Synchronization in wireless communications

The last decade has witnessed an immense increase of wireless communications services in order to keep pace with the ever increasing demand for higher data rates combined with higher mobility. To satisfy this demand for higher data rates, the throughput over the existing transmission media had to be increased. Several techniques were proposed to boost up the data rate: multicarrier systems to combat selective fading, ultra wide band (UWB) communications systems to share the spectrum with other users, MIMO transmissions to increase the capacity of wireless links, iteratively decodable codes (e.g., turbo codes and LDPC codes) to improve the quality of the link, cognitive radios, and so forth

JAG: Reliable and Predictable Wireless Agreement under External Radio Interference

Wireless low-power transceivers used in sensor networks typically operate in unlicensed frequency bands that are subject to external radio interference caused by devices transmitting at much higher power.communication protocols should therefore be designed to be robust against such interference. A critical building block of many protocols at all layers is agreement on a piece of information among a set of nodes. At the MAC layer, nodes may need to agree on a new time slot or frequency channel, at the application layer nodes may need to agree on handing over a leader role from one node to another. Message loss caused by interference may break agreement in two different ways: none of the nodes uses the new information (time slot, channel, leader) and sticks with the previous assignment, or-even worse-some nodes use the new information and some do not. This may lead to reduced performance or failures. In this paper, we investigate the problem of agreement under external radio interference and point out the limitations of traditional message-based approaches. We propose JAG, a novel protocol that uses jamming instead of message transmissions to make sure that two neighbouring nodes agree, and show that it outperforms message-based approaches in terms of agreement probability, energy consumption, and time-to-completion. We further show that JAG can be used to obtain performance guarantees and meet the requirements of applications with real-time constraints.CONETReSens

Massive MIMO is a Reality -- What is Next? Five Promising Research Directions for Antenna Arrays

Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is no longer a "wild" or "promising" concept for future cellular networks - in 2018 it became a reality. Base stations (BSs) with 64 fully digital transceiver chains were commercially deployed in several countries, the key ingredients of Massive MIMO have made it into the 5G standard, the signal processing methods required to achieve unprecedented spectral efficiency have been developed, and the limitation due to pilot contamination has been resolved. Even the development of fully digital Massive MIMO arrays for mmWave frequencies - once viewed prohibitively complicated and costly - is well underway. In a few years, Massive MIMO with fully digital transceivers will be a mainstream feature at both sub-6 GHz and mmWave frequencies. In this paper, we explain how the first chapter of the Massive MIMO research saga has come to an end, while the story has just begun. The coming wide-scale deployment of BSs with massive antenna arrays opens the door to a brand new world where spatial processing capabilities are omnipresent. In addition to mobile broadband services, the antennas can be used for other communication applications, such as low-power machine-type or ultra-reliable communications, as well as non-communication applications such as radar, sensing and positioning. We outline five new Massive MIMO related research directions: Extremely large aperture arrays, Holographic Massive MIMO, Six-dimensional positioning, Large-scale MIMO radar, and Intelligent Massive MIMO.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Digital Signal Processin