Analytical Characterization and Optimum Detection of Nonlinear Multicarrier Schemes

It is widely recognized that multicarrier systems such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are suitable for severely time-dispersive channels. However, it is also recognized that multicarrier signals have high envelope fluctuations which make them especially sensitive to nonlinear distortion effects. In fact, it is almost unavoidable to have nonlinear distortion effects in the transmission chain. For this reason, it is essential to have a theoretical, accurate characterization of nonlinearly distorted signals not only to evaluate the corresponding impact of these distortion effects on the system’s performance, but also to develop mechanisms to combat them. One of the goals of this thesis is to address these challenges and involves a theoretical characterization of nonlinearly distorted multicarrier signals in a simple, accurate way. The other goal of this thesis is to study the optimum detection of nonlinearly distorted, multicarrier signals. Conventionally, nonlinear distortion is seen as a noise term that degrades the system’s performance, leading even to irreducible error floors. Even receivers that try to estimate and cancel it have a poor performance, comparatively to the performance associated to a linear transmission, even with perfect cancellation of nonlinear distortion effects. It is shown that the nonlinear distortion should not be considered as a noise term, but instead as something that contains useful information for detection purposes. The adequate receiver to take advantage of this information is the optimum receiver, since it makes a block-by-block detection, allowing us to exploit the nonlinear distortion which is spread along the signal’s band. Although the optimum receiver for nonlinear multicarrier schemes is too complex, due to its necessity to compare the received signal with all possible transmitted sequences, it is important to study its potential performance gains. In this thesis, it is shown that the optimum receiver outperforms the conventional detection, presenting gains not only relatively to conventional receivers that deal with nonlinear multicarrier signals, but also relatively to conventional receivers that deal with linear, multicarrier signals. We also present sub-optimum receivers which are able to approach the performance gains associated to the optimum detection and that can even outperform the conventional linear, multicarrier schemes

Reduced Complexity Sequential Monte Carlo Algorithms for Blind Receivers

Monte Carlo algorithms can be used to estimate the state of a system given relative observations. In this dissertation, these algorithms are applied to physical layer communications system models to estimate channel state information, to obtain soft information about transmitted symbols or multiple access interference, or to obtain estimates of all of these by joint estimation. Initially, we develop and analyze a multiple access technique utilizing mutually orthogonal complementary sets (MOCS) of sequences. These codes deliberately introduce inter-chip interference, which is naturally eliminated during processing at the receiver. However, channel impairments can destroy their orthogonality properties and additional processing becomes necessary. We utilize Monte Carlo algorithms to perform joint channel and symbol estimation for systems utilizing MOCS sequences as spreading codes. We apply Rao-Blackwellization to reduce the required number of particles. However, dense signaling constellations, multiuser environments, and the interchannel interference introduced by the spreading codes all increase the dimensionality of the symbol state space significantly. A full maximum likelihood solution is computationally expensive and generally not practical. However, obtaining the optimum solution is critical, and looking at only a part of the symbol space is generally not a good solution. We have sought algorithms that would guarantee that the correct transmitted symbol is considered, while only sampling a portion of the full symbol space. The performance of the proposed method is comparable to the Maximum Likelihood (ML) algorithm. While the computational complexity of ML increases exponentially with the dimensionality of the problem, the complexity of our approach increases only quadratically. Markovian structures such as the one imposed by MOCS spreading sequences can be seen in other physical layer structures as well. We have applied this partitioning approach with some modification to blind equalization of frequency selective fading channel and to multiple-input multiple output receivers that track channel changes. Additionally, we develop a method that obtains a metric for quantifying the convergence rate of Monte Carlo algorithms. Our approach yields an eigenvalue based method that is useful in identifying sources of slow convergence and estimation inaccuracy.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Douglas B. Williams; Committee Member: Brani Vidakovic; Committee Member: G. Tong zhou; Committee Member: Gordon Stuber; Committee Member: James H. McClella

Analysis and design of physical-layer network coding for relay networks

Physical-layer network coding (PNC) is a technique to make use of interference in wireless transmissions to boost the system throughput. In a PNC employed relay network, the relay node directly recovers and transmits a linear combination of its received messages in the physical layer. It has been shown that PNC can achieve near information-capacity rates. PNC is a new information exchange scheme introduced in wireless transmission. In practice, transmitters and receivers need to be designed and optimized, to achieve fast and reliable information exchange. Thus, we would like to ask: How to design the PNC schemes to achieve fast and reliable information exchange? In this thesis, we address this question from the following works: Firstly, we studied channel-uncoded PNC in two-way relay fading channels with QPSK modulation. The computation error probability for computing network coded messages at the relay is derived. We then optimized the network coding functions at the relay to improve the error rate performance. We then worked on channel coded PNC. The codes we studied include classical binary code, modern codes, and lattice codes. We analyzed the distance spectra of channel-coded PNC schemes with classical binary codes, to derive upper bounds for error rates of computing network coded messages at the relay. We designed and optimized irregular repeat-accumulate coded PNC. We modified the conventional extrinsic information transfer chart in the optimization process to suit the superimposed signal received at the relay. We analyzed and designed Eisenstein integer based lattice coded PNC in multi-way relay fading channels, to derive error rate performance bounds of computing network coded messages. Finally we extended our work to multi-way relay channels. We proposed a opportunistic transmission scheme for a pair-wise transmission PNC in a single-input single-output multi-way relay channel, to improve the sum-rate at the relay. The error performance of computing network coded messages at the relay is also improved. We optimized the uplink/downlink channel usage for multi-input multi-output multi-way relay channels with PNC to maximize the degrees of freedom capacity. We also showed that the system sum-rate can be further improved by a proposed iterative optimization algorithm

