Enabling Efficient, Robust, and Scalable Wireless Multi-Hop Networks: A Cross-Layer Approach Exploiting Cooperative Diversity

The practical performance in terms of throughput, robustness, and scalability of traditional Wireless Multihop Networks (WMNs) is limited. The key problem is that such networks do not allow for advanced physical layers, which typically require (a) spatial diversity via multiple antennas, (b) timely Channel State Information (CSI) feedback, and (c) a central instance that coordinates nodes. We propose Corridor-based Routing to address these issues. Our approach widens traditional hop-by-hop paths to span multiple nodes at each hop, and thus provide spatial diversity. As a result, at each hop, a group of transmitters cooperates at the physical layer to forward data to a group of receivers. We call two subsequent groups of nodes a stage. Since all nodes participating in data forwarding at a certain hop are part of the same fully connected stage, corridors only require one-hop CSI feedback. Further, each stage operates independently. Thus, Corridor-based Routing does not require a network-wide central instance, and is scalable. We design a protocol that builds end-to-end corridors. As expected, this incurs more overhead than finding a traditional WMN path. However, if the resulting corridor provides throughput gains, the overhead compensates after a certain number of transmitted packets. We adapt two physical layers to the aforementioned stage topology, namely, Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), and Interference Alignment (IA). In OFDMA, we allocate each subchannel to a link of the current stage which provides good channel conditions. As a result, we avoid deep fades, which enables OFDMA to transmit data robustly in scenarios in which traditional schemes cannot operate. Moreover, it achieves higher throughputs than such schemes. To minimize the transmission time at each stage, we present an allocation mechanism that takes into account both the CSI, and the amount of data that each transmitter needs to transmit. Further, we address practical issues and implement our scheme on software-defined radios. We achieve roughly 30% average throughput gain compared to a WMN not using corridors. We analyze OFDMA in theory, simulation, and practice. Our results match in all three domains. Further, we design a physical layer for corridor stages based on IA in the frequency domain. Our practical experiments show that IA often performs poorly because the decoding process augments noise. We find that the augmentation factor depends only on the channel coefficients of the subchannels that IA uses. We design a mechanism to determine which transmitters should transmit to which receivers on which subchannels to minimize noise. Since the number of possible combinations is very large, we use heuristics that reduce the search space significantly. Based on this design, we present the first practical frequency IA system. Our results show that our approach avoids noise augmentation efficiently, and thus operates robustly. We observe that IA is most suitable for stages with specific CSI and traffic conditions. In such scenarios, the throughput gain compared to a WMN not using corridors is 25% on average, and 150% in the best case. Finally, we design a decision engine which estimates the performance of both OFDMA and IA for a given stage, and chooses the one which achieves the highest throughput. We evaluate corridors with up to five stages, and achieve roughly 20% average throughput gain. We conclude that switching among physical layers to adapt to the particular CSI and traffic conditions of each stage is crucial for efficient and robust operation

Feedback Mechanisms for Centralized and Distributed Mobile Systems

The wireless communication market is expected to witness considerable growth in the immediate future due to increasing smart device usage to access real-time data. Mobile devices become the predominant method of Internet access via cellular networks (4G/5G) and the onset of virtual reality (VR), ushering in the wide deployment of multiple bands, ranging from TVWhite Spaces to cellular/WiFi bands and on to mmWave. Multi-antenna techniques have been considered to be promising approaches in telecommunication to optimize the utilization of radio spectrum and minimize the cost of system construction. The performance of multiple antenna technology depends on the utilization of radio propagation properties and feedback of such information in a timely manner. However, when a signal is transmitted, it is usually dispersed over time coming over different paths of different lengths due to reflections from obstacles or affected by Doppler shift in mobile environments. This motivates the design of novel feedback mechanisms that improve the performance of multi-antenna systems. Accurate channel state information (CSI) is essential to increasing throughput in multiinput, multi-output (MIMO) systems with digital beamforming. Channel-state information for the operation of MIMO schemes (such as transmit diversity or spatial multiplexing) can be acquired by feedback of CSI reports in the downlink direction, or inferred from uplink measurements assuming perfect channel reciprocity (CR). However, most works make the assumption that channels are perfectly reciprocal. This assumption is often incorrect in practice due to poor channel estimation and imperfect channel feedback. Instead, experiments have demonstrated that channel reciprocity can be easily broken by multiple factors. Specifically, channel reciprocity error (CRE) introduced by transmitter-receiver imbalance have been widely studied by both simulations and experiments, and the impact of mobility and estimation error have been fully investigated in this thesis. In particular, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have asymmetric behavior when communicating with one another and to the ground, due to differences in altitude that frequently occur. Feedback mechanisms are also affected by channel differences caused by the user’s body. While there has been work to specifically quantify the losses in signal reception, there has been little work on how these channel differences affect feedback mechanisms. In this dissertation, we perform system-level simulations, implement design with a software defined radio platform, conduct in-field experiments for various wireless communication systems to analyze different channel feedback mechanisms. To explore the feedback mechanism, we then explore two specific real world scenarios, including UAV-based beamforming communications, and user-induced feedback systems

