five accessions have been propagated and cultivated in a collection field for extra situ investigations. Accessions differ for pomological traits and chemical composition. Three of them, MG1, MG2, and MG3, belong to typology with low-medium acidity and high sugar content, while the other two, Tordimonte A and B, belong to typology with high acidity. In the juice and in the peels’ extract of Tordimonte A accession a high level of punicalin has been found through chromatographic determinations, while the presence of punicalagin was found in the juice of accession MG1. The accessions MG1, MG2, and MG3 seem particularly suitable for direct commercialization of fruits due to the fruit traits and quality (sweet varieties), while Tordimonte A and B could be valuable for juice processing (sour varieties).     

A full-rank regularization technique for MMSE detection in multiuser CDMA systems

In multiuser code-division multiple-access (CDMA) environments, the ill-conditioning of the covariance matrix of the received signal may degrade the performance of minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) detectors, especially when few samples are available for the covariance matrix estimation. In order to mitigate this performance degradation, we propose a full-rank regularized MMSE detector based on the covariance matrix tapering (CMT) technique. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).     

SER performance of linear multiuser detectors for DS-CDMA downlink with transmitter nonlinear distortions

The aim of this paper is to examine the effects of the nonlinear distortions introduced by the high-power amplifier in the downlink of direct-sequence code-division multiple-access systems. By modeling the nonlinear distortion effects as a signal power loss and a superimposed colored Gaussian noise, we derive the symbol-error rate (SER) of the minimum mean-squared error (mmse) detector in additive white Gaussian noise channels. Successively, we make use of a semianalytical approach to obtain the SER performance of linear multiuser detectors, such as the RAKE, decorrelator, and mmse receiver, in frequency-selective fading channels. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the theoretical approach.     

Simple equalization of time-varying channels for OFDM

We present a block minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) equalizer for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems over time-varying multipath channels. The equalization algorithm exploits the band structure of the frequency-domain channel matrix by means of a band LDL/sup H/ factorization. The complexity of the proposed algorithm is linear in the number of subcarriers and turns out to be smaller with respect to a serial MMSE equalizer characterized by a similar performance.     

Theoretical analysis and performance of the decorrelating detector for DS-CDMA signals in nonlinear channels

We analyze the effects of the nonlinear distortions, introduced by the transmitting high-power amplifier (HPA), on the performance of the linear decorrelating multiuser detector in direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) downlink systems. By assuming and motivating the Gaussian distribution of the nonlinear distortion noise, the symbol-error rate (SER) and the total degradation (TD) has been derived theoretically in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and frequency-flat Rayleigh fading channels. Simulation results show that the analytical model is quite accurate in many scenarios.     

Local ML detection for multicarrier DS-CDMA downlink systems with grouped linear precoding

Abstract-A multicarrier direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (MC-DS-CDMA) downlink system with linear precoding over a group of subcarriers is considered. This scheme preserves user orthogonality independently of the underlying frequency-selective channel, collects the channel diversity and enables low-complexity decoding. In this context, we examine a local maximum-likelihood (LML) detection technique that searches for the maximum-likelihood (ML) solution in the neighborhood of the output provided by the minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) detector. By exploiting the soft information of the MMSE detector output and the precoder structure, we introduce useful criteria to reduce the computational complexity of the LML search. Simulations illustrate that the LML-MMSE detector with minimum neighborhood size yields considerable BER improvement with respect to MMSE, and outperforms a block decision-feedback equalization (DFE) approach at comparable complexity.