Acoustic Sensing: Mobile Applications and Frameworks

Acoustic sensing has attracted significant attention from both academia and industry due to its ubiquity. Since smartphones and many IoT devices are already equipped with microphones and speakers, it requires nearly zero additional deployment cost. Acoustic sensing is also versatile. For example, it can detect obstacles for distracted pedestrians (BumpAlert), remember indoor locations through recorded echoes (EchoTag), and also understand the touch force applied to mobile devices (ForcePhone). In this dissertation, we first propose three acoustic sensing applications, BumpAlert, EchoTag, and ForcePhone, and then introduce a cross-platform sensing framework called LibAS. LibAS is designed to facilitate the development of acoustic sensing applications. For example, LibAS can let developers prototype and validate their sensing ideas and apps on commercial devices without the detailed knowledge of platform-dependent programming. LibAS is shown to require less than 30 lines of code in Matlab to implement the prototype of ForcePhone on Android/iOS/Tizen/Linux devices.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143971/1/yctung_1.pd

Empirical multi-band characterization of propagation with modelling aspects for communictions

Diese Arbeit präsentiert eine empirische Untersuchung der Wellenausbreitung für drahtlose Kommunikation im Millimeterwellen- und sub-THz-Band, wobei als Referenz das bereits bekannte und untersuchte sub-6-GHz-Band verwendet wird. Die großen verfügbaren Bandbreiten in diesen hohen Frequenzbändern erlauben die Verwendung hoher instantaner Bandbreiten zur Erfüllung der wesentlichen Anforderungen zukünftiger Mobilfunktechnologien (5G, “5G and beyond” und 6G). Aufgrund zunehmender Pfad- und Eindringverluste bei zunehmender Trägerfrequenz ist die resultierende Abdeckung dabei jedoch stark reduziert. Die entstehenden Pfadverluste können durch die Verwendung hochdirektiver Funkschnittstellen kompensiert werden, wodurch die resultierende Auflösung im Winkelbereich erhöht wird und die Notwendigkeit einer räumlichen Kenntnis der Systeme mit sich bringt: Woher kommt das Signal? Darüber hinaus erhöhen größere Anwendungsbandbreiten die Auflösung im Zeitbereich, reduzieren das small-scale Fading und ermöglichen die Untersuchung innerhalb von Clustern von Mehrwegekomponenten. Daraus ergibt sich für Kommunikationssysteme ein vorhersagbareres Bild im Winkel-, Zeit- und Polarisationsbereich, welches Eigenschaften sind, die in Kanalmodellen für diese Frequenzen widergespiegelt werden müssen. Aus diesem Grund wurde in der vorliegenden Arbeit eine umfassende Charakterisierung der Wellenausbreitung durch simultane Multibandmessungen in den sub-6 GHz-, Millimeterwellen- und sub-THz-Bändern vorgestellt. Zu Beginn wurde die Eignung des simultanen Multiband-Messverfahrens zur Charakterisierung der Ausbreitung von Grenzwert-Leistungsprofilen und large-scale Parametern bewertet. Anschließend wurden wichtige Wellenausbreitungsaspekte für die Ein- und Multibandkanalmodellierung innerhalb mehrerer Säulen der 5G-Technologie identifiziert und Erweiterungen zu verbreiteten räumlichen Kanalmodellen eingeführt und bewertet, welche die oben genannten Systemaspekte abdecken.This thesis presents an empirical characterization of propagation for wireless communications at mm-waves and sub-THz, taking as a reference the already well known and studied sub-6 GHz band. The large blocks of free spectrum available at these high frequency bands makes them particularly suitable to provide the necessary instantaneous bandwidths to meet the requirements of future wireless technologies (5G, 5G and beyond, and 6G). However, isotropic path-loss and penetration-loss are larger with increasing carrier frequency, hence, coverage is severely reduced. Path-loss can be compensated with the utilization of highly directive radio-interfaces, which increases the resolution in the angular domain. Nonetheless, this emphasizes the need of spatial awareness of systems, making more relevant the question “where does the signal come from?” In addition, larger application bandwidths increase the resolution in the time domain, reducing small-scale fading and allowing to observe inside of clusters of multi-path components (MPCs). Consequently, communication systems have a more deterministic picture of the environment in the angular, time, and polarization domain, characteristics that need to be reflected in channel models for these frequencies. Therefore, in the present work we introduce an extensive characterization of propagation by intensive simultaneous multi-band measurements in the sub-6 GHz, mm-waves, and sub-THz bands. Firstly, the suitability of the simultaneous multi-band measurement procedure to characterize propagation from marginal power profiles and large-scale parameters (LSPs) has been evaluated. Then, key propagation aspects for single and multi-band channel modelling in several verticals of 5G have been identified, and extensions to popular spatial channel models (SCMs) covering the aforementioned system aspects have been introduced and evaluated

