Implementable Wireless Access for B3G Networks - III: Complexity Reducing Transceiver Structures

This article presents a comprehensive overview of some of the research conducted within Mobile VCE’s Core Wireless Access Research Programme,1 a key focus of which has naturally been on MIMO transceivers. The series of articles offers a coherent view of how the work was structured and comprises a compilation of material that has been presented in detail elsewhere (see references within the article). In this article MIMO channel measurements, analysis, and modeling, which were presented previously in the first article in this series of four, are utilized to develop compact and distributed antenna arrays. Parallel activities led to research into low-complexity MIMO single-user spacetime coding techniques, as well as SISO and MIMO multi-user CDMA-based transceivers for B3G systems. As well as feeding into the industry’s in-house research program, significant extensions of this work are now in hand, within Mobile VCE’s own core activity, aiming toward securing major improvements in delivery efficiency in future wireless systems through crosslayer operation

Millimeter Wave Communications with Reconfigurable Antennas

The highly sparse nature of propagation channels and the restricted use of radio frequency (RF) chains at transceivers limit the performance of millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Introducing reconfigurable antennas to mmWave can offer an additional degree of freedom on designing mmWave MIMO systems. This paper provides a theoretical framework for studying the mmWave MIMO with reconfigurable antennas. We present an architecture of reconfigurable mmWave MIMO with beamspace hybrid analog-digital beamformers and reconfigurable antennas at both the transmitter and the receiver. We show that employing reconfigurable antennas can provide throughput gain for the mmWave MIMO. We derive the expression for the average throughput gain of using reconfigurable antennas, and further simplify the expression by considering the case of large number of reconfiguration states. In addition, we propose a low-complexity algorithm for the reconfiguration state and beam selection, which achieves nearly the same throughput performance as the optimal selection of reconfiguration state and beams by exhaustive search.Comment: presented at IEEE ICC 201

Wireless Networks In-the-Loop: Software Radio as the Enabler

A software architecture to rapidly develop and test radio networks in real and physical environments is proposed. Radio network terminals are developed in software and run on generic hardware to maximize reconfigurability. Due to the software nature of the radio terminals, radio networks can be simulated in a virtual environment, where physical channels are emulated by software entities. Without any changes to the code base, the same waveform can also be run in a real, physical environment. This feature is used to rapidly switch between real and virtual networks, thus bridging the gap between simulation and physical reality. Aspects of the proposed system are implemented and demonstrated with the GNU Software Radio framework

Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead

While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks