SIGNAL: A Ka-band Digital Beam-Forming SAR System Concept to Monitor Topography Variations of Ice Caps and Glaciers

This paper discusses the implementation of an endto- end simulator for the BIOMASS mission. An overview of the system architecture is provided along with a functional description of the modules that comprise the simulator

Millimeter wave MIMO communications : high-resolution angle acquisition and low-resolution time-frequency synchronization

Knowledge of the propagation channel is critical to exploit the full benefit of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques in millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular systems. Obtaining accurate channel state information in mmWave systems, however, is challenging due to high estimation overhead, high computational complexity and on-grid setting. It is also desirable to reduce the analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) resolution at mmWave frequencies to reduce power consumption and implementation costs. The use of low-precision ADCs, though, brings new design challenges to practical cellular networks. In the first part of this dissertation, we develop several new methods to estimate and track the mmWave channel's angle-of-departure and angle-of-arrival with high accuracy and low overhead. The key ingredient of the proposed strategies is custom designed beam pairs, from which there exists an invertible function of the angle to be estimated. We further extend the proposed algorithms to dual-polarized MIMO in wideband channels, and angle tracking design for fast-varying environments. We derive analytical angle estimation error performance of the proposed methods in single-path channels. We also use numerical examples to characterize the robustness of the proposed approaches to various transceiver settings and channel conditions. In the second part of this dissertation, we focus on improving the low-resolution time-frequency synchronization performance for mmWave cellular systems. In our system model, the base station uses analog beams to send the synchronization signal with infinite-resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs). The user equipment employs a fully digital front end to detect the synchronization signal with low-resolution ADCs. For low-resolution timing synchronization, we propose a new multi-beam probing based strategy, targeting at maximizing the minimum received synchronization signal-to-quantization-plus-noise ratio among all serving users. Regarding low-resolution frequency synchronization, we construct new sequences for carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation and compensation. We use both analytical and numerical examples to show that the proposed sequences and the corresponding metrics used for retrieving the CFOs are robust to the quantization distortion.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Energy and Spectral Efficient Wireless Communications

Energy and spectrum are two precious commodities for wireless communications. How to improve the energy and spectrum efficiency has become two critical issues for the designs of wireless communication systems. This dissertation is devoted to the development of energy and spectral efficient wireless communications. The developed techniques can be applied to a wide range of wireless communication systems, such as wireless sensor network (WSN) designed for structure health monitoring (SHM), medium access control (MAC) for multi-user systems, and cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio systems. First, to improve the energy efficiency in SHM WSN, a new ultra low power (ULP) WSN is proposed to monitor the vibration properties of structures such as buildings, bridges, and the wings and bodies of aircrafts. The new scheme integrates energy harvesting, data sensing, and wireless communication into a unified process, and it achieves significant energy savings compared to existing WSNs. Second, a cross-layer collision tolerant (CT) MAC scheme is proposed to improve energy and spectral efficiency in a multi-user system with shared medium. When two users transmit simultaneously over a shared medium, a collision happens at the receiver. Conventional MAC schemes will discard the collided signals, which result in a waste of the precious energy and spectrum resources. In our proposed CT-MAC scheme, each user transmits multiple weighted replicas of a packet at randomly selected data slots in a frame, and the indices of the selected slots are transmitted in a special collision-free position slot at the beginning of each frame. Collisions of the data slots in the MAC layer are resolved by using multiuser detection (MUD) in the PHY layer. Compared to existing schemes, the proposed CT-MAC scheme can support more simultaneous users with a higher throughput. Third, a new cooperative spectrum sensing scheme is proposed to improve the energy and spectral efficiency of a cognitive radio network. A new Slepian-Wolf coded cooperation scheme is proposed for a cognitive radio network with two secondary users (SUs) performing cooperative spectrum sensing through a fusion center (FC). The proposed scheme can achieve significant performance gains compared to existing schemes

A BIST solution for frequency domain characterization of analog circuits

This work presents an efficient implementation of a BIST solution for frequency characterization of analog systems. It allows a complete characterization in terms of magnitude and phase, including also harmonic distortion and offset measurements. Signal generation is performed using a modified filter, while response evaluation is based on 1storder ÓÄ modulation and very simple digital processing. The signal generator and the response analyzer have been implemented using the Switched-Capacitor (SC) technique in a standard 0.35ìm-3.3V CMOS technology. Both circuits have been separately validated, and an on-board prototype of the complete test system for frequency characterization has been implemented. Experimental results verify the functionality of the proposed approach, and a dynamic range of [email protected] (1MHz clock) has been demonstrated.Gobierno de España TEC2007-68072/MIC, TSI 020400- 2008-71Catrene European Project 2A105SR

High-resolution distributed sampling of bandlimited fields with low-precision sensors

The problem of sampling a discrete-time sequence of spatially bandlimited fields with a bounded dynamic range, in a distributed, communication-constrained, processing environment is addressed. A central unit, having access to the data gathered by a dense network of fixed-precision sensors, operating under stringent inter-node communication constraints, is required to reconstruct the field snapshots to maximum accuracy. Both deterministic and stochastic field models are considered. For stochastic fields, results are established in the almost-sure sense. The feasibility of having a flexible tradeoff between the oversampling rate (sensor density) and the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) precision, while achieving an exponential accuracy in the number of bits per Nyquist-interval per snapshot is demonstrated. This exposes an underlying ``conservation of bits'' principle: the bit-budget per Nyquist-interval per snapshot (the rate) can be distributed along the amplitude axis (sensor-precision) and space (sensor density) in an almost arbitrary discrete-valued manner, while retaining the same (exponential) distortion-rate characteristics. Achievable information scaling laws for field reconstruction over a bounded region are also derived: With N one-bit sensors per Nyquist-interval, $\Theta(\log N)$ Nyquist-intervals, and total network bitrate $R_{net} = \Theta((\log N)^2)$ (per-sensor bitrate $\Theta((\log N)/N)$), the maximum pointwise distortion goes to zero as $D = O((\log N)^2/N)$ or $D = O(R_{net} 2^{-\beta \sqrt{R_{net}}})$. This is shown to be possible with only nearest-neighbor communication, distributed coding, and appropriate interpolation algorithms. For a fixed, nonzero target distortion, the number of fixed-precision sensors and the network rate needed is always finite.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures; paper withdrawn from IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and re-submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor