Software Defined Radio Solutions for Wireless Communications Systems

Wireless technologies have been advancing rapidly, especially in the recent years. Design, implementation, and manufacturing of devices supporting the continuously evolving technologies require great efforts. Thus, building platforms compatible with different generations of standards and technologies has gained a lot of interest. As a result, software defined radios (SDRs) are investigated to offer more flexibility and scalability, and reduce the design efforts, compared to the conventional fixed-function hardware-based solutions.This thesis mainly addresses the challenges related to SDR-based implementation of today’s wireless devices. One of the main targets of most of the wireless standards has been to improve the achievable data rates, which imposes strict requirements on the processing platforms. Realizing real-time processing of high throughput signal processing algorithms using SDR-based platforms while maintaining energy consumption close to conventional approaches is a challenging topic that is addressed in this thesis.Firstly, this thesis concentrates on the challenges of a real-time software-based implementation for the very high throughput (VHT) Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11ac amendment from the wireless local area networks (WLAN) family, where an SDR-based solution is introduced for the frequency-domain baseband processing of a multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) transmitter and receiver. The feasibility of the implementation is evaluated with respect to the number of clock cycles and the consumed power. Furthermore, a digital front-end (DFE) concept is developed for the IEEE 802.11ac receiver, where the 80 MHz waveform is divided to two 40 MHz signals. This is carried out through time-domain digital filtering and decimation, which is challenging due to the latency and cyclic prefix (CP) budget of the receiver. Different multi-rate channelization architectures are developed, and the software implementation is presented and evaluated in terms of execution time, number of clock cycles, power, and energy consumption on different multi-core platforms.Secondly, this thesis addresses selected advanced techniques developed to realize inband fullduplex (IBFD) systems, which aim at improving spectral efficiency in today’s congested radio spectrum. IBFD refers to concurrent transmission and reception on the same frequency band, where the main challenge to combat is the strong self-interference (SI). In this thesis, an SDRbased solution is introduced, which is capable of real-time mitigation of the SI signal. The implementation results show possibility of achieving real-time sufficient SI suppression under time-varying environments using low-power, mobile-scale multi-core processing platforms. To investigate the challenges associated with SDR implementations for mobile-scale devices with limited processing and power resources, processing platforms suitable for hand-held devices are selected in this thesis work. On the baseband processing side, a very long instruction word (VLIW) processor, optimized for wireless communication applications, is utilized. Furthermore, in the solutions presented for the DFE processing and the digital SI canceller, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) multi-core central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) are used with the aim of investigating the performance enhancement achieved by utilizing parallel processing.Overall, this thesis provides solutions to the challenges of low-power, and real-time software-based implementation of computationally intensive signal processing algorithms for the current and future communications systems

大規模システムLSI設計のための統一的ハードウェア・ソフトウェア協調検証手法

Currently, the complexity of embedded LSI system is growing faster than the productivity of system design. This trend results in a design productivity gap, particularly in tight development time. Since the verification task takes bigger part of development task, it becomes a major challenge in LSI system design. In order to guarantee system reliability and quality of results (QoR), verifying large coverage of system functionality requires huge amount of relevant test cases and various scenario of evaluations. To overcome these problems, verification methodology is evolving toward supporting higher level of design abstraction by employing HW-SW co-verification. In this study, we present a novel approach for verification LSI circuit which is called as unified HW/SW co-verification framework. The study aims to improve design efficiency while maintains implementation consistency in the point of view of system-level performance. The proposed data-driven simulation and flexible interface of HW and SW design become the backbone of verification framework. In order to avoid time consuming, prone error, and iterative design spin-off in a large team, the proposed framework has to support multiple design abstractions. Hence, it can close the loop of design, exploration, optimization, and testing. Furthermore, the proposed methodology is also able to co-operate with system-level simulation in high-level abstraction, which is easy to extend for various applications and enables fast-turn around design modification. These contributions are discussed in chapter 3. In order to show the effectiveness and the use-cases of the proposed verification framework, the evaluation and metrics assessments of Very High Throughput wireless LAN system design are carried out. Two application examples are provided. The first case in chapter 4 is intended for fast verification and design exploration of large circuit. The Maximum Likelihood Detection (MLD) MIMO decoder is considered as Design Under Test (DUT). The second case, as presented in chapter 5, is the evaluation for system-level simulation. The full transceiver system based on IEEE 802.11ac standard is employed as DUT. Experimental results show that the proposed verification approach gives significant improvements of verification time (e.g. up to 10,000 times) over the conventional scheme. The proposed framework is also able to support various schemes of system level evaluations and cross-layer evaluation of wireless system.九州工業大学博士学位論文 学位記番号：情工博甲第328号 学位授与年月日：平成29年6月30日1 Introduction|2 Design and Verification in LSI System Design|3 Unified HW/SW Co-verification Methodology|4 Fast Co-verification and Design Exploration in Complex Circuits|5 Unified System Level Simulator for Very High Throughput Wireless Systems|6 Conclusion and Future Work九州工業大学平成29年

Design of Low Latency and High Reliable Industrial Wireless Lan System

Industrial wireless system, particularly Factory Automation (FA) system has been recognized as one of potential applications in machine type communication. A wireless system for an industrial network is preferable due to its primary advantages: flexibility for controlling mobile clients, low-complexity installation and low-cost maintenance by reducing physical connectivity in factory environment, and also applicable for hazardous sites. Several existing wireless technologies have been deployed for industrial wireless system, including Zigbee, WirelssHART and WLAN based system. However, the existing technologies have several limitations in terms of low throughput, poor reliability, as well as non deterministic. These drawbacks restrict the deployment of these technologies in critical industrial control system where low latency and high reliability are the primary requirements. In order to overcome the limitations of current technology, this thesis proposes low latency and high reliable industrial wireless LAN system, particularly for FA system. Specifically, two main topics are presented: (1) Design of high throughput of WLAN PHY transceiver for industrial wireless system. The first topic is presented to deal with fast transmission requirements. Typically, a WLAN system is deployed for home or office network scenarios. Since this scenario incorporates large data payload, throughput metric is higher priority than latency metric. Hence, to adopt WLAN based PHY transceiver for industrial wireless network, the issue of latency should be addressed as the top priority with respect to maintain reliability performance as well as low-complexity implementation. Therefore, as a first step, cross layer design approach is carried out in order to achieve optimum trade-off between QoS performance, implementation complexity, as well as lower power consumption. Later, the obtained PHY system parameters from cross layer design stage are employed for designing PHY transceiver system. In addition, several design optimizations are also incorporated during designing transceiver system that was conducted based on Model based RTL design. (2) Retransmission diversity based on channel selectivity scheme. The second part discusses performance improvement, specifically reliability performance in regard to low latency communication. The proposed work leverages frequency diversity that is available in the employed transmission bandwidth. A low complexity sub channel selection method by utilizing adjacent channel selection is considered. To confirm the effectiveness of this proposal, the performance results in terms of latency and reliability are evaluated, covering link level and system level performance of the FAWLAN system. Hardware implementation and verification result confirms that the designed PHY system achieves processing latency for about 13μs, corresponding to total transmission delay for about 85μs. This performance could satisfy the performance target in terms of FA WLAN protocol which requires transmission delay less than 100μs. Furthermore, the proposed PHY design also offers better normalize power consumption per transmitted bit (e.g. energy efficiency performance) for around 6.76 mJ/Mb. Moreover, the proposed retransmission scheme could also offer control duration per user (cycle time) from 52-63μs, improving the control duration per user for approximately 36% from the conventional system. Therefore, the proposed retransmission scheme is an sub-optimum method in terms of low complexity and low latency, as compared to CSI based retransmission. This could be potentially applied in industrial wireless system.九州工業大学博士学位論文 学位記番号:情工博甲第350号 学位授与年月日:令和2年9月25日1 Introduction|2 Overview of Low Latency and High Reliable Industrial Wireless System|3 Cross Layer Design|4 Low Latency and High Throughput PHY Design|5 High Reliable Transceiver System|6 Conclusion and Future Work九州工業大学令和2年

Teaching Your Wireless Card New Tricks: Smartphone Performance and Security Enhancements Through Wi-Fi Firmware Modifications

