Infrastructure Enabled Autonomy Acting as an Intelligent Transportation System for Autonomous Cars

Autonomous cars have the ability to increase safety, efficiency, and speed of travel. Yet many see a point at which stand-alone autonomous agents populate an area too densely, creating increased risk - particularly when each agent is operating and making decisions on its own and in its own self-interest. The problem at hand then becomes how to best implement and scale this new technology and structure in such a way that it can keep pace with a rapidly changing world, benefitting not just individuals, but societies. This research approaches the challenge by developing an intelligent transportation system that relies on an infrastructure. The solution lies in the removal of sensing and high computational tasks from the vehicles, allowing static ground stations with multi sensor-sensing packs to sense the surrounding environment and direct the vehicles safely from start to goal. On a high level, the Infrastructure Enabled Autonomy system (IEA) uses less hardware, bandwidth, energy, and money to maintain a controlled environment for a vehicle to operate when in highly congested environments. Through the development of background detection algorithms, this research has shown the advantage of static MSSPs analyzing the same environment over time, and carrying an increased reliability from fewer unknowns about the area of interest. It was determined through testing that wireless commands can sufficiently operate a vehicle in a limited agent environment, and do not bottleneck the system. The horizontal trial outcome illustrated that a switching MSSP state of the IEA system showed similar loop time, but a greatly increased standard deviation. However, after performing a t-test with a 95 percent confidence interval, the static and switching MSSP state trials were not significantly different. The final testing quantified the cross track error. For a straight path, the vehicle being controlled by the IEA system had a cross track error less than 12 centimeters, meaning between the controller, network lag, and pixel error, the system was robust enough to generate stable control of the vehicle with minimal error

The spectral X-ray imaging data acquisition (SpeXIDAQ) framework

Photon counting X-ray imagers have found their way into the mainstream scientific community in recent years, and have become important components in many scientific setups. These camera systems are in active development, with output data rates increasing significantly with every new generation of devices. A different class of PCD (Photon Counting Detector) devices has become generally available, where camera data output is no longer a matrix of photon counts but instead direct measurements of the deposited charge per pixel in every frame, which requires significant off-camera processing. This type of PCD, called a hyperspectral X-ray camera due to its fully spectroscopic output, yet again increases the demands put on the acquisition and processing backend. Not only are bandwidth requirements increased, but the need to do extensive data processing is also introduced with these hyperspectral PCD devices. To cope with these new developments the Spectral X-ray Imaging Data Acquisition framework (SpeXIDAQ) has been developed. All aspects of the imaging pipeline are handled by the SpeXIDAQ framework: from detector control and frame grabbing, to processing, storage and live visualisation during experiments

Survey of Spectrum Sharing for Inter-Technology Coexistence

Increasing capacity demands in emerging wireless technologies are expected to be met by network densification and spectrum bands open to multiple technologies. These will, in turn, increase the level of interference and also result in more complex inter-technology interactions, which will need to be managed through spectrum sharing mechanisms. Consequently, novel spectrum sharing mechanisms should be designed to allow spectrum access for multiple technologies, while efficiently utilizing the spectrum resources overall. Importantly, it is not trivial to design such efficient mechanisms, not only due to technical aspects, but also due to regulatory and business model constraints. In this survey we address spectrum sharing mechanisms for wireless inter-technology coexistence by means of a technology circle that incorporates in a unified, system-level view the technical and non-technical aspects. We thus systematically explore the spectrum sharing design space consisting of parameters at different layers. Using this framework, we present a literature review on inter-technology coexistence with a focus on wireless technologies with equal spectrum access rights, i.e. (i) primary/primary, (ii) secondary/secondary, and (iii) technologies operating in a spectrum commons. Moreover, we reflect on our literature review to identify possible spectrum sharing design solutions and performance evaluation approaches useful for future coexistence cases. Finally, we discuss spectrum sharing design challenges and suggest future research directions

Design and evaluation of a framework for cooperative and adaptive QoS control of DSRC network for road safety applications

Dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) are a promising vehicle communication technique for collaborative road safety applications (CSA). However, road safety applications require highly reliable and timely wireless communications, which present big challenges to DSRC based vehicle networks on effective and robust quality of services (QoS) provisioning due to the random channel access method applied in the DSRC technique. In this paper we examine the QoS control problem for CSA in the DSRC based vehicle networks and presented an overview of the research work towards the QoS control problem. After an analysis of the system application requirements and the DSRC vehicle network features, we propose a framework for cooperative and adaptive QoS control, which is believed to be a key for the success of DSRC on supporting effective collaborative road safety applications. A core design in the proposed QoS control framework is that network feedback and cross-layer design are employed to collaboratively achieve targeted QoS. A design example of cooperative and adaptive rate control scheme is implemented and evaluated, with objective of illustrating the key ideas in the framework. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed rate control schemes in providing highly available and reliable channel for emergency safety messages