Proceedings of the Second International Mobile Satellite Conference (IMSC 1990)

Presented here are the proceedings of the Second International Mobile Satellite Conference (IMSC), held June 17-20, 1990 in Ottawa, Canada. Topics covered include future mobile satellite communications concepts, aeronautical applications, modulation and coding, propagation and experimental systems, mobile terminal equipment, network architecture and control, regulatory and policy considerations, vehicle antennas, and speech compression

Security protocols suite for machine-to-machine systems

Nowadays, the great diffusion of advanced devices, such as smart-phones, has shown that there is a growing trend to rely on new technologies to generate and/or support progress; the society is clearly ready to trust on next-generation communication systems to face today’s concerns on economic and social fields. The reason for this sociological change is represented by the fact that the technologies have been open to all users, even if the latter do not necessarily have a specific knowledge in this field, and therefore the introduction of new user-friendly applications has now appeared as a business opportunity and a key factor to increase the general cohesion among all citizens. Within the actors of this technological evolution, wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) networks are becoming of great importance. These wireless networks are made up of interconnected low-power devices that are able to provide a great variety of services with little or even no user intervention. Examples of these services can be fleet management, fire detection, utilities consumption (water and energy distribution, etc.) or patients monitoring. However, since any arising technology goes together with its security threats, which have to be faced, further studies are necessary to secure wireless M2M technology. In this context, main threats are those related to attacks to the services availability and to the privacy of both the subscribers’ and the services providers’ data. Taking into account the often limited resources of the M2M devices at the hardware level, ensuring the availability and privacy requirements in the range of M2M applications while minimizing the waste of valuable resources is even more challenging. Based on the above facts, this Ph. D. thesis is aimed at providing efficient security solutions for wireless M2M networks that effectively reduce energy consumption of the network while not affecting the overall security services of the system. With this goal, we first propose a coherent taxonomy of M2M network that allows us to identify which security topics deserve special attention and which entities or specific services are particularly threatened. Second, we define an efficient, secure-data aggregation scheme that is able to increase the network lifetime by optimizing the energy consumption of the devices. Third, we propose a novel physical authenticator or frame checker that minimizes the communication costs in wireless channels and that successfully faces exhaustion attacks. Fourth, we study specific aspects of typical key management schemes to provide a novel protocol which ensures the distribution of secret keys for all the cryptographic methods used in this system. Fifth, we describe the collaboration with the WAVE2M community in order to define a proper frame format actually able to support the necessary security services, including the ones that we have already proposed; WAVE2M was funded to promote the global use of an emerging wireless communication technology for ultra-low and long-range services. And finally sixth, we provide with an accurate analysis of privacy solutions that actually fit M2M-networks services’ requirements. All the analyses along this thesis are corroborated by simulations that confirm significant improvements in terms of efficiency while supporting the necessary security requirements for M2M networks

Telecommunication Systems

This book is based on both industrial and academic research efforts in which a number of recent advancements and rare insights into telecommunication systems are well presented. The volume is organized into four parts: "Telecommunication Protocol, Optimization, and Security Frameworks", "Next-Generation Optical Access Technologies", "Convergence of Wireless-Optical Networks" and "Advanced Relay and Antenna Systems for Smart Networks." Chapters within these parts are self-contained and cross-referenced to facilitate further study

WOFEX 2021 : 19th annual workshop, Ostrava, 1th September 2021 : proceedings of papers

The workshop WOFEX 2021 (PhD workshop of Faculty of Electrical Engineer-ing and Computer Science) was held on September 1st September 2021 at the VSB – Technical University of Ostrava. The workshop offers an opportunity for students to meet and share their research experiences, to discover commonalities in research and studentship, and to foster a collaborative environment for joint problem solving. PhD students are encouraged to attend in order to ensure a broad, unconfined discussion. In that view, this workshop is intended for students and researchers of this faculty offering opportunities to meet new colleagues.Ostrav

Proceedings of the Third International Mobile Satellite Conference (IMSC 1993)

Satellite-based mobile communications systems provide voice and data communications to users over a vast geographic area. The users may communicate via mobile or hand-held terminals, which may also provide access to terrestrial cellular communications services. While the first and second International Mobile Satellite Conferences (IMSC) mostly concentrated on technical advances, this Third IMSC also focuses on the increasing worldwide commercial activities in Mobile Satellite Services. Because of the large service areas provided by such systems, it is important to consider political and regulatory issues in addition to technical and user requirements issues. Topics covered include: the direct broadcast of audio programming from satellites; spacecraft technology; regulatory and policy considerations; advanced system concepts and analysis; propagation; and user requirements and applications