Smartphones come with a variety of sensors and communication interfaces, which make them perfect candidates for mobile communication testbeds. Nevertheless, proprietary firmwares hinder us from accessing the full capabilities of the underlying hardware platform which impedes innovation. Focusing on FullMAC Wi-Fi chips, we present Nexmon, a C-based firmware modification framework. It gives access to raw Wi-Fi frames and advanced capabilities that we found by reverse engineering chips and their firmware. As firmware modifications pose security risks, we discuss how to secure firmware handling without impeding experimentation on Wi-Fi chips. To present and evaluate our findings in the field, we developed the following applications. We start by presenting a ping-offloading application that handles ping requests in the firmware instead of the operating system. It significantly reduces energy consumption and processing delays. Then, we present a software-defined wireless networking application that enhances scalable video streaming by setting flow-based requirements on physical-layer parameters. As security application, we present a reactive Wi-Fi jammer that analyses incoming frames during reception and transmits arbitrary jamming waveforms by operating Wi-Fi chips as software-defined radios (SDRs). We further introduce an acknowledging jammer to ensure the flow of non-targeted frames and an adaptive power-control jammer to adjust transmission powers based on measured jamming successes. Additionally, we discovered how to extract channel state information (CSI) on a per-frame basis. Using both SDR and CSI-extraction capabilities, we present a physical-layer covert channel. It hides covert symbols in phase changes of selected OFDM subcarriers. Those manipulations can be extracted from CSI measurements at a receiver. To ease the analysis of firmware binaries, we created a debugging application that supports single stepping and runs as firmware patch on the Wi-Fi chip. We published the source code of our framework and our applications to ensure reproducibility of our results and to enable other researchers to extend our work. Our framework and the applications emphasize the need for freely modifiable firmware and detailed hardware documentation to create novel and exciting applications on commercial off-the-shelf devices

