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

Reliable indoor power line communication systems: via application of advanced relaying processing

In this thesis, we focus on improving the performance of indoor power line communication (PLC) systems using relaying schemes. A method of modelling relay-involved PLC channels has been proposed. We study the optimal joint transceiver and relay power allocation problem for relay-assisted multicarrier indoor PLC systems. We transform the nonconvex problem into a group of sub-problems which can be efficiently solved using standard convex optimization techniques. The proposed schemes outperform conventional direct PLC systems

Radio hardware virtualization for software-defined wireless networks

Software-Defined Network (SDN) is a promising architecture for next generation Internet. SDN can achieve Network Function Virtualization much more efficiently than conventional architectures by splitting the data and control planes. Though SDN emerged first in wired network, its wireless counterpart Software-Defined Wireless Network (SDWN) also attracted an increasing amount of interest in the recent years. Wireless networks have some distinct characteristics compared to the wired networks due to the wireless channel dynamics. Therefore, network controllers present some extra degrees of freedom, such as taking measurements against interference and noise, or adapting channels according to the radio spectrum occupation. These specific characteristics bring about more challenges to wireless SDNs. Currently, SDWN implementations are mainly using customized firmware, such as OpenWRT, running on an embedded application processor in commercial WiFi chips, and restricted to layers above lower Media Access Control. This limitation comes from the fact that radio hardware usually require specific drivers, which have a proprietary implementation by various chipset vendors. Hence, it is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve virtualization on the radio hardware. However, this status has been changing as Software-Defined Radio (SDR) systems open up the entire radio communication stack to radio hobbyists and researchers. The bridge between SDR and SDN will make it possible to bring the softwarization and virtualization of wireless networks down to the physical layer, which will unlock the full potential of SDWN. This paper investigates the necessity and feasibility of extending the virtualization of wireless networks towards the radio hardware. A SDR architecture is presented for radio hardware virtualization in order to facilitate SDWN design and experimentation. We do believe that by adopting the virtualization-oriented hardware accelerator design presented here, an all-layer end-to-end high performance SDWN can be achieved

Power saving and optimal hybrid precoding in millimeter wave massive MIMO systems for 5G

The proliferation of wireless services emerging from use cases offifth-generation(5G) technology is posing many challenges on cellular communicationinfrastructure. They demand to connect a massive number of devices withenhanced data rates. The massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)technology at millimeter-wave (mmWave) in combination with hybrid precodingemerges as a concrete tool to address the requirements of 5G networkdevelopments. But Massive MIMO systems consume significant power fornetwork operations. Hence the prior role is to improve the energy efficiency byreducing the power consumption. This paper presents the power optimizationmodels for massive MIMO systems considering perfect channel state information(CSI) and imperfect CSI. Further, this work proposes an optimal hybrid precodingsolution named extended simultaneous orthogonal matchingpursuit (ESOMP).Simulation results reveal that a constant sum-rate can be achieved in massiveMIMO systems while significantly reducing the power consumption. Theproposed extended SOMPhybrid precoder performsclose to the conventionaldigital beamforming method. Further, modulation schemes compatible withmassive MIMO systems are outlined and their bit error rate (BER) performance isinvestigate

Joint bit allocation and precoding for filterbank transceivers in NOFDM systems

Recently, the non orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (NOFDM) systems have attracted increased interest. They have several advantages over traditional OFDM systems: higher bandwidth efficiency; reduced sensitivity to carrier frequency offsets, oscillator phase noise and narrowband interference; and reduced intersymbol/intercarrier interference (ISI/ICI). In particular, low ISI/ICI will be important for future systems where Doppler frequencies will be larger (equivalently, channel variations will be faster) due to higher carrier frequencies and higher mobile velocities. In the first part of this thesis the duality of multicarrier systems and Gabor frames is discussed and applied to the design of a generalized multicarrier system based on a filterbank structure. The efficient polyphase implementation is also discussed. In this thesis the channel capacity of a GMC systems is evaluated through the diagonalization of an equivalent matrix model where intersymbol and intercarrier interferences have been included. Exploiting the majorization theory, the mutual information can be represented as a Schur-concave function and it is maximized through a joint transceiver design adding a linear precoder at the transmitter and a LMMSE equalizer at the receiver. The capacity is derived by the eigenvalue decomposition of the global system matrix including the noise colored by the receiver filtering and employing a power allocation of the transmitted power according to the well-known water-filling solution. This thesis investigates also the behaviour of the NOFDM systems when a power and bit allocation algorithm (like the Campello one) is employed in order to satisfy a certain QoS constrain. A comparison of the performances with OFDM systems is included. Finally a simple application of the cognitive radio paradigm employing filterbankbased multicarrier systems is developed and some interesting results are showed

MIMO Discrete Wavelet Transform for the Next Generation Wireless Systems

Study is presented into the performance of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and MIMO-DWT with transmit beamforming. Feedback loop has been used between the equalizer at the transmitter to the receiver which provided the channel state information which was then used to construct a steering matrix for the transmission sequence such that the received signals at the transmitter can be combined constructively in order to provide a reliable and improved system for next generation wireless systems. As convolution in time domain equals multiplication in frequency domain no such counterpart exist for the symbols in space, means linear convolution and Intersymbol Interference (ISI) generation so both zero forcing (ZF) and minimum mean squared error (MMSE) equalizations have been employed. The results show superior performance improvement and in addition allow keeping the processing, power and implementation cost at the transmitter which has less constraints and the results also show that both equalization algorithms perform alike in wavelets and the ISI is spread equally between different wavelet domains