Radio channel characterisation and system-level modelling for ultra wideband body-centric wireless communications

PhDThe next generation of wireless communication is evolving towards user-centric networks, where constant and reliable connectivity and services are essential. Bodycentric wireless network (BCWN) is the most exciting and emerging 4G technology for short (1-5 m) and very short (below 1 m) range communication systems. It has got numerous applications including healthcare, entertainment, surveillance, emergency, sports and military. The major difference between the BCWN and conventional wireless systems is the radio channel over which the communication takes place. The human body is a hostile medium from the radio propagation perspective and it is therefore important to understand and characterise the effect of the human body on the antenna elements, the radio propagation channel parameters and hence the system performance. In addition, fading is another concern that affects the reliability and quality of the wireless link, which needs to be taken into account for a low cost and reliable wireless communication system for body-centric networks. The complex nature of the BCWN requires operating wireless devices to provide low power requirements, less complexity, low cost and compactness in size. Apart from these characteristics, scalable data rates and robust performance in most fading conditions and jamming environment, even at low signal to noise ratio (SNR) is needed. Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is one of the most promising candidate for BCWN as it tends to fulfill most of these requirements. The thesis focuses on the characterisation of ultra wideband body-centric radio propagation channel using single and multiple antenna techniques. Apart from channel characterisation, system level modelling of potential UWB radio transceivers for body-centric wireless network is also proposed. Channel models with respect to large scale and delay analysis are derived from measured parameters. Results and analyses highlight the consequences of static and dynamic environments in addition to the antenna positions on the performance of body-centric wireless communication channels. Extensive measurement i campaigns are performed to analyse the significance of antenna diversity to combat the channel fading in body-centric wireless networks. Various diversity combining techniques are considered in this process. Measurement data are also used to predict the performance of potential UWB systems in the body-centric wireless networks. The study supports the significance of single and multiple antenna channel characterisation and modelling in producing suitable wireless systems for ultra low power body-centric wireless networks.University of Engineering and Technology Lahore Pakista

Receiver Design and Security for Low Power Wireless Communications Systems

This dissertation focuses on two important areas in wireless communications: receiver design and security. In the first part of this dissertation we consider low data rate receiver design for ultra-wideband (UWB), a wideband radio technology that promises to help solve the frequency allocation problem that often inhibits narrowband systems. Reference-based receivers are promising candidates in the UWB regime, because the conventional rake receiver designs suffers from complexity limitations and inaccuracies in channel estimation. Many reference-based systems have arisen as viable solutions for receivers. We unify these systems as well as other systems into the general framework for performance analysis to suggest the optimal system for varying constraints. We improve the performance of frequency-shifted reference (FSR-UWB) for an average power constraint by halving the frequency offset and employing a sample-and-hold approach across the frame period. Also, we introduce a novel peak mitigation technique; tone reservation, for the multi-differential (MD) version of FSR-UWB, to reduce the high peak-to-average power ratio observed as the data carriers increase. The next part of this dissertation is about wireless security which is ubiquitous in modern news. Cryptography is widely use for security but it assumes limited computational abilities of an eavesdropper, is based on the unproven hardness of the underlying primitives, and allows for the message to be recorded and decrypted later. In this dissertation we consider an information-theoretic security approach to guaranteeing everlasting secrecy. We contribute a new secrecy rate pair outage formulation, where an outage event is based on the instantaneous rates of the destination and the eavesdropper being below and above desired thresholds, respectively. In our new secrecy rate pair outage formulation, two new unaccounted outage events emerge: secrecy breach, where the eavesdropper is above the targeted threshold; unreliable, where the destination is unable to successfully decode the message. The former case must be carefully avoided, while for the latter case we can exploit automatic retransmissions (ARQ) while maintaining the eavesdropper intercept probability below the target threshold. We look at both ``simple\u27\u27 receivers and also complex receivers that use a buffer to store previous messages to maximally combine signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Then we extend these results to the two-hop case where we maximize the end-to-end secure throughput by optimizing the intercept probability at each eavesdropper given a total end-to-end intercept constraint. Lastly, we consider the difficult case in information-theoretic security: the near eavesdropper case, where we contribute an optimal power allocation algorithm that leverages nearby chatter nodes to generate noise to reduce the probability of intercept by the eavesdropper while minimally impeding the source-to-destination communication. As shown in both one-hop and two-hop cases, allowing a slight outage at the destination for cases of when the eavesdropper is above a specific threshold greatly improves secrecy performance

