Digital Pre-distortion for Interference Reduction in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks

Given the ever increasing reliance of today’s society on ubiquitous wireless access, the paradigm of dynamic spectrum access (DSA) as been proposed and implemented for utilizing the limited wireless spectrum more efficiently. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is growing in popularity for adoption into wireless services employing DSA frame- work, due to its high bandwidth efficiency and resiliency to multipath fading. While these advantages have been proven for many wireless applications, including LTE-Advanced and numerous IEEE wireless standards, one potential drawback of OFDM or its non-contiguous variant, NC-OFDM, is that it exhibits high peak-to-average power ratios (PAPR), which can induce in-band and out-of-band (OOB) distortions when the peaks of the waveform enter the compression region of the transmitter power amplifier (PA). Such OOB emissions can interfere with existing neighboring transmissions, and thereby severely deteriorate the reliability of the DSA network. A performance-enhancing digital pre-distortion (DPD) technique compensating for PA and in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) modulator distortions is proposed in this dissertation. Al- though substantial research efforts into designing DPD schemes have already been presented in the open literature, there still exists numerous opportunities to further improve upon the performance of OOB suppression for NC-OFDM transmission in the presence of RF front-end impairments. A set of orthogonal polynomial basis functions is proposed in this dissertation together with a simplified joint DPD structure. A performance analysis is presented to show that the OOB emissions is reduced to approximately 50 dBc with proposed algorithms employed during NC-OFDM transmission. Furthermore, a novel and intuitive DPD solution that can minimize the power regrowth at any pre-specified frequency in the spurious domain is proposed in this dissertation. Conventional DPD methods have been proven to be able to effectively reduce the OOB emissions that fall on top of adjacent channels. However more spectral emissions in more distant frequency ranges are generated by employing such DPD solutions, which are potentially in violation of the spurious emission limit. At the same time, the emissions in adjacent channel must be kept under the OOB limit. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there has not been extensive research conducted on this topic. Mathematical derivation procedures of the proposed algorithm are provided for both memoryless nonlinear model and memory-based nonlinear model. Simulation results show that the proposed method is able to provide a good balance of OOB emissions and emissions in the far out spurious domain, by reducing the spurious emissions by 4-5 dB while maintaining the adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) improvement by at least 10 dB, comparing to the PA output spectrum without any DPD

An End-to-End Multi-Standard OFDM Transceiver Architecture Using FPGA Partial Reconfiguration

Cognitive radios that are able to operate across multiple standards depending on environmental conditions and spectral requirements, are becoming more important as the demand for higher bandwidth and efficient spectrum use increases. Traditional custom ASIC implementations cannot support such flexibility, with standards changing at a faster pace, while software implementations of baseband communication fail to achieve performance and latency requirements. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) offer a hardware platform that combines flexibility, performance, and efficiency, and hence they have become key in meeting the requirements for flexible standards-based cognitive radio implementations. This paper proposes a dynamically reconfigurable end-to-end transceiver baseband that can switch between three popular OFDM standards, IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.16 and IEEE 802.22, operating in non-contiguous fashion with rapid switching. We show that com- bining FPGA partial reconfiguration with parameterised modules offers a reduction in reconfiguration time of 71% and a FIFO size reduction of 25% compared to conventional approaches, and provides the ability to buffer data during reconfiguration to prevent link interruption. The baseband exposes a simple interface which maximises compatibility with different cognitive engine implementations

SdrLift: A Domain-Specific Intermediate Hardware Synthesis Framework for Prototyping Software-Defined Radios

Modern design of Software-Defined Radio (SDR) applications is based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) due to their ability to be configured into solution architectures that are well suited to domain-specific problems while achieving the best trade-off between performance, power, area, and flexibility. FPGAs are well known for rich computational resources, which traditionally include logic, register, and routing resources. The increased technological advances have seen FPGAs incorporating more complex components that comprise sophisticated memory blocks, Digital Signal Processing (DSP) blocks, and high-speed interfacing to Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) bus. Gateware for programming FPGAs is described at a lowlevel of design abstraction using Register Transfer Language (RTL), typically using either VHSIC-HDL (VHDL) or Verilog code. In practice, the low-level description languages have a very steep learning curve, provide low productivity for hardware designers and lack readily available open-source library support for fundamental designs, and consequently limit the design to only hardware experts. These limitations have led to the adoption of High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools that raise design abstraction using syntax, semantics, and software development notations that are well-known to most software developers. However, while HLS has made programming of FPGAs more accessible and can increase the productivity of design, they are still not widely adopted in the design community due to the low-level skills that are still required to produce efficient designs. Additionally, the resultant RTL code from HLS tools is often difficult to decipher, modify and optimize due to the functionality and micro-architecture that are coupled together in a single High-Level Language (HLL). In order to alleviate these problems, Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) have been introduced to capture algorithms at a high level of abstraction with more expressive power and providing domain-specific optimizations that factor in new transformations and the trade-off between resource utilization and system performance. The problem of existing DSLs is that they are designed around imperative languages with an instruction sequence that does not match the hardware structure and intrinsics, leading to hardware designs with system properties that are unconformable to the high-level specifications and constraints. The aim of this thesis is, therefore, to design and implement an intermediatelevel framework namely SdrLift for use in high-level rapid prototyping of SDR applications that are based on an FPGA. The SdrLift input is a HLL developed using functional language constructs and design patterns that specify the structural behavior of the application design. The functionality of the SdrLift language is two-fold, first, it can be used directly by a designer to develop the SDR applications, secondly, it can be used as the Intermediate Representation (IR) step that is generated by a higher-level language or a DSL. The SdrLift compiler uses the dataflow graph as an IR to structurally represent the accelerator micro-architecture in which the components correspond to the fine-level and coarse-level Hardware blocks (HW Block) which are either auto-synthesized or integrated from existing reusable Intellectual Property (IP) core libraries. Another IR is in the form of a dataflow model and it is used for composition and global interconnection of the HW Blocks while making efficient interfacing decisions in an attempt to satisfy speed and resource usage objectives. Moreover, the dataflow model provides rules and properties that will be used to provide a theoretical framework that formally analyzes the characteristics of SDR applications (i.e. the throughput, sample rate, latency, and buffer size among other factors). Using both the directed graph flow (DFG) and the dataflow model in the SdrLift compiler provides two benefits: an abstraction of the microarchitecture from the high-level algorithm specifications and also decoupling of the microarchitecture from the low-level RTL implementation. Following the IR creation and model analyses is the VHDL code generation which employs the low-level optimizations that ensure optimal hardware design results. The code generation process per forms analysis to ensure the resultant hardware system conforms to the high-level design specifications and constraints. SdrLift is evaluated by developing representative SDR case studies, in which the VHDL code for eight different SDR applications is generated. The experimental results show that SdrLift achieves the desired performance and flexibility, while also conserving the hardware resources utilized

