11,373 research outputs found
State-of-the-art in Power Line Communications: from the Applications to the Medium
In recent decades, power line communication has attracted considerable
attention from the research community and industry, as well as from regulatory
and standardization bodies. In this article we provide an overview of both
narrowband and broadband systems, covering potential applications, regulatory
and standardization efforts and recent research advancements in channel
characterization, physical layer performance, medium access and higher layer
specifications and evaluations. We also identify areas of current and further
study that will enable the continued success of power line communication
technology.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication, IEEE Journal on
Selected Areas in Communications. Special Issue on Power Line Communications
and its Integration with the Networking Ecosystem. 201
Partner selection in indoor-to-outdoor cooperative networks: an experimental study
In this paper, we develop a partner selection protocol for enhancing the
network lifetime in cooperative wireless networks. The case-study is the
cooperative relayed transmission from fixed indoor nodes to a common outdoor
access point. A stochastic bivariate model for the spatial distribution of the
fading parameters that govern the link performance, namely the Rician K-factor
and the path-loss, is proposed and validated by means of real channel
measurements. The partner selection protocol is based on the real-time
estimation of a function of these fading parameters, i.e., the coding gain. To
reduce the complexity of the link quality assessment, a Bayesian approach is
proposed that uses the site-specific bivariate model as a-priori information
for the coding gain estimation. This link quality estimator allows network
lifetime gains almost as if all K-factor values were known. Furthermore, it
suits IEEE 802.15.4 compliant networks as it efficiently exploits the
information acquired from the receiver signal strength indicator. Extensive
numerical results highlight the trade-off between complexity, robustness to
model mismatches and network lifetime performance. We show for instance that
infrequent updates of the site-specific model through K-factor estimation over
a subset of links are sufficient to at least double the network lifetime with
respect to existing algorithms based on path loss information only.Comment: This work has been submitted to IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in
Communications in August 201
Using amplify-and-forward relay for coverage extension in indoor environments
Cooperative communication is a promising method for increasing the capacity and extending the coverage between a base station (BS) and a mobile user (MU) by using relays to exploit cooperative diversity. However, the existing literature mainly focuses on theoretical performance evaluation without experimental validation and, thus, fails to address the effects on real-world radio signal propagation. This research, therefore, aims to develop a prototype amplify-and-forward (AF) relay using software-defined radio (SDR) to evaluate the real-world performance of such a relay in improving coverage. The proposed relay is developed using the LabVIEW software and programmed on a National Instruments-Universal Software Radio Peripheral 2922 (NI-USRP 2922) SDR platform. The major merit of this entire communication setup is less expensive as the system uses a reprogrammable hardware. The measurements are performed indoors, and the signal strength or received power at the MU in cases with and without the relay is recorded. The results show that the received power performance and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the user improve significantly when the AF relay is deployed compared to when direct link point-to-point transmission without the relay is used
Software Defined Radio Implementation of Carrier and Timing Synchronization for Distributed Arrays
The communication range of wireless networks can be greatly improved by using
distributed beamforming from a set of independent radio nodes. One of the key
challenges in establishing a beamformed communication link from separate radios
is achieving carrier frequency and sample timing synchronization. This paper
describes an implementation that addresses both carrier frequency and sample
timing synchronization simultaneously using RF signaling between designated
master and slave nodes. By using a pilot signal transmitted by the master node,
each slave estimates and tracks the frequency and timing offset and digitally
compensates for them. A real-time implementation of the proposed system was
developed in GNU Radio and tested with Ettus USRP N210 software defined radios.
The measurements show that the distributed array can reach a residual frequency
error of 5 Hz and a residual timing offset of 1/16 the sample duration for 70
percent of the time. This performance enables distributed beamforming for range
extension applications.Comment: Submitted to 2019 IEEE Aerospace Conferenc
On the Experimental Evaluation of Vehicular Networks: Issues, Requirements and Methodology Applied to a Real Use Case
One of the most challenging fields in vehicular communications has been the
experimental assessment of protocols and novel technologies. Researchers
usually tend to simulate vehicular scenarios and/or partially validate new
contributions in the area by using constrained testbeds and carrying out minor
tests. In this line, the present work reviews the issues that pioneers in the
area of vehicular communications and, in general, in telematics, have to deal
with if they want to perform a good evaluation campaign by real testing. The
key needs for a good experimental evaluation is the use of proper software
tools for gathering testing data, post-processing and generating relevant
figures of merit and, finally, properly showing the most important results. For
this reason, a key contribution of this paper is the presentation of an
evaluation environment called AnaVANET, which covers the previous needs. By
using this tool and presenting a reference case of study, a generic testing
methodology is described and applied. This way, the usage of the IPv6 protocol
over a vehicle-to-vehicle routing protocol, and supporting IETF-based network
mobility, is tested at the same time the main features of the AnaVANET system
are presented. This work contributes in laying the foundations for a proper
experimental evaluation of vehicular networks and will be useful for many
researchers in the area.Comment: in EAI Endorsed Transactions on Industrial Networks and Intelligent
Systems, 201
D-SLATS: Distributed Simultaneous Localization and Time Synchronization
Through the last decade, we have witnessed a surge of Internet of Things
(IoT) devices, and with that a greater need to choreograph their actions across
both time and space. Although these two problems, namely time synchronization
and localization, share many aspects in common, they are traditionally treated
separately or combined on centralized approaches that results in an ineffcient
use of resources, or in solutions that are not scalable in terms of the number
of IoT devices. Therefore, we propose D-SLATS, a framework comprised of three
different and independent algorithms to jointly solve time synchronization and
localization problems in a distributed fashion. The First two algorithms are
based mainly on the distributed Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) whereas the third
one uses optimization techniques. No fusion center is required, and the devices
only communicate with their neighbors. The proposed methods are evaluated on
custom Ultra-Wideband communication Testbed and a quadrotor, representing a
network of both static and mobile nodes. Our algorithms achieve up to three
microseconds time synchronization accuracy and 30 cm localization error
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