Acknowledgement

I take this opportunity to express my profound gratitude and respect to all those who assisted me throughout the work of this project. Working on my honours project was a daunting task. I am glad to have had encouragement, support, and advice of a great set of mentors, colleagues, and friends.

I want to start by thanking my supervisors, Prof. Alfredo (Alf) Terzoli and Mr. Mosiuoa (Mos) Tsietsi, for their help in guiding me with my research. Alf helped me understand how to do research while Mos helped me understand the technical parts of the research. I ascribe my little success to them. You gave me this opportunity to undertake the project and providing crucial feedback that influenced me and provided opportunity to undertake the project work in esteemed concern. I am also deeply thankful to Dr. Kundan Singhn (Columbia University) and Li.lichun for useful suggestions, gentle and soothing attitude and pointing me in the right direction this helped me a lot to learn and understand various concepts. I am also extremely grateful to my convergence research group colleagues (Ray, Walter, Grace, Shange, Kooper, Moses, Mathe and Zelalemss) at Rhodes University for advising and willing to help when ever I needed them. I must specifically thank Mathe for her fair criticism which brought the best out of me, for sacrificing her time to attend to my problems, thanks Mathe you are a superwoman.Zelalemss, you calmness approach in assisting me was highly appreciated. Thanks very much.

I must also take this opportunity to thank SANTED for sponsoring my studies. This work would have been significantly harder to do without the funding from Telkom SA, Comverse SA, Stortech, Tellabs, Easttel, Bright Ideas Projects 39 and THRIP through the Telkom Centre of Excellence at Rhodes University. Thank you so much. MeKauna, tangi unene (Thanks very much fo making it possible for me to study at Rhodes university and for your support).

Finally, I would like to thank my family. Your consistency in keeping me focused on my studies has been like a soccer referee refereeing a soccer game, my mother and cousins seemed to have a perfected the art of making me work on the most important tasks, either by sharing their wisdom, showing their love or by just reminding me that working hard always pays off.

Thank you guys!

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Erasmus Tyapa