Cooperative Radio Communications for Green Smart Environments

The demand for mobile connectivity is continuously increasing, and by 2020 Mobile and Wireless Communications will serve not only very dense populations of mobile phones and nomadic computers, but also the expected multiplicity of devices and sensors located in machines, vehicles, health systems and city infrastructures. Future Mobile Networks are then faced with many new scenarios and use cases, which will load the networks with different data traffic patterns, in new or shared spectrum bands, creating new specific requirements. This book addresses both the techniques to model, analyse and optimise the radio links and transmission systems in such scenarios, together with the most advanced radio access, resource management and mobile networking technologies. This text summarises the work performed by more than 500 researchers from more than 120 institutions in Europe, America and Asia, from both academia and industries, within the framework of the COST IC1004 Action on "Cooperative Radio Communications for Green and Smart Environments". The book will have appeal to graduates and researchers in the Radio Communications area, and also to engineers working in the Wireless industry. Topics discussed in this book include: • Radio waves propagation phenomena in diverse urban, indoor, vehicular and body environments• Measurements, characterization, and modelling of radio channels beyond 4G networks• Key issues in Vehicle (V2X) communication• Wireless Body Area Networks, including specific Radio Channel Models for WBANs• Energy efficiency and resource management enhancements in Radio Access Networks• Definitions and models for the virtualised and cloud RAN architectures• Advances on feasible indoor localization and tracking techniques• Recent findings and innovations in antenna systems for communications• Physical Layer Network Coding for next generation wireless systems• Methods and techniques for MIMO Over the Air (OTA) testin

Exploiting radio interference for human sensing and communications

Wireless devices are now widely deployed in all indoor spaces including homes, offices, shopping malls, etc. In these spaces, we are ubiquitously enveloped by radio spectrum. The presence of various objects such as furniture, walls and human bodies influences the radio wave propagations in numerous ways owing to reflection and diffraction of the wireless signals. As a result, the signals from multiple propagation paths may overlap in constructive and destructive ways which results in radio interference. Interference is normally construed to be undesirable, since it adversely affects the signal quality at the receiver node. Thus various techniques have been proposed in literature to minimise the effects of interference. In this thesis, on the contrary, we show that radio interference can be used to our advantage in the context of two distinct application domains: (i) device-free human sensing and (ii) multi-hop communications. First, we show that WiFi signals can be used to uniquely identify people. There is strong evidence to suggest that all humans have unique gait patterns. While walking in vicinity of WiFi devices, an individual will interfere with the radio propagations and create unique perturbations in the WiFi spectrum. The unique features that are representative of the gait of the individual are extracted to identify the person. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the proposed system can uniquely identify people with an average accuracy of 93% to 77% from a group comprised of 2 to 6 people. Second, we propose a system that is able to monitor breathing rate in a natural setting where the individual can perform actions such as reading, writing, using their phone, etc. We observe breathing and accompanying actions create both constructive and destructive interference. Certain specific subcarriers carry strong imprints of the subtle chest motions that occur during breathing because of the frequency and spacial diversity of MIMO technology that is employed in the state-of-the-art WiFi devices. Our proposed methods are used to identify those subcarriers and precisely isolate the breathing signals. We implement both previous works on commercial off-the-shelf WiFi devices and exploit Channel State Information (CSI) of WiFi signals to extract the patterns for human identification and breath rate monitoring in RF spectrum. Third, we propose a novel point-to-point communication protocol, which exploit the benefits of constructive interference in order to enhance communication reliability and reduce energy consumption. The proposed protocol attempts to discover the most reliable and energy efficient route between a source and a destination. To achieve this objective, the proposed algorithm identifies direct routes and selects helper nodes to ensure reliable communications while allowing all other devices in the network to power down. During data transmissions, the selected nodes can exploit the benefits of constructive interference to increase received signal strength and enhance reliability. Extensive experiments show the proposed method can save energy consumption by up to 82.5% compared to a state-of-the-art approach whilst achieving similar end-to-end transmission reliability

