HopScotch - a low-power renewable energy base station network for rural broadband access

The provision of adequate broadband access to communities in sparsely populated rural areas has in the past been severely restricted. In this paper, we present a wireless broadband access test bed running in the Scottish Highlands and Islands which is based on a relay network of low-power base stations. Base stations are powered by a combination of renewable sources creating a low cost and scalable solution suitable for community ownership. The use of the 5~GHz bands allows the network to offer large data rates and the testing of ultra high frequency ``white space'' bands allow expansive coverage whilst reducing the number of base stations or required transmission power. We argue that the reliance on renewable power and the intelligent use of frequency bands makes this approach an economic green radio technology which can address the problem of rural broadband access

Network performance & Quality of service in data networks involving spectrum utilization techniques

This research has developed technique to improve the quality of service in wireless data networks that employ spectrum utilization techniques based on Cognitive Radio. Most multiple dimension implementations focus on maximizing the Successful Communication Probability SCP in order to improve the wireless network utilization. However this usually has a negative impact on the Quality of Service, since increasing the SCP leads to increasing signal interference and Packet Loss, and thus network performance deterioration. The Multiple Dimension Cognitive Radio technique is a new technique, proposed in this thesis, that improves the Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN) efficiency by giving opportunity to secondary users (Unlicensed users) to use several dimension such as time, frequency, modulation, coding, and antenna directionality to increase their opportunity in finding spectrum hole. In order to draw a balance between improving the networking utilization and keeping the network performance at an acceptable level, this thesis proposes a new model of multiple dimension CR which provides a compromise between maximizing the SCP and network throughput from one side and keeping the QoS within the accepted thresholds from the other side. This is important so as to avoid network performance degradation which may result from the high user density in single wireless domain as a result of maximizing the SCP. In this research, a full Cognitive Radio model has been implemented in the OPNET simulator by developing modified nodes with the appropriate coding which include basic functionality. The Purpose of this model is to simulate the CR environment and study the network performance after applying the controlled multi dimension technique presented here. The proposed technique observes the channel throughput on TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) level, also QoS KPIs (Key Performance Index) like Packet Loss and Bit Error rate, during the operation of the CR multi dimension technique and alerts the system when the throughput degrades below a certain level. The proposed technique has interactive cautious nature which keeps monitoring the network performance and once find evident on network performance deterioration it takes corrective action, terminates low priority connections and releases over utilized channels, in order to keep the performance accepted

Convolutive superposition for multicarrier cognitive radio systems

Recently, we proposed a spectrum-sharing paradigm for single-carrier cognitive radio (CR) networks, where a secondary user (SU) is able to maintain or even improve the performance of a primary user (PU) transmission, while also obtaining a low-data rate channel for its own communication. According to such a scheme, a simple multiplication is used to superimpose one SU symbol on a block of multiple PU symbols.The scope of this paper is to extend such a paradigm to a multicarrier CR network, where the PU employs an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation scheme. To improve its achievable data rate, besides transmitting over the subcarriers unused by the PU, the SU is also allowed to transmit multiple block-precoded symbols in parallel over the OFDM subcarriers used by the primary system. Specifically, the SU convolves its block-precoded symbols with the received PU data in the time-domain, which gives rise to the term convolutive superposition. An information-theoretic analysis of the proposed scheme is developed, which considers different amounts of network state information at the secondary transmitter, as well as different precoding strategies for the SU. Extensive simulations illustrate the merits of our analysis and designs, in comparison with conventional CR schemes, by considering as performance indicators the ergodic capacity of the considered systems.Comment: 29 pages, 8 figure