UWB Communication Characteristics for Different Distribution of People and Various Materials of Walls

[[abstract]]A comparison of UWB communication characteristics for different distribution of people and various materials of walls in real environments is investigated. The impulse responses of these cases are computed by applying shooting and bouncing ray/image (SBR/Image) techniques and inverse Fourier transform. The frequency dependence utilized in the structure on the indoor channel is accounted for in the channel calculation. By using the impulse response of these multi-path channels, the mean excess delay, root mean square (RMS) delay spread, the number of multi-path arrivals within 10 dB of the peak multi-path arrival (NP10dB), and the number of paths required to meet the 85% energy capture threshold (NP (85%)) for these different distribution of people and various materials of walls have been obtained. The bit error rate (BER) performance for UWB indoor communication is calculated. The outage probability for binary antipodal-pulse amplitude modulation (B-PAM) system has been presented. Numerical results have shown that the multi-path effect by people is an important factor for BER performance. Some different distribution of people and various materials of walls have been very carefully investigated. Finally, it is worth noting that in these cases the present work provides not only comparative information but also quantitative information on the performance reduction.[[incitationindex]]EI[[booktype]]紙

Impact of Metallic Furniture on UWB Channel Statistical Characteristics

[[abstract]]The bit error rate (BER) performance for ultra-wide band (UWB) indoor communication with the impact of metallic furniture is investigated. The impulse responses of different indoor environments for any transmitter and receiver location are computed by shooting and bouncing ray/image and inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) techniques. By using the impulse responses of these multi-path channels, the BER performance for binary pulse amplitude modulation (BPAM) impulse radio UWB communication system are calculated. Numerical results have shown that the multi-path effect by the metallic cabinets is an important factor for BER performance. Also the outage probability for the UWB multi-path environment with metallic cabinets is larger than that with wooden cabinets. Finally, it is worth noting that in these cases the present work provides not only comparative information but also quantitative information on the performance reduction.[[notice]]補正完畢[[incitationindex]]EI[[booktype]]紙

