701 research outputs found
Passively Controllable Smart Antennas
We recently introduced passively controllable smart (PCS) antenna systems for efficient wireless transmission, with direct applications in wireless sensor networks. A PCS antenna system is accompanied by a tunable passive controller whose adjustment at every signal transmission generates a specific radiation pattern. To reduce co-channel interference and optimize the transmitted power, this antenna can be programmed to transmit data in a desired direction in such a way that no signal is transmitted (to the far field) at pre-specified undesired directions. The controller of a PCS antenna was assumed to be centralized in our previous work, which was an impediment to its implementation. In this work, we study the design of PCS antenna systems under decentralized controllers, which are both practically implementable and cost efficient. The PCS antenna proposed here is made of one active element and its programming needs solving second-order-cone optimizations. These properties differentiate a PCS antenna from the existing smart antennas, and make it possible to implement a PCS antenna on a small-sized, low-power silicon chip
Understanding Link Dynamics in Wireless Sensor Networks with Dynamically Steerable Directional Antennas
Abstract. By radiating the power in the direction of choice, electronicallyswitched directional (ESD) antennas can reduce network contention and avoid packet loss. There exists some ESD antennas for wireless sensor networks, but so far researchers have mainly evaluated their directionality. There are no studies regarding the link dynamics of ESD antennas, in particular not for indoor deployments and other scenarios where nodes are not necessarily in line of sight. Our long-term experiments confirm that previous findings that have demonstrated the dependence of angleof-arrival on channel frequency also hold for directional transmissions with ESD antennas. This is important for the design of protocols for wireless sensor networks with ESD antennas: the best antenna direction, i.e., the direction that leads to the highest packet reception rate and signal strength at the receiver, is not stable but varies over time and with the selected IEEE 802.15.4 channel. As this requires protocols to incorporate some form of adaptation, we present an intentionally simple and yet efficient mechanism for selecting the best antenna direction at run-time with an energy overhead below 2 % compared to standard omni-directional transmissions.
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Smart Cities: Research Challenges and Opportunities
The concept of Smart Cities has been introduced as a way to benefit from the
digitization of various ecosystems at a city level. To support this concept,
future communication networks need to be carefully designed with respect to the
city infrastructure and utilization of resources. Recently, the idea of 'smart'
environment, which takes advantage of the infrastructure for better performance
of wireless networks, has been proposed. This idea is aligned with the recent
advances in design of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), which are
planar structures with the capability to reflect impinging electromagnetic
waves toward preferred directions. Thus, RISs are expected to provide the
necessary flexibility for the design of the 'smart' communication environment,
which can be optimally shaped to enable cost- and energy-efficient signal
transmissions where needed. Upon deployment of RISs, the ecosystem of the Smart
Cities would become even more controllable and adaptable, which would
subsequently ease the implementation of future communication networks in urban
areas and boost the interconnection among private households and public
services. In this paper, we describe our vision of the application of RISs in
future Smart Cities. In particular, the research challenges and opportunities
are addressed. The contribution paves the road to a systematic design of
RIS-assisted communication networks for Smart Cities in the years to come.Comment: Submitted for possible publication in IEEE Open Journal of the
Communications Societ
Spectral and Energy Efficiency of IRS-Assisted MISO Communication with Hardware Impairments
In this letter, we analyze the spectral and energy efficiency of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted multiple-input single-output (MISO) downlink system with hardware impairments. An extended error vector magnitude (EEVM) model is utilized to characterize the impact of radio-frequency (RF) impairments at the access point (AP) and phase noise is considered at the IRS. We show that the spectral efficiency is limited due to the hardware impairments even when the numbers of AP antennas and IRS elements grow infinitely large, which is in contrast with the conventional case with ideal hardware. Moreover, the performance degradation at high SNR is shown to be mainly affected by the AP hardware impairments rather than by the phase noise at the IRS. We further obtain in closed form the optimal transmit power for energy efficiency maximization. Simulation results are provided to verify the obtained results
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Energy Efficiency in Wireless Communication
The adoption of a Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) for downlink
multi-user communication from a multi-antenna base station is investigated in
this paper. We develop energy-efficient designs for both the transmit power
allocation and the phase shifts of the surface reflecting elements, subject to
individual link budget guarantees for the mobile users. This leads to
non-convex design optimization problems for which to tackle we propose two
computationally affordable approaches, capitalizing on alternating
maximization, gradient descent search, and sequential fractional programming.
Specifically, one algorithm employs gradient descent for obtaining the RIS
phase coefficients, and fractional programming for optimal transmit power
allocation. Instead, the second algorithm employs sequential fractional
programming for the optimization of the RIS phase shifts. In addition, a
realistic power consumption model for RIS-based systems is presented, and the
performance of the proposed methods is analyzed in a realistic outdoor
environment. In particular, our results show that the proposed RIS-based
resource allocation methods are able to provide up to higher energy
efficiency, in comparison with the use of regular multi-antenna
amplify-and-forward relaying.Comment: Accepted by IEEE TWC; additional materials on the topic are included
in the 2018 conference publications at ICASSP
(https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8461496) and GLOBECOM 2018
(arXiv:1809.05397
RIS-Aided Wireless Communications: Prototyping, Adaptive Beamforming, and Indoor/Outdoor Field Trials
The prospects of using a Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) to aid
wireless communication systems have recently received much attention from
academia and industry. Most papers make theoretical studies based on elementary
models, while the prototyping of RIS-aided wireless communication and
real-world field trials are scarce. In this paper, we describe a new RIS
prototype consisting of 1100 controllable elements working at 5.8 GHz band. We
propose an efficient algorithm for configuring the RIS over the air by
exploiting the geometrical array properties and a practical receiver-RIS
feedback link. In our indoor test, where the transmitter and receiver are
separated by a 30 cm thick concrete wall, our RIS prototype provides a 26 dB
power gain compared to the baseline case where the RIS is replaced by a copper
plate. A 27 dB power gain was observed in the short-distance outdoor
measurement. We also carried out long-distance measurements and successfully
transmitted a 32 Mbps data stream over 500 m. A 1080p video was live-streamed
and it only played smoothly when the RIS was utilized. The power consumption of
the RIS is around 1 W. Our paper is vivid proof that the RIS is a very
promising technology for future wireless communications.Comment: 13 pages, 18 figures, submitte
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