Advisor:
- Prof. Tayeb A. Denidni, INRS-EMT.

Co-advisors:
- Prof. Sofiène Affes, INRS-EMT.
- Dr. Charles Despins, PROMPT-Québec.

Biography: Salma Aït Fares has received the M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, University of Quebec in Trois Rivières, Trois Rivières, QC, Canada in 2003. She is pursuing her Ph.D. program in telecommunications at INRS-ÉMT, Montréal, QC, Canada. Her current research interests have focused on Smart adaptive antenna array and MIMO technology for mobile communications, Adaptive signal processing applied to wireless communications and OFDM systems.

Distinctions:
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellowships for Foreign Researchers, 2007-2008.
- International Tuition Fee Remission Award, University of Quebec at Trois Rivières, Trois-Rivières, QC, Canada, from 05-2000 to 04- 2001.

Research topic: Study and design of smart antennas array for application in wireless underground communications.

Research summary: The main cause of degradation of communication quality in harsh confined environments, such as underground mines, is multipath fading as it is typically more severe than CCI. This multipath phenomenon arises when a transmitted signal undergoes reflection from various obstacles in the propagation environment. This gives rise to multiple waves arriving at the receiver from different directions with different amplitudes, phases and time delays, which inflicts inter-symbol interference (ISI) and intra-symbol interference (isi) on the received signal and consequently time dispersionand fading. To provide a remedy, adaptive equalizers, error-correcting codes, diversity, RAKE receivers for CDMA, Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, and adaptive antenna arrays (AAA) beamforming have been proposed. Among these, AAA beamforming techniques exploit spatial diversity by using multiple antennas. They have the potential of achieving high data rates and increasing the capacity of mobile services by effectively reducing the multipath effect and CCI. The main objective of this thesis is to develop a blind path synchronization method, based on the AAA beamforming, in order to combat the fading effect and to maximize the received power with a limited number of antenna elements. We have proposed in this study new path synchronization techniques based on blind spatial-domain path-diversity beamforming to remedy the ISI and isi problems with a few antenna elements.

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