A Survey of Air-to-Ground Propagation Channel Modeling for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), particularly for small UAVs, due to their affordable prices, ease of availability, and ease of operability. Existing and future applications of UAVs include remote surveillance and monitoring, relief operations, package delivery, and communication backhaul infrastructure. Additionally, UAVs are envisioned as an important component of 5G wireless technology and beyond. The unique application scenarios for UAVs necessitate accurate air-to-ground (AG) propagation channel models for designing and evaluating UAV communication links for control/non-payload as well as payload data transmissions. These AG propagation models have not been investigated in detail when compared to terrestrial propagation models. In this paper, a comprehensive survey is provided on available AG channel measurement campaigns, large and small scale fading channel models, their limitations, and future research directions for UAV communication scenarios

Performance evaluation of fixed WiMax physical layer under high fading channels

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.A radio channel characteristic modelling is essential in every network planning. This project deals with the performance of WiMax networks in an outdoor environment while using fading channel models. The radio channels characteristics are analyzed by simulations have been done using Matlab programming. Stanford University Interim(SUI) Channels set was proposed to simulate the fixed broadband wireless access channel environments where IEEE 802.16d is to be deployed. It has six channel models that are grouped into three categories according to three typical different outdoor Terrains, in order to give a comprehensive study of fading channels on the overall performance of the system, WiMax system has been tested under SUI channels that modified into account for 30o directional antennas, with 90% cell coverage and with 99.9% reliability in its geographical covered area. Furthermore, in order to combat the fading which occurs in urban areas and improve the capacity and the throughput of the system, multiples antennas at both ends of communication link are used, the transmission gain obtained when using multiple antennas instead of only a single antenna. Space-time coding and maximum ratio combining for more than one transmit and receive antenna is implemented to allow performance investigations in various MIMO scenarios. It has been concluded that uses multiple antennas at the receiver offers a significant improvement of 3 dB of gain in the channel SNR. This thesis also contain implementation of all compulsory features of the WiMax OFDM physical layer specified in IEEE 802.16-2004 using Matlab coding. In order to combat the temporal variations in quality on a multipath fading channel, an adaptive modulation technique is used. This technique employs multiple modulation schemes to instantaneously adapt to the variations in the channel SNR, thus maximizing the system throughput and improving BER performance. WiMax transceiver has been tested with and without encoding and studied the effect of encoding on multipath channel. Testing the system with flexible channel bandwidth has been part of this thesis. Finally it has been explained in this thesis the affect of increasing the size of cyclic prefix on overall performance of WiMax system

Waveform-Defined Security: A Low-Cost Framework for Secure Communications

Communication security could be enhanced at physical layer but at the cost of complex algorithms and redundant hardware, which would render traditional physical layer security (PLS) techniques unsuitable for use with resource-constrained communication systems. This work investigates a waveform-defined security (WDS) framework, which differs fundamentally from traditional PLS techniques used in today’s systems. The framework is not dependent on channel conditions such as signal power advantage and channel state information (CSI). Therefore, the framework is more reliable than channel dependent beamforming and artificial noise (AN) techniques. In addition, the framework is more than just increasing the cost of eavesdropping. By intentionally tuning waveform patterns to weaken signal feature diversity and enhance feature similarity, eavesdroppers will not be able to identify correctly signal formats. The wrong classification of signal formats would result in subsequent detection errors even when an eavesdropper uses brute-force detection techniques. To get a robust WDS framework, three impact factors, namely training data feature, oversampling factor and bandwidth compression factor (BCF) offset, are investigated. An optimal WDS waveform pattern is obtained at the end after a joint study of the three factors. To ensure a valid eavesdropping model, artificial intelligence (AI) dependent signal classifiers are designed followed by optimal performance achievable signal detectors. To show the compatibility in available communication systems, the WDS framework is successfully integrated in IEEE 802.11a with nearly no adding computational complexity. Finally, a low-cost software-defined radio (SDR) experiment is designed to verify the feasibility of the WDS framework in resource-constrained communications

Enhancing the Physical Layer in V2V Communication Using OFDM - MIMO Techniques

Vehicular Ad hoc network (VANET) has recently been attracting the attention of researchers as a new technology in the wireless communication system. Vehicle-to-vehicle V2V communication can be considered an important way to help the drivers to satisfy requirements such as less congestion, accident warning, road exploration, etc. The propagation issues such as multipath fading significantly affect the reliability of V2V communication. The goal of this work is to enhance the performance of the physical layer PHY in V2V communication. However, the cellular phone channel has been used to evaluate the possibility of apply it in the vehicular communication V2V. The simulation results observed that the transmitted signal is affected by a multipath fading channel. In order to overcome this problem two techniques are used: Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technique and Multiple-Input-MultipleOutput (MIMO) diversity technique. The simulation results showed that the OFDM technique overcomes the multipath fading with high transmission power. On the other hand, MIMO diversity technique called Alamouti Space-Time Code for two transmitters and two receivers (MIMO 2x2) is used to improve the error degradation with less transmission power