Noise-based Transmit Reference Modulation:A Feasibility Analysis

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) receive huge research interest for a multitude of applications, ranging from remote monitoring applications, such as monitoring of potential forest fires, floods and air pollution, to domestic and industrial monitoring of temperature, humidity, vibration, stress, etc. In the former set of applications, a large number of nodes can be involved which are usually deployed in remote or inaccessible environments. Due to logistic and cost reasons, battery replacement is undesired. Energy-efficient radios are needed, with a power-demand so little that batteries can last the lifetime of the node or that the energy can be harvested from the environment. Coherent direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) based radios are widely employed in monitoring applications, due to their overall resilience to channel impairments and robustness against interference. However, a DSSS rake receiver has stringent requirements on precise synchronization and accurate channel knowledge. To obviate the complexity of a coherent DSSS receiver, particularly for low data rate sensor networks, a DSSS scheme that has fast synchronization and possibly low power consumption, is much desired. In this regard, this thesis studies a noncoherent DSSS scheme called transmit reference (TR), which promises a simple receiver architecture and fast synchronization. In traditional TR, the modulated information signal is sent along an unmodulated reference signal, with a small time offset between them. In this thesis, we present and investigate a variant of TR, called noise-based frequency offset modulation (N-FOM), which uses pure noise as the spreading signal and a small frequency offset (instead of a time offset) to separate the information and reference signals. The detection is based on correlation of the received signal with a frequency-shifted version of itself, which collects the transmitted energy without compromising the receiver simplicity. Analytical expressions on performance metrics, supplemented by simulation results, improve understanding of the underlying mechanisms and provide insights into utility of N-FOM in low-power WSNs. In point-to-point line-of-sight (LOS) communication, it was observed that the communication scheme has a minimal utility. The energy-detector type of receiver mixes all in-band signals, which magnifies the overall noise. Particularly, the self-mixing of the transmitted signal also elevates the noise level, which increases with a further increase in the received signal energy. Therefore, for a fixed set of system parameters, the performance attains an asymptote with increasing transmission power. The phenomenon also establishes a non-monotonic relation between performance and the spreading factor. It was observed that a higher spreading factor in N-FOM is beneficial only in a high-SNR regime. After developing an understanding of the performance degrading mechanisms, few design considerations are listed. It is found that a suitable choice of the receiver front-end filter can maximize the SNR. However, the optimal filter depends on received signal and noise levels. A practically feasible – albeit suboptimal – filter is presented which gives close to the optimal performance. Next, timing synchronization is considered. The implications of synchronization errors are analyzed, and a synchronization strategy is devised. The proposed synchronization strategy has little overhead and can be easily implemented for symbol-level synchronization. The N-FOM LOS link model is extended to assess the performance degradation due to interference. Performance metrics are derived which quantify the effects of multiple-user interference, as well as that from external interferers, such as WiFi. Since the correlation operation mixes all in-band signals, the total interfering entities are quadratically increased. The research shows the vulnerability of N-FOM to interference, which makes it optimistic to operate in a crowded shared spectrum (such as the ISM 2.4\,GHz band). We also observe an upper limit on the number of mutually interfering links in a multiple access (MA) network, that can be established with an acceptable quality. The scheme is further investigated for its resilience against impairments introduced by a dense multipath environment. It is observed that despite the noise enhancement, the N-FOM system performs reasonably well in a non-line-of-sight (NLOS) communication. The detection mechanism exploits the multipath channel diversity and leads to an improved performance in a rich scattering environment. An analytical expression for outage probability is also derived. The results indicate that a healthy N-FOM link with very low outage probability can be established at a nominal value of the received bit SNR. It is also found that the choice of the frequency offset is central to the system design. Due to multiple practical implications associated with this parameter, the maximum data rate and the number of usable frequency offsets are limited, particularly in a MA NLOS communication scenario. The analysis evolves into a rule-of-thumb criterion for the data rate and the frequency offset. It is deduced that, due to its limited capability to coexist in a shared spectrum, N-FOM is not a replacement for coherent DSSS systems. The scheme is mainly suited to a low data rate network with low overall traffic, operating in an interference-free rich scattering environment. Such a niche of sensor applications could benefit from N-FOM where the design goal requires a simple detection mechanism and immunity to multipath fading

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

Comprehensive performance analysis of fully cooperative communication in WBANs

© 2013 IEEE. While relay-based cooperative networks (widely known in the literature as cooperative communication), where relays only forward signals from the sources to the destination, have been extensively researched, fully cooperative systems have not been thoroughly examined. Unlike relay networks, in a fully cooperative network, each node acts as both a source node sending its own data and a relay forwarding its partner's data to the destination. Mutual cooperation between neighboring nodes is believed to improve the overall system error performance, especially when space-time codes are incorporated. However, a comprehensive performance analysis of space-time-coded fully cooperative communication from all three perspectives, namel,y error performance, outage probability, and energy efficiency, is still missing. Answers to the commonly asked questions of whether, in what conditions, and to what extent the space-time-coded fully cooperative communication is better than direct transmission are still unknown. Motivated by this fact and inspired by the increasing popularity of healthcare applications in wireless body area networks (WBANs), this paper derives for the first time a comprehensive performance analysis of a decode-and-forward space-time coded fully cooperative communication network in Rayleigh and Rician fading channels in either identically or non-identically distributed fading scenario. Numerical analysis of error performance, outage probability, and energy efficiency, validated by simulations, show that fully cooperative communication is better than direct transmission from all three aspects in many cases, especially at a low-power and low signal-to-noise ratio regime, which is a typical working condition in WBANs