Enabling Accurate Cross-Layer PHY/MAC/NET Simulation Studies of Vehicular Communication Networks

Vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communications is required for numerous applications that aim at improving traffic safety and efficiency. In this setting, however, gauging system performance through field trials can be very expensive especially when the number of studied vehicles is high. Therefore, many existing studies have been conducted using either network or physical layer simulators; both approaches are problematic. Network simulators typically abstract physical layer details (coding, modulation, radio channels, receiver algorithms, etc.) while physical layer ones do not consider overall network characteristics (topology, network traffic types, and so on). In particular, network simulators view a transmitted frame as an indivisible unit, which leads to several limitations. First, the impact of the vehicular radio channel is typically not reflected in its appropriate context. Further, interference due to frame collisions is not modeled accurately ( if at all) and, finally, the benefits of advanced signal processing techniques, such as interference cancellation, are difficult to assess. To overcome these shortcomings we have integrated a detailed physical layer simulator into the popular NS-3 network simulator. This approach aims to bridge the gap between the physical and network layer perspectives, allow for more accurate channel and physical layer models, and enable studies on cross-layer optimization. In this paper, we exemplify our approach by integrating an IEEE 802.11a and p physical layer simulator with NS-3. Further, we validate the augmented NS-3 simulator against an actual IEEE 802.11 wireless testbed and illustrate the additional value of this integration

Characterization, Avoidance and Repair of Packet Collisions in Inter-Vehicle Communication Networks

This work proposes a combined and accurate simulation of wireless channel, physical layer and networking aspects in order to bridge the gaps between the corresponding research communities. The resulting high fidelity simulations enable performance optimizations across multiple layers, and are used in the second part of this thesis to evaluate the impact of fast-fading channel characteristics on Carrier-Sense Multiple Access, and to quantify the benefit of successive interference cancellation

Characterization, Avoidance and Repair of Packet Collisions in Inter-Vehicle Communication Networks

This work proposes a combined and accurate simulation of wireless channel, physical layer and networking aspects in order to bridge the gaps between the corresponding research communities. The resulting high fidelity simulations enable performance optimizations across multiple layers, and are used in the second part of this thesis to evaluate the impact of fast-fading channel characteristics on Carrier-Sense Multiple Access, and to quantify the benefit of successive interference cancellation

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

Using Commercial Ray Tracing Software to Drive an Attenuator-Based Mobile WIreless Testbed

We propose and build a prototype architecture for a laboratory-based mobile wireless testbed that uses highly detailed, site-specific channel models to dynamically configure a many-to-many analog channel emulator. Unlike similar systems that have used abstract channel models with few details from the physical environment, we take advantage of commercial ray tracing software and high-performance hardware to make realistic signal power and characteristics predictions in a highly detailed environment. The ray tracing results are used to program a many-to-many analog channel emulator. Using this system, we can conveniently, repeatedly, and realistically subject real wireless nodes to the effects of mobility. We use our prototype system and a detailed CAD model of the University of Maryland campus to compare field test measurements to measurements made from the same devices in the same physical scenario in the testbed. This thesis presents the design, implementation, and validation phases of the proposed mobile wireless testbed

Design, Implementation and Characterization of a Cooperative Communications System

Cooperative communications is a class of techniques which seek to improve reliability and throughput in wireless systems by pooling the resources of distributed nodes. While cooperation can occur at different network layers and time scales, physical layer cooperation at symbol time scales offers the largest benefit. However, symbol level cooperation poses significant implementation challenges, especially in the context of a network of distributed nodes. We first present the design and implementation of a complete cooperative physical layer transceiver, built from scratch on the Wireless Open-Access Research Platform (WARP). In our implementation fully distributed nodes employ physical layer cooperation at symbol time scales without requiring a central synchronization source. Our design supports per-packet selection of non-cooperative or cooperative communication, with cooperative links utilizing either amplify-and-forward or decode-and-forward relaying. A single design implements transmission, reception and relaying, allowing each node to assume the role of source, destination or relay per packet. We also present experimental methodologies for evaluating our design and extensive experimental results of our transceiver's performance under a variety of topologies and propagation conditions. Our methods are designed to test both overall performance and to isolate and understand the underlying causes of performance limitations. Our results clearly demonstrate significant performance gains (more than 50× improvement in PER in some topologies) provided by physical layer cooperation even when subject to the constraints of a real-time implementation. As with all our work on WARP, our transceiver design and experimental framework are available via the open-source WARP repository for use by other wireless researchers

A survey of V2V channel modeling for VANET simulations

International audienceMost Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) network protocols are evaluated by simulation. However in most network simulators, the physical layer suffers from a lack of realism. Therefore, realistic V2V channel modeling has become a crucial issue in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) networks. V2V channels are known to exhibit specific features which imply the design of new simulation models. In this survey paper, we first recall the main physical features of such wireless time and frequency dispersive channels. Next, three "simulation-ready" V2V channel models found in the literature are reviewed. Finally, two complete VANET simulation frameworks are presented. They illustrate the importance of a realistic channel and physical layer modeling in vehicular networking

Digital self-interference cancellation in full-duplex wireless systems

Present half-duplex (HD) wireless technologies are currently striving to meet the growing demand of high speed wireless connectivity. Recent works have demonstrated the feasibility and potential of full-duplex (FD) wireless systems to double the spectral efficiency of HD systems, which makes FD communication an attractive solution to address the present wireless spectral congestion. Self-interference (SI) cancellation is the key to FD communication and the residual SI is the major factor determining the performance of an FD radio. At the receiver of an FD system, SI suppression is achieved in two stages, first in analog domain at RF level, and then in digital domain at baseband level. Digital SI cancellation, being the last stage, plays a crucial role, as it primarily quantifies the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the desired signal. In this thesis, we present a novel frequency domain approach for the reconstruction of SI signal in digital domain. For the realization and performance evaluation of the proposed and the existing time domain reconstruction approaches with different SI channel estimation algorithms, we have considered the baseband model of FD implemented on an OFDM system under time dispersive fading channel. We have evaluated the performance of digital SI cancellation techniques for such an FD system via detailed simulations and extensive tests with WARP Software Defined Radio (SDR), also analyzing computational complexity. Through the simulation and test results, it is shown that, for the AWGN channel, the amount of digital cancellation increases with increasing SNR of the received SI signal, and a maximum cancellation of 36 dB is achieved. Under fading, the SI suppression capability of all digital techniques degrades, especially with increasing delay spread. However, since the frequency domain estimation is resilient to large delay spreads, better performance is observed as compared to the time domain estimation based techniques, which are more prone to frequency selectivity. Additionally, it is demonstrated that with least square frequency domain estimate, the cancellation obtained by the proposed frequency domain reconstruction, outperforms the existing time domain approach by 5 - 10 dB, while the computational complexity is reduced to one-fourth of that required by the time domain reconstruction. Furthermore, it is observed that the SI suppression capability of the digital cancellation techniques can be improved up to 1 dB, by increasing the number of training sequence symbols, which can be achieved by slight modifications in the preamble structure. Lastly, FD operation is demonstrated on the WARP SDR set up, by applying the frequency and time domain reconstruction approaches, showing simultaneous transmission and reception of a tone