Compressive Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive IoT

PhDWith the rising of new paradigms in wireless communications such as Internet of things (IoT), current static frequency allocation policy faces a primary challenge of spectrum scarcity, and thus encourages the IoT devices to have cognitive capabilities to access the underutilised spectrum in the temporal and spatial dimensions. Wideband spectrum sensing is one of the key functions to enable dynamic spectrum access, but entails a major implementation challenge in terms of sampling rate and computation cost since the sampling rate of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) should be higher than twice of the spectrum bandwidth based on the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. By exploiting the sparse nature of wideband spectrum, sub-Nyquist sampling and sparse signal recovery have shown potential capabilities in handling these problems, which are directly related to compressive sensing (CS) from the viewpoint of its origin. To invoke sub-Nyquist wideband spectrum sensing in IoT, blind signal acquisition with low-complexity sparse recovery is desirable on compact IoT devices. Moreover, with cooperation among distributed IoT devices, the complexity of sampling and reconstruc- tion can be further reduced with performance guarantee. Specifically, an adaptively- regularized iterative reweighted least squares (AR-IRLS) reconstruction algorithm is proposed to speed up the convergence of reconstruction with less number of iterations. Furthermore, a low-complexity compressive spectrum sensing algorithm is proposed to reduce computation complexity in each iteration of IRLS-based reconstruction algorithm, from cubic time to linear time. Besides, to transfer computation burden from the IoT devices to the core network, a joint iterative reweighted sparse recovery scheme with geo-location database is proposed to adopt the occupied channel information from geo- location database to reduce the complexity in the signal reconstruction. Since numerous IoT devices access or release the spectrum randomly, the sparsity levels of wideband spec-trum signals are varying and unknown. A blind CS-based sensing algorithm is proposed to enable the local secondary users (SUs) to adaptively adjust the sensing time or sam- pling rate without knowledge of spectral sparsity. Apart from the signal reconstruction at the back-end, a distributed sub-Nyquist sensing scheme is proposed by utilizing the surrounding IoT devices to jointly sample the spectrum based on the multi-coset sam- pling theory, in which only the minimum number of low-rate ADCs on the IoT devices are required to form coset samplers without the prior knowledge of the number of occu- pied channels and signal-to-noise ratios. The models of the proposed algorithms are derived and verified by numerical analyses and tested on both real-world and simulated TV white space signals