Spectrum Sensing Testbed Design for Cognitive Radio Applications

Abstract-In this paper, we proposed a cognitive radio (CR) implementation by using standard wireless communication laboratory equipments such as signal generator and spectrum analyzer. Equipments are controlled through MATLAB instrument control toolbox to carry out CR capabilities specified by IEEE 802.22 WRAN standard. Energy detection and maximum minimum eigenvalue detection algorithms are employed to sense spectrum for opportunistic access. The aim of this work is to provide a CR environment for spectrum sensing algorithms to perform a comparative study considering wireless microphone (WM) signals for research and educational purposes

An Architecture for Coexistence with Multiple Users in Frequency Hopping Cognitive Radio Networks

The radio frequency (RF) spectrum is a limited resource. Spectrum allotment disputes stem from this scarcity as many radio devices are con confined to a fixed frequency or frequency sequence. One alternative is to incorporate cognition within a configurable radio platform, therefore enabling the radio to adapt to dynamic RF spectrum environments. In this way, the radio is able to actively observe the RF spectrum, orient itself to the current RF environment, decide on a mode of operation, and act accordingly, thereby sharing the spectrum and operating in more flexible manner. This research presents a novel framework for incorporating several techniques for the purpose of adapting radio operation to the current RF spectrum environment. Specifically, this research makes six contributions to the field of cognitive radio: (1) the framework for a new hybrid hardware/software middleware architecture, (2) a framework for testing and evaluating clustering algorithms in the context of cognitive radio networks, (3) a new RF spectrum map representation technique, (4) a new RF spectrum map merging technique, (5) a new method for generating a random key-based adaptive frequency-hopping waveform, and (6) initial integration testing toward implementing the proposed system on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)

A Review of TV White Space Technology and its Deployments in Africa

The emergence of bandwidth-driven applications in the current wireless communication environment is driving a paradigm shift from the conventional fixed spectrum assignment policy to intelligent and dynamic spectrum access. Practical demands for efficient spectrum utilization have continued to drive the development of TV white space technology to provide affordable and reliable wireless connectivity. It is envisaged that transition from analogue transmission to Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) creates more spectrum opportunity for TV white space access and regulatory agencies of many countries had begun to explore this opportunity to address spectrum scarcity. To convey the evolutionary trends in the development of TV white space technology, this paper presents a comprehensive review on the contemporary approaches to TV white space technology and practical deployments of pilot projects in Africa. The paper outlines the activities in TV white space technology, which include regulations and standardization, commercial trials, research challenges, open issues and future research directions. Furthermore, it also provides an overview of the current industrial trends in TV white space technology which demonstrates that cognitive radio as an enabling technology for TV white space technology

Rapid Prototyping Interface for Software Defined Radio Experimentation

This thesis focuses on a user-friendly software-defined radio (SDR) development workflow for prototyping, research and education in wireless communications and networks. Specifically, a Simulink interface to the Universal Software Radio Peripheral 2(USRP2) SDR platform is devised in order to enable over-the-air data transmission and reception using a Simulink signal source and sink, in addition to controlling a subset of the hardware resources of the USRP2 platform. Using the USRP2 as the RF front end, this interface will use Simulink for software radio development and signal processing libraries of the digital baseband component of the communication transceiver design. This combination of hardware and software will enable the rapid design, implementation, and verification of digital communications systems in simulation, while allowing the user to easily test the system with near real time over-the-air transmission. The use of Simulink and MATLAB for communication transceiver development will provide streaming access to the USRP2 without the steep learning curve associated with current workflows. These widely available software packages and the USRP2 will make digital communication system prototyping both affordable yet highly versatile, enabling researchers and industry engineers to conduct studies into new wireless communications and networking architectures including cognitive radio. Furthermore, the interface will allow users to become familiar with tools used in industry while learning communications and networking concepts

A Survey of Cognitive Radio Access to TV White Spaces

Cognitive radio is being intensively researched as the enabling technology for license-exempt access to the so-called TV White Spaces (TVWS), large portions of spectrum in the UHF/VHF bands which become available on a geographical basis after digital switchover. Both in the US, and more recently, in the UK the regulators have given conditional endorsement to this new mode of access. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in technology, regulation, and standardisation of cognitive access to TVWS. It examines the spectrum opportunity and commercial use cases associated with this form of secondary access