Joint transceiver design and power optimization for wireless sensor networks in underground mines

Avec les grands développements des technologies de communication sans fil, les réseaux de capteurs sans fil (WSN) ont attiré beaucoup d’attention dans le monde entier au cours de la dernière décennie. Les réseaux de capteurs sans fil sont maintenant utilisés pour a surveillance sanitaire, la gestion des catastrophes, la défense, les télécommunications, etc. De tels réseaux sont utilisés dans de nombreuses applications industrielles et commerciales comme la surveillance des processus industriels et de l’environnement, etc. Un réseau WSN est une collection de transducteurs spécialisés connus sous le nom de noeuds de capteurs avec une liaison de communication distribuée de manière aléatoire dans tous les emplacements pour surveiller les paramètres. Chaque noeud de capteur est équipé d’un transducteur, d’un processeur de signal, d’une unité d’alimentation et d’un émetteur-récepteur. Les WSN sont maintenant largement utilisés dans l’industrie minière souterraine pour surveiller certains paramètres environnementaux, comme la quantité de gaz, d’eau, la température, l’humidité, le niveau d’oxygène, de poussière, etc. Dans le cas de la surveillance de l’environnement, un WSN peut être remplacé de manière équivalente par un réseau à relais à entrées et sorties multiples (MIMO). Les réseaux de relais multisauts ont attiré un intérêt de recherche important ces derniers temps grâce à leur capacité à augmenter la portée de la couverture. La liaison de communication réseau d’une source vers une destination est mise en oeuvre en utilisant un schéma d’amplification/transmission (AF) ou de décodage/transfert (DF). Le relais AF reçoit des informations du relais précédent et amplifie simplement le signal reçu, puis il le transmet au relais suivant. D’autre part, le relais DF décode d’abord le signal reçu, puis il le transmet au relais suivant au deuxième étage s’il peut parfaitement décoder le signal entrant. En raison de la simplicité analytique, dans cette thèse, nous considérons le schéma de relais AF et les résultats de ce travail peuvent également être développés pour le relais DF. La conception d’un émetteur/récepteur pour le relais MIMO multisauts est très difficile. Car à l’étape de relais L, il y a 2L canaux possibles. Donc, pour un réseau à grande échelle, il n’est pas économique d’envoyer un signal par tous les liens possibles. Au lieu de cela, nous pouvons trouver le meilleur chemin de la source à la destination qui donne le rapport signal sur bruit (SNR) de bout en bout le plus élevé. Nous pouvons minimiser la fonction objectif d’erreur quadratique moyenne (MSE) ou de taux d’erreur binaire (BER) en envoyant le signal utilisant le chemin sélectionné. L’ensemble de relais dans le chemin reste actif et le reste des relais s’éteint, ce qui permet d’économiser de l’énergie afin d’améliorer la durée de vie du réseau. Le meilleur chemin de transmission de signal a été étudié dans la littérature pour un relais MIMO à deux bonds mais est plus complexe pour un ...With the great developments in wireless communication technologies, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have gained attention worldwide in the past decade and are now being used in health monitoring, disaster management, defense, telecommunications, etc. Such networks are used in many industrial and consumer applications such as industrial process and environment monitoring, among others. A WSN network is a collection of specialized transducers known as sensor nodes with a communication link distributed randomly in any locations to monitor environmental parameters such as water level, and temperature. Each sensor node is equipped with a transducer, a signal processor, a power unit, and a transceiver. WSNs are now being widely used in the underground mining industry to monitor environmental parameters, including the amount of gas, water, temperature, humidity, oxygen level, dust, etc. The WSN for environment monitoring can be equivalently replaced by a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay network. Multi-hop relay networks have attracted significant research interest in recent years for their capability in increasing the coverage range. The network communication link from a source to a destination is implemented using the amplify-and-forward (AF) or decode-and-forward (DF) schemes. The AF relay receives information from the previous relay and simply amplifies the received signal and then forwards it to the next relay. On the other hand, the DF relay first decodes the received signal and then forwards it to the next relay in the second stage if it can perfectly decode the incoming signal. For analytical simplicity, in this thesis, we consider the AF relaying scheme and the results of this work can also be developed for the DF relay. The transceiver design for multi-hop MIMO relay is very challenging. This is because at the L-th relay stage, there are 2L possible channels. So, for a large scale network, it is not economical to send the signal through all possible links. Instead, we can find the best path from source-to-destination that gives the highest end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We can minimize the mean square error (MSE) or bit error rate (BER) objective function by sending the signal using the selected path. The set of relay in the path remains active and the rest of the relays are turned off which can save power to enhance network life-time. The best path signal transmission has been carried out in the literature for 2-hop MIMO relay and for multiple relaying it becomes very complex. In the first part of this thesis, we propose an optimal best path finding algorithm at perfect channel state information (CSI). We consider a parallel multi-hop multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) AF relay system where a linear minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) receiver is used at the destination. We simplify the parallel network into equivalent series multi-hop MIMO relay link using best relaying, where the best relay ..