Cooperative Radio Communications for Green Smart Environments

The demand for mobile connectivity is continuously increasing, and by 2020 Mobile and Wireless Communications will serve not only very dense populations of mobile phones and nomadic computers, but also the expected multiplicity of devices and sensors located in machines, vehicles, health systems and city infrastructures. Future Mobile Networks are then faced with many new scenarios and use cases, which will load the networks with different data traffic patterns, in new or shared spectrum bands, creating new specific requirements. This book addresses both the techniques to model, analyse and optimise the radio links and transmission systems in such scenarios, together with the most advanced radio access, resource management and mobile networking technologies. This text summarises the work performed by more than 500 researchers from more than 120 institutions in Europe, America and Asia, from both academia and industries, within the framework of the COST IC1004 Action on "Cooperative Radio Communications for Green and Smart Environments". The book will have appeal to graduates and researchers in the Radio Communications area, and also to engineers working in the Wireless industry. Topics discussed in this book include: • Radio waves propagation phenomena in diverse urban, indoor, vehicular and body environments• Measurements, characterization, and modelling of radio channels beyond 4G networks• Key issues in Vehicle (V2X) communication• Wireless Body Area Networks, including specific Radio Channel Models for WBANs• Energy efficiency and resource management enhancements in Radio Access Networks• Definitions and models for the virtualised and cloud RAN architectures• Advances on feasible indoor localization and tracking techniques• Recent findings and innovations in antenna systems for communications• Physical Layer Network Coding for next generation wireless systems• Methods and techniques for MIMO Over the Air (OTA) testin

Optical Communication

Optical communication is very much useful in telecommunication systems, data processing and networking. It consists of a transmitter that encodes a message into an optical signal, a channel that carries the signal to its desired destination, and a receiver that reproduces the message from the received optical signal. It presents up to date results on communication systems, along with the explanations of their relevance, from leading researchers in this field. The chapters cover general concepts of optical communication, components, systems, networks, signal processing and MIMO systems. In recent years, optical components and other enhanced signal processing functions are also considered in depth for optical communications systems. The researcher has also concentrated on optical devices, networking, signal processing, and MIMO systems and other enhanced functions for optical communication. This book is targeted at research, development and design engineers from the teams in manufacturing industry, academia and telecommunication industries

Design of terahertz transceiver schemes for ultrahigh-speed wireless communications