Belle II Technical Design Report

The Belle detector at the KEKB electron-positron collider has collected almost 1 billion Y(4S) events in its decade of operation. Super-KEKB, an upgrade of KEKB is under construction, to increase the luminosity by two orders of magnitude during a three-year shutdown, with an ultimate goal of 8E35 /cm^2 /s luminosity. To exploit the increased luminosity, an upgrade of the Belle detector has been proposed. A new international collaboration Belle-II, is being formed. The Technical Design Report presents physics motivation, basic methods of the accelerator upgrade, as well as key improvements of the detector.Comment: Edited by: Z. Dole\v{z}al and S. Un

Spectrum Map and its Application in Cognitive Radio Networks

Recent measurements on radio spectrum usage have revealed the abundance of underutilized bands of spectrum that belong to licensed users. This necessitated the paradigm shift from static to dynamic spectrum access. Cognitive radio based secondary networks that utilize such unused spectrum holes in the licensed band, have been proposed as a possible solution to the spectrum crisis. The idea is to detect times when a particular licensed band is unused and use it for transmission without causing interference to the licensed user. We argue that prior knowledge about occupancy of such bands and the corresponding achievable performance metrics can potentially help secondary networks to devise effective strategies to improve utilization. In this work, we use Shepard\u27s method of interpolation to create a spectrum map that provides a spatial distribution of spectrum usage over a region of interest. It is achieved by intelligently fusing the spectrum usage reports shared by the secondary nodes at various locations. The obtained spectrum map is a continuous and differentiable 2-dimension distribution function in space. With the spectrum usage distribution known, we show how different radio spectrum and network performance metrics like channel capacity, secondary network throughput, spectral efficiency, and bit error rate can be estimated. We show the applicability of the spectrum map in solving the intra-cell channel allocation problem in centralized cognitive radio networks, such as IEEE 802.22. We propose a channel allocation scheme where the base station allocates interference free channels to the consumer premise equipments (CPE) using the spectrum map that it creates by fusing the spectrum usage information shared by some CPEs. The most suitable CPEs for information sharing are chosen on a dynamic basis using an iterative clustering algorithm. Next, we present a contention based media access control (MAC) protocol for distributed cognitive radio network. The unlicensed secondary users contend among themselves over a common control channel. Winners of the contention get to access the available channels ensuring high utilization and minimum collision with primary incumbent. Last, we propose a multi-channel, multi-hop routing protocol with secondary transmission power control. The spectrum map, created and maintained by a set of sensors, acts as the basis of finding the best route for every source destination pair. The proposed routing protocol ensures primary receiver protection and maximizes achievable link capacity. Through simulation experiments we show the correctness of the prediction model and how it can be used by secondary networks for strategic positioning of secondary transmitter-receiver pairs and selecting the best candidate channels. The simulation model mimics realistic distribution of TV stations for urban and non-urban areas. Results validate the nature and accuracy of estimation, prediction of performance metrics, and efficiency of the allocation process in an IEEE 802.22 network. Results for the proposed MAC protocol show high channel utilization with primary quality of service degradation within a tolerable limit. Performance evaluation of the proposed routing scheme reveals that it ensures primary receiver protection through secondary power control and maximizes route capacity

Heterogeneous Dynamic Spectrum Access in Cognitive Radio enabled Vehicular Networks Using Network Softwarization

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) is regarded as an emerging technology to solve the spectrum scarcity problem created by static spectrum allocation. In DSA, unlicensed users access idle channels opportunistically, without creating any harmful interference to licensed users. This method will also help to incorporate billions of wireless devices for different applications such as Internet-of-Things, cyber-physical systems, smart grids, etc. Vehicular networks for intelligent transportation cyber-physical systems is emerging concept to improve transportation security and reliability. IEEE 802.11p standard comprising of 7 channels is dedicated for vehicular communications. These channels could be highly congested and may not be able to provide reliable communications in urban areas. Thus, vehicular networks are expected to utilize heterogeneous wireless channels for reliable communications. In this thesis, real-time opportunistic spectrum access in cloud based cognitive radio network (ROAR) architecture is used for energy efficiency and dynamic spectrum access in vehicular networks where geolocation of vehicles is used to find idle channels. Furthermore, a three step mechanism to detect geolocation falsification attacks is presented. Performance is evaluated using simulation results