Assessing the Feasibility of Wireless Networks for Managed Automated Driving (MAD): A Spotlight on Communication Technology

The primary objective of this research is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and Packet error rate (PER) and their implications on the overall performance of wireless communication systems. This thesis focuses to implement wireless communication between the remote infrastructureand vehicle using the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), with focus on the physical, data link layer

Vehicular Dynamic Spectrum Access: Using Cognitive Radio for Automobile Networks

Vehicular Dynamic Spectrum Access (VDSA) combines the advantages of dynamic spectrum access to achieve higher spectrum efficiency and the special mobility pattern of vehicle fleets. This dissertation presents several noval contributions with respect to vehicular communications, especially vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Starting from a system engineering aspect, this dissertation will present several promising future directions for vehicle communications, taking into consideration both the theoretical and practical aspects of wireless communication deployment. This dissertation starts with presenting a feasibility analysis using queueing theory to model and estimate the performance of VDSA within a TV whitespace environment. The analytical tool uses spectrum measurement data and vehicle density to find upper bounds of several performance metrics for a VDSA scenario in TVWS. Then, a framework for optimizing VDSA via artificial intelligence and learning, as well as simulation testbeds that reflect realistic spectrum sharing scenarios between vehicle networks and heterogeneous wireless networks including wireless local area networks and wireless regional area networks. Detailed experimental results justify the testbed for emulating a mobile dynamic spectrum access environment composed of heterogeneous networks with four dimensional mutual interference. Vehicular cooperative communication is the other proposed technique that combines the cooperative communication technology and vehicle platooning, an emerging concept that is expected to both increase highway utilization and enhance both driver experience and safety. This dissertation will focus on the coexistence of multiple vehicle groups in shared spectrum, where intra-group cooperation and inter-group competition are investigated in the aspect of channel access. Finally, a testbed implementation VDSA is presented and a few applications are developed within a VDSA environment, demonstrating the feasibility and benefits of some features in a future transportation system

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

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

Spectrum Optimisation in Wireless Communication Systems: Technology Evaluation, System Design and Practical Implementation

Two key technology enablers for next generation networks are examined in this thesis, namely Cognitive Radio (CR) and Spectrally Efficient Frequency Division Multiplexing (SEFDM). The first part proposes the use of traffic prediction in CR systems to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) for CR users. A framework is presented which allows CR users to capture a frequency slot in an idle licensed channel occupied by primary users. This is achieved by using CR to sense and select target spectrum bands combined with traffic prediction to determine the optimum channel-sensing order. The latter part of this thesis considers the design, practical implementation and performance evaluation of SEFDM. The key challenge that arises in SEFDM is the self-created interference which complicates the design of receiver architectures. Previous work has focused on the development of sophisticated detection algorithms, however, these suffer from an impractical computational complexity. Consequently, the aim of this work is two-fold; first, to reduce the complexity of existing algorithms to make them better-suited for application in the real world; second, to develop hardware prototypes to assess the feasibility of employing SEFDM in practical systems. The impact of oversampling and fixed-point effects on the performance of SEFDM is initially determined, followed by the design and implementation of linear detection techniques using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The performance of these FPGA based linear receivers is evaluated in terms of throughput, resource utilisation and Bit Error Rate (BER). Finally, variants of the Sphere Decoding (SD) algorithm are investigated to ameliorate the error performance of SEFDM systems with targeted reduction in complexity. The Fixed SD (FSD) algorithm is implemented on a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) to measure its computational complexity. Modified sorting and decomposition strategies are then applied to this FSD algorithm offering trade-offs between execution speed and BER