Resource allocation and optimization techniques in wireless relay networks

Relay techniques have the potential to enhance capacity and coverage of a wireless network. Due to rapidly increasing number of smart phone subscribers and high demand for data intensive multimedia applications, the useful radio spectrum is becoming a scarce resource. For this reason, two way relay network and cognitive radio technologies are required for better utilization of radio spectrum. Compared to the conventional one way relay network, both the uplink and the downlink can be served simultaneously using a two way relay network. Hence the effective bandwidth efficiency is considered to be one time slot per transmission. Cognitive networks are wireless networks that consist of different types of users, a primary user (PU, the primary license holder of a spectrum band) and secondary users (SU, cognitive radios that opportunistically access the PU spectrum). The secondary users can access the spectrum of the licensed user provided they do not harmfully affect to the primary user. In this thesis, various resource allocation and optimization techniques have been investigated for wireless relay and cognitive radio networks

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

Review on Resource Efficient Relay Selection Scheme for Cognitive Radio Network

----------------------------------------------------------ABSTRACT----------------------------------------------------------

Optimal resource sharing and spectrum leasing in energy efficient relay-assisted networks

Assuming a bidirectional relay assisted network, we first study the problem of optimal resource sharing between two transceiver pairs. One of the pairs, referred to as the primary pair, owns the spectral resources while the other pair, called the secondary pair, is considered to own the relay infrastructure. Assuming amplify-and-forward relaying scheme and aiming to establish a cooperation between the two networks, we study three different design problems in a single carrier scenario. In the first approach we maximize the smaller of the secondary transceiver rates subject to two separate constraints on the total powers consumed in the primary and the secondary networks while providing a minimum data rate to the primary pair. In the second approach, we replace the per network power constraint by a constraint on the average total power consumed in both networks. The third approach combines the two aforementioned methods to materialize spectrum leasing and sharing for the case when the primary network is active with a certain probability. Then we investigate two different design approaches to the multi-carrier scenario. The first approach relies on maximizing the secondary network average sum-rate subject to two spectral power masks for the two networks while providing a minimum sum-rate to the primary pair in a multi-relay scenario. In the second approach, we replace the spectral power mask for each network by a constraint on the total power consumed in that network. Different from the previous studies, we further investigate the resource allocation problem between several energy harvesting relay nodes such that a unidirectional communication link is established between a pair of users and the harvested energy is optimally allocated between the relays such that the overall throughput of the network is maximized. Assuming the availability of full knowledge of channel state information and that of the energy packets, we maximize the throughput of the network under two sets of constraints on the status of the battery. We then consider the problem of maximizing the average throughput of the system, for the case when only the statistics of the channels are available

