A Channel Ranking And Selection Scheme Based On Channel Occupancy And SNR For Cognitive Radio Systems

Wireless networks and information traffic have grown exponentially over the last decade. Consequently, an increase in demand for radio spectrum frequency bandwidth has resulted. Recent studies have shown that with the current fixed spectrum allocation (FSA), radio frequency band utilization ranges from 15% to 85%. Therefore, there are spectrum holes that are not utilized all the time by the licensed users, and, thus the radio spectrum is inefficiently exploited. To solve the problem of scarcity and inefficient utilization of the spectrum resources, dynamic spectrum access has been proposed as a solution to enable sharing and using available frequency channels. With dynamic spectrum allocation (DSA), unlicensed users can access and use licensed, available channels when primary users are not transmitting. Cognitive Radio technology is one of the next generation technologies that will allow efficient utilization of spectrum resources by enabling DSA. However, dynamic spectrum allocation by a cognitive radio system comes with the challenges of accurately detecting and selecting the best channel based on the channelâs availability and quality of service. Therefore, the spectrum sensing and analysis processes of a cognitive radio system are essential to make accurate decisions. Different spectrum sensing techniques and channel selection schemes have been proposed. However, these techniques only consider the spectrum occupancy rate for selecting the best channel, which can lead to erroneous decisions. Other communication parameters, such as the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) should also be taken into account. Therefore, the spectrum decision-making process of a cognitive radio system must use techniques that consider spectrum occupancy and channel quality metrics to rank channels and select the best option. This thesis aims to develop a utility function based on spectrum occupancy and SNR measurements to model and rank the sensed channels. An evolutionary algorithm-based SNR estimation technique was developed, which enables adaptively varying key parameters of the existing Eigenvalue-based blind SNR estimation technique. The performance of the improved technique is compared to the existing technique. Results show the evolutionary algorithm-based estimation performing better than the existing technique. The utility-based channel ranking technique was developed by first defining channel utility function that takes into account SNR and spectrum occupancy. Different mathematical functions were investigated to appropriately model the utility of SNR and spectrum occupancy rate. A ranking table is provided with the utility values of the sensed channels and compared with the usual occupancy rate based channel ranking. According to the results, utility-based channel ranking provides a better scope of making an informed decision by considering both channel occupancy rate and SNR. In addition, the efficiency of several noise cancellation techniques was investigated. These techniques can be employed to get rid of the impact of noise on the received or sensed signals during spectrum sensing process of a cognitive radio system. Performance evaluation of these techniques was done using simulations and the results show that the evolutionary algorithm-based noise cancellation techniques, particle swarm optimization and genetic algorithm perform better than the regular gradient descent based technique, which is the least-mean-square algorithm

Online Mapping and Perception Algorithms for Multi-robot Teams Operating in Urban Environments.

This thesis investigates some of the sensing and perception challenges faced by multi-robot teams equipped with LIDAR and camera sensors. Multi-robot teams are ideal for deployment in large, real-world environments due to their ability to parallelize exploration, reconnaissance or mapping tasks. However, such domains also impose additional requirements, including the need for a) online algorithms (to eliminate stopping and waiting for processing to finish before proceeding) and b) scalability (to handle data from many robots distributed over a large area). These general requirements give rise to specific algorithmic challenges, including 1) online maintenance of large, coherent maps covering the explored area, 2) online estimation of communication properties in the presence of buildings and other interfering structure, and 3) online fusion and segmentation of multiple sensors to aid in object detection. The contribution of this thesis is the introduction of novel approaches that leverage grid-maps and sparse multi-variate gaussian inference to augment the capability of multi-robot teams operating in urban, indoor-outdoor environments by improving the state of the art of map rasterization, signal strength prediction, colored point cloud segmentation, and reliable camera calibration. In particular, we introduce a map rasterization technique for large LIDAR-based occupancy grids that makes online updates possible when data is arriving from many robots at once. We also introduce new online techniques for robots to predict the signal strength to their teammates by combining LIDAR measurements with signal strength measurements from their radios. Processing fused LIDAR+camera point clouds is also important for many object-detection pipelines. We demonstrate a near linear-time online segmentation algorithm to this domain. However, maintaining the calibration of a fleet of 14 robots made this approach difficult to employ in practice. Therefore we introduced a robust and repeatable camera calibration process that grounds the camera model uncertainty in pixel error, allowing the system to guide novices and experts alike to reliably produce accurate calibrations.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113516/1/jhstrom_1.pd

Proceedings of the 2011 Joint Workshop of Fraunhofer IOSB and Institute for Anthropomatics, Vision and Fusion Laboratory

This book is a collection of 15 reviewed technical reports summarizing the presentations at the 2011 Joint Workshop of Fraunhofer IOSB and Institute for Anthropomatics, Vision and Fusion Laboratory. The covered topics include image processing, optical signal processing, visual inspection, pattern recognition and classification, human-machine interaction, world and situation modeling, autonomous system localization and mapping, information fusion, and trust propagation in sensor networks

Statistical Properties and Applications of Empirical Mode Decomposition

Signal analysis is key to extracting information buried in noise. The decomposition of signal is a data analysis tool for determining the underlying physical components of a processed data set. However, conventional signal decomposition approaches such as wavelet analysis, Wagner-Ville, and various short-time Fourier spectrograms are inadequate to process real world signals. Moreover, most of the given techniques require \emph{a prior} knowledge of the processed signal, to select the proper decomposition basis, which makes them improper for a wide range of practical applications. Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) is a non-parametric and adaptive basis driver that is capable of breaking-down non-linear, non-stationary signals into an intrinsic and finite components called Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF). In addition, EMD approximates a dyadic filter that isolates high frequency components, e.g. noise, in higher index IMFs. Despite of being widely used in different applications, EMD is an ad hoc solution. The adaptive performance of EMD comes at the expense of formulating a theoretical base. Therefore, numerical analysis is usually adopted in literature to interpret the behavior. This dissertation involves investigating statistical properties of EMD and utilizing the outcome to enhance the performance of signal de-noising and spectrum sensing systems. The novel contributions can be broadly summarized in three categories: a statistical analysis of the probability distributions of the IMFs and a suggestion of Generalized Gaussian distribution (GGD) as a best fit distribution; a de-noising scheme based on a null-hypothesis of IMFs utilizing the unique filter behavior of EMD; and a novel noise estimation approach that is used to shift semi-blind spectrum sensing techniques into fully-blind ones based on the first IMF. These contributions are justified statistically and analytically and include comparison with other state of art techniques