Towards low-cost gigabit wireless systems at 60 GHz

The world-wide availability of the huge amount of license-free spectral space in the 60 GHz band provides wide room for gigabit-per-second (Gb/s) wireless applications. A commercial (read: low-cost) 60-GHz transceiver will, however, provide limited system performance due to the stringent link budget and the substantial RF imperfections. The work presented in this thesis is intended to support the design of low-cost 60-GHz transceivers for Gb/s transmission over short distances (a few meters). Typical applications are the transfer of high-definition streaming video and high-speed download. The presented work comprises research into the characteristics of typical 60-GHz channels, the evaluation of the transmission quality as well as the development of suitable baseband algorithms. This can be summarized as follows. In the first part, the characteristics of the wave propagation at 60 GHz are charted out by means of channel measurements and ray-tracing simulations for both narrow-beam and omni-directional configurations. Both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) are considered. This study reveals that antennas that produce a narrow beam can be used to boost the received power by tens of dBs when compared with omnidirectional configurations. Meanwhile, the time-domain dispersion of the channel is reduced to the order of nanoseconds, which facilitates Gb/s data transmission over 60-GHz channels considerably. Besides the execution of measurements and simulations, the influence of antenna radiation patterns is analyzed theoretically. It is indicated to what extent the signal-to-noise ratio, Rician-K factor and channel dispersion are improved by application of narrow-beam antennas and to what extent these parameters will be influenced by beam pointing errors. From both experimental and analytical work it can be concluded that the problem of the stringent link-budget can be solved effectively by application of beam-steering techniques. The second part treats wideband transmission methods and relevant baseband algorithms. The considered schemes include orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) and single carrier with frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE), which are promising candidates for Gb/s wireless transmission. In particular, the optimal linear equalization in the frei quency domain and associated implementation issues such as synchronization and channel estimation are examined. Bit error rate (BER) expressions are derived to evaluate the transmission performance. Besides the linear equalization techniques, a low-complexity inter-symbol interference cancellation technique is proposed to achieve much better performance of code-spreading systems such as MC-CDMA and SC-FDE. Both theoretical analysis and simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme offers great advantages as regards both complexity and performance. This makes it particularly suitable for 60-GHz applications in multipath environments. The third part treats the influence of quantization and RF imperfections on the considered transmission methods in the context of 60-GHz radios. First, expressions for the BER are derived and the influence of nonlinear distortions caused by the digital-to-analog converters, analog-to-digital converters and power amplifiers on the BER performance is examined. Next, the BER performance under the influence of phase noise and IQ imbalance is evaluated for the case that digital compensation techniques are applied in the receiver as well as for the case that such techniques are not applied. Finally, a baseline design of a low-cost Gb/s 60-GHz transceiver is presented. It is shown that, by application of beam-steering in combination with SC-FDE without advanced channel coding, a data rate in the order of 2 Gb/s can be achieved over a distance of 10 meters in a typical NLOS indoor scenario

Full-duplex wireless communications: challenges, solutions and future research directions

The family of conventional half-duplex (HD) wireless systems relied on transmitting and receiving in different time-slots or frequency sub-bands. Hence the wireless research community aspires to conceive full-duplex (FD) operation for supporting concurrent transmission and reception in a single time/frequency channel, which would improve the attainable spectral efficiency by a factor of two. The main challenge encountered in implementing an FD wireless device is the large power difference between the self-interference (SI) imposed by the device’s own transmissions and the signal of interest received from a remote source. In this survey, we present a comprehensive list of the potential FD techniques and highlight their pros and cons. We classify the SI cancellation techniques into three categories, namely passive suppression, analog cancellation and digital cancellation, with the advantages and disadvantages of each technique compared. Specifically, we analyse the main impairments (e.g. phase noise, power amplifier nonlinearity as well as in-phase and quadrature-phase (I/Q) imbalance, etc.) that degrading the SI cancellation. We then discuss the FD based Media Access Control (MAC)-layer protocol design for the sake of addressing some of the critical issues, such as the problem of hidden terminals, the resultant end-to-end delay and the high packet loss ratio (PLR) due to network congestion. After elaborating on a variety of physical/MAC-layer techniques, we discuss potential solutions conceived for meeting the challenges imposed by the aforementioned techniques. Furthermore, we also discuss a range of critical issues related to the implementation, performance enhancement and optimization of FD systems, including important topics such as hybrid FD/HD scheme, optimal relay selection and optimal power allocation, etc. Finally, a variety of new directions and open problems associated with FD technology are pointed out. Our hope is that this treatise will stimulate future research efforts in the emerging field of FD communication