Collaborative Distributed Beamforming for Spectrum-Sharing Systems

The scarcity of bandwidth has always been the main obstacle for providing reliable high date-rate wireless links, which are in great demand to accommodate nowadays and immediate future wireless applications. In addition, recent reports have showed inefficient usage and under-utilization of the available bandwidth. Cognitive radio (CR) has recently emerged as a promising solution to enhance the spectrum utilization, where it offers the ability for unlicensed users to access the licensed spectrum opportunistically. On one hand, by allowing opportunistic spectrum access, the overall spectrum utilization can be improved. On the other hand, transmission from cognitive nodes can cause severe interference to the licensed users of the spectrum. This requires cognitive radio networks (CRNs) to consider two essential design targets, namely, maximizing the spectrum utilization and minimizing the interference caused to the primary users (PUs). Such interference can be reduced through proper resource allocation, power control or other degrees of freedom techniques such as beamforming. In this thesis, we aim to use joint distributed beamforming and cooperative relaying in spectrum-sharing systems in an effort to enhance the spectrum efficiency and improve the performance of the secondary system. We investigate a one-way cooperative spectrum-sharing system in the presence of one PU and multiple PUs. We study two relaying schemes, namely, decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying in conjunction with distributed optimal beamforming. We employ zero forcing beamforming (ZFB) as a sub-optimal scheme, and compare both approaches through simulations. For both schemes, we derive closed-form expressions and asymptotic expressions for the outage probability and bit error rate (BER) over independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels for binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) schemes. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the combination of the cooperative diversity and distributed beamforming in compensating for the loss in the secondary system's performance due to the primary user's co-channel interference (CCI). To further improve the spectrum efficiency, we employ distributed beamforming in two-way AF cooperative spectrum-sharing systems in the presence of multiple PUs. For this system, we investigate the transmission protocols over two, three and four time-slots. Our results show that the three time-slot protocol outperforms the two time-slot and four time-slot protocols in certain scenarios where it offers a good compromise between bandwidth efficiency and system performance. We extend the two-way relaying system to the DF scheme, where two practical two-way relaying strategies are investigated, namely, DF-XORing (bit-wise level) and DF-superposition (symbol-wise level). For each relaying strategy, we derive general optimal beamforming vectors and sup-optimal ZFB vectors at the relays. Employing ZFB, we present an analytical framework of the secondary system considering the effect of the primary-secondary mutual CCIs. Our results show that, when the received signals at the relays are weighted equally, the DF-XOR always outperforms both DF-superposition and AF relaying. In the last part of the thesis, we consider a limited feedback system model by assuming partial channel state information (CSI) of the interference channel between the secondary relays and primary receiver. In particular, the CSI feedback is limited only to the quantized channel direction information (CDI). To investigate the effect of the quantized CDI on the secondary system's performance, we derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability and the BER considering the mutual secondary-primary CCI. In the simulation results, we compare the system performance of the limited feedback with the perfect CSI. Our results show that the performance improves as the number of feedback bits increases

Energy harvesting-based spectrum access with incremental cooperation, relay selection and hardware noises

In this paper, we propose an energy harvesting (EH)-based spectrum access model in cognitive radio (CR) network. In the proposed scheme, one of available secondary transmitters (STs) helps a primary transmitter (PT) forward primary signals to a primary receiver (PR). Via the cooperation, the selected ST finds opportunities to access licensed bands to transmit secondary signals to its intended secondary receiver (SR). Secondary users are assumed to be mobile, hence, optimization of energy consumption for these users is interested. The EH STs have to harvest energy from the PT's radio-frequency (RF) signals to serve the PTPR communication as well as to transmit their signals. The proposed scheme employs incremental relaying technique in which the PR only requires the assistance from the STs when the transmission between PT and PR is not successful. Moreover, we also investigate impact of hardware impairments on performance of the primary and secondary networks. For performance evaluation, we derive exact and lower-bound expressions of outage probability (OP) over Rayleigh fading channel. Monte-Carlo simulations are performed to verify the theoretical results. The results present that the outage performance of both networks can be enhanced by increasing the number of the ST-SR pairs. In addition, the outage performance of both primary and secondary networks is severely degraded with the increasing of hardware impairment level. It is also shown that fraction of time used for EH and positions of the secondary users significantly impact on the system performance.Web of Science26125024