Future ultra-high-speed wireless communication systems face difficult challenges due to the fundamental limitations of current technologies operating at microwave frequencies. Supporting high transmission rates will require the use of more spectral resources that are only available at higher frequencies. Within this context, terahertz (THz) communications have been attracting more and more attention, being considered by the research community as one of the most promising research fields on the topic due to the availability of extensive unused bandwidth segments. However, its widespread use is not yet possible due to some obstacles, such as the high propagation losses that occur in this band and the difficulty in designing devices that can effectively perform both transmission and detection tasks. The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute for the solution of both of the aforementioned problems and to propose novel THz transceiver schemes for ultra-high-speed wireless communications. Three main research areas were addressed: device modelling for the THz; index modulation (IM) based schemes for Beyond 5G (B5G) networks and hybrid precoding designs for THz ultra massive (UM) – multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. The main contributions of this work include the creation of a new design for a reconfigurable THz filter; the proposal of a precoded generalized spatial modulation scheme for downlink MIMO transmissions in B5G networks; the creation of a low-complexity hybrid design algorithm with a near fully-digital performance for multiuser (MU) mmWave/THz ultra massive MIMO systems that can incorporate different analog architectures; and the system-level assessment of cloud radio access network (C-RAN) deployments based on low-complexity hybrid precoding designs for massive MIMO downlink transmissions in B5G networks. The first contribution is especially suited for the implementation of reconfigurable THz filters and optical modulators, since it is based on a simple design, which transits from situations in which it presents a full transparency to situations where it achieves full opacity. Moreover, this approach can also be used for the implementation of simultaneously transmitting and reflecting (STAR) reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) which are important for enabling flexible system designs in RIS-assisted networks. The second contribution showed that the implementation of precoding schemes based on generalised spatial modulations is a solution with a considerable potential for future B5G systems, since it can provide larger throughputs when compared to conventional MU-MIMO schemes with identical spectral efficiencies.The last two contributions showed that through the proposed hybrid design algorithm it becomes possible to replace a fully digital precoder/combiner by a fully-connected or even by a partially-connected architecture (array of subarrays and dynamic array of subarrays), while achieving good tradeoffs between spectral efficiency, power consumption and implementation complexity. These proposals are particularly relevant for the support of UM-MIMO in severely hardware constrained THz systems. Moreover, the capability of achieving significant improvements in terms of throughput performance and coverage over typical cellular networks, when considering hybrid precoding‐based C-RAN deployments in two indoor office scenarios at the THz band, was demonstrated.Os futuros sistemas de comunicação sem fios de velocidade ultra-elevada enfrentam desafios difíceis devido às limitações fundamentais das tecnologias atuais que funcionam a frequências de microondas. O suporte de taxas de transmissão altas exigirá a utilização de mais recursos espectrais que só estão disponíveis em frequências mais elevadas. A banda Terahertz (THz) é uma das soluções mais promissoras devido às suas enormes larguras de banda disponíveis no espectro eletromagnético. No entanto, a sua utilização generalizada ainda não é possível devido a alguns obstáculos, tais como as elevadas perdas de propagação que se verificam nesta banda e a dificuldade em conceber dispositivos que possam desempenhar eficazmente as tarefas de transmissão e deteção. O objetivo desta tese de doutoramento, é contribuir para ambos os problemas mencionados anteriormente e propor novos esquemas de transcetores THz para comunicações sem fios de velocidade ultra-elevada. Três grandes áreas de investigação foram endereçadas, contribuindo individualmente para um todo: a modelação do dispositivo para o THz; esquemas baseados em modulações de índice (IM) para redes pós-5G (B5G) e desenhos de pré-codificadores híbridos para sistemas THz MIMO ultra-massivos. As principais contribuições deste trabalho incluem a criação de um novo design para um filtro THz reconfigurável; a proposta de uma nova tipologia de modulação espacial generalizada pré-codificada para transmissões MIMO de ligação descendente para redes B5G; a criação de um algoritmo de design híbrido de baixa complexidade com desempenho quase totalmente digital para sistemas MIMO multi-utilizador (MU) mmWave/THz ultra massivos que podem incorporar diferentes arquiteturas analógicas e a avaliação das implementações da rede de acesso de rádio na nuvem (C-RAN) com base em designs de pré-codificação híbridos de baixa complexidade para transmissões MIMO de ligação descendente massivas em redes B5G. A primeira contribuição é especialmente adequada para a implementação de filtros THz reconfiguráveis e moduladores óticos, uma vez que se baseia numa concepção mais simples, que transita de situações em que apresenta uma transparência total para situações em que atinge uma opacidade total. Para além disso, esta abordagem também pode ser utilizada para a implementação de superfícies inteligentes reconfiguráveis (RIS) de transmissão e reflexão simultânea (STAR). A segunda contribuição mostrou que a implementação de esquemas de pré-codificação baseados em modulações espaciais generalizadas é uma solução com um potencial considerável para futuros sistemas B5G, uma vez que permite alcançar maiores ganhos em termos de débito binário quando comparado com esquemas convencionais MU-MIMO com eficiências espectrais idênticas. As duas últimas contribuições mostraram que através do algoritmo proposto torna-se possível substituir a utilização de uma arquitectura totalmente digital por uma arquitetura totalmente conectada ou mesmo por uma arquitetura parcialmente conectada (arrays de subarrays e arrays dinâmicos de subarrays), conseguindo-se bons tradeoffs entre eficiência espectral, consumo de energia e complexidade de implementação. Estas propostas são particularmente relevantes para dar suporte a sistemas THz UM-MIMO com restrições severas ao nível de hardware. Demonstrou-se também a capacidade de se alcançar melhorias significativas em termos de débito binário e cobertura em relação a redes celulares típicas, considerando dois cenários na banda THz