SNR-based evaluation of coexistence in wireless system of hospital

Abstract. The wireless system (IEEE Std. 802.11) of North Karelian Central Hospital (NKCH) has been studied in the newly opened J2 building of the hospital. The measurements have been carried out using Ekahau Sidekick spectrum analyser and Ekahau Pro software. Signal propagation has been modelled in the control ward of the Emergency department because many coexisting systems are used with critical requirements of data communication over there. The analytical models have been developed to understand the radio-frequency (RF) signal propagation in the entire building. Measurements have also been carried out on the entire first floor, in the Department of the Abdominal Diseases on the ground floor and in the Children’s wards on the third floor. The multi-slope path-loss propagation models with shadowing have been generated based on the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) measurements for typical hospital environment at the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band. The measurements have been carried out within the two predefined routes. The models have also been compared to the empirically derived path-loss models. The probability of signal outage has been calculated for both measured routes. The aggregate interference has been measured within the routes that cover the area where remarkable signal variations and the high level of interference has been indicated based on the heatmaps of Ekahau. The use of Ekahau Sidekick and Ekahau Pro software in the coexistence study has been described. The noise floor has been determined based on the averaged values of the six measurement campaigns. The local changes in signal strength of the desired signal and aggregated power of interference have been studied. The Signal-to-Interference Ratio (SIR) models have been generated within the measured routes. The rapid decreases of Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) have been indicated on all measured floors of building J2. They have been studied and their effect on the network performance has been evaluated. The evaluation has been done by comparing the measured values of RSSI, SNR and SIR to the requirements of the respective Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS). The link margins have been calculated based on the chosen bit error probability and the given SNR requirement of the respective MCS. The comparison between the measured RSSI readings and the required threshold of the respective MCS has been done using the defined shadowing as a link margin. It has been shown that the measured difference between the signal strength of the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands has been caused by the reduced transmit power at the 2.4 GHz band. Based on the SIR measurements, it has been shown that the access points of the neighbouring building have contributed locally to the measured aggregate interference in the Control ward. However, the primary reason for the decrease of SIR at the 2.4 GHz band has been the decrease of desired signal power that has been contributed by the above mentioned reduced transmit power. The strong SNR drops have been indicated on every measured floor before the roaming has occurred.Sairaalan langattoman järjestelmän arviointi signaali-kohina-suhteen avulla. Tiivistelmä. Tässä diplomityössä on tutkittu Pohjois-Karjalan keskussairaalan (PKKS) langatonta verkkoa (IEEE Std. 802.11) äskettäin avatussa sairaalan laajennusosassa (J2-rakennus). Mittaukset on toteutettu käyttäen Ekahau Sidekick spektrianalysaattoria ja Ekahau Pro -ohjelmaa. Päivystyksen valvontaosasto on valittu tutkimuskohteeksi, koska siellä käytetään paljon eri teknologioihin perustuvia järjestelmiä, joiden välinen tiedonsiirto on luonteeltaan kriittistä. Luotujen mallien avulla rakennuksen langatonta toimintaympäristöä tutkitaan RF-järjestelmän (Radio-Frequency) näkökulmasta myös muissa mittausten kohteina olleissa tiloissa. Mittauksia on tehty myös valvontaosaston ulkopuolella 1. kerroksessa sekä 3. kerroksen lastenosastoilla ja Vatsakeskuksen tiloissa pohjakerroksessa. RSSI-mittausten perusteella on luotu radiotiehäviöihin perustuvat etenemismallit molemmilla käytössä olevilla ISM-taajuuskaistoilla (Industrial, Scientific and Medical bands). Varjostuminen ja etenemishäviökertoimen muutokset on otettu huomioon etenemismalleissa. Mittaukset on suoritettu ennalta määritellyillä reiteillä. Luotuja malleja on verrattu myös tutkimuskirjallisuudessa esitettyihin, empiirisesti johdettuihin etenemishäviömalleihin. Signaalikatkoksen todennäköisyys on laskettu molemmille reiteille 2.4 GHz:n taajuuskaistalla. Vastaanotetun häiriötehon summa on mitattu koko mallinnettavan tilan alueelle ulottuvien mittausreittien pohjalta. Mittausreitit on määritelty Ekahau Pron tuottamien kuuluvuus- ja häiriökarttojen avulla ottaen huomioon havaitut signaalitason vaihtelut. Ekahau Sidekick -spektrianalysaattorin ja Ekahau Pro -ohjelman käyttöä on kuvattu tämän tutkimuksen kontekstissa. Kohinataso on määritelty kaikissa kuudessa mittauskampanjassa mitattujen kohina-tehoarvojen keskiarvona. Paikallisten hyötysignaalinvoimakkuus- ja häiriötehovaihteluiden vaikutusta verkon suorituskykyyn on tutkittu ja molemmat mittausreitit kattavat SIR-mallit (Signal-to-Interference Ratio) on luotu. Kaikissa tutkituissa kerroksissa havaittuja äkillisiä signaali-kohinasuhteen vaihteluita on tutkittu ja niiden vaikutusta järjestelmän suorituskykyyn on arvioitu. Mitattujen hyöty- ja häiriösignaalivaihteluiden arviointi on toteutettu vertaamalla mittaamalla saatuja SNR- (Signal-to-Noise ratio), SIR- ja RSSI-arvoja (Received Signal Strength Indicator) eri tiedonsiirtonopeuksia käyttävien MCS-indeksien vaatimiin signaalinvoimakkuus- ja signaali-kohina-suhteen arvoihin. Kynnysarvoille on laskettu linkkimarginaalit käyttäen mitoitusvaatimuksena valittua bittivirhetodennäköisyyden arvoa. Mitattuja RSSI-arvoja on verrattu käyttäen linkkimarginaalina etenemismallinnuksessa määritettyjä varjostumisvaikutuksen arvoja. 2.4 ja 5 GHz:n taajuusalueiden välillä mitatun signaalinvoimakkuuseron on tutkimuksessa saatujen tulosten perusteella osoitettu olevan seurausta alennetusta lähetystehosta 2.4 GHz:n kaistalla. SIR-mittausten perusteella on todettu viereisen rakennuksen tukiasemien kasvattaneen vastaanotettua häiriötehosummaa valvontaosastolla paikallisesti. Ensisijainen syy mitattuihin SIR-arvojen vaihteluihin ovat kuitenkin alhainen signaalinvoimakkuus 2.4 GHz:n kaistalla, mikä osittain johtuu edellä kuvatusta alennetusta lähetystehosta. Voimakkaita SNR-vaihteluita on mitattu kaikissa kerroksissa ennen kuin päätelaite kytkeytyy uuteen tukiasemaan