357 research outputs found
Multiverse: Mobility pattern understanding improves localization accuracy
Department of Computer Science and EngineeringThis paper presents the design and implementation of Multiverse, a practical indoor localization system that can be deployed on top of already existing WiFi infrastructure. Although the existing WiFi-based positioning techniques achieve acceptable accuracy levels, we find that existing solutions are not practical for use in buildings due to a requirement of installing sophisticated access point (AP) hardware or special application on client devices to aid the system with extra information. Multiverse achieves sub-room precision estimates, while utilizing only received signal strength indication (RSSI) readings available to most of today's buildings through their installed APs, along with the assumption that most users would walk at the normal speed. This level of simplicity would promote ubiquity of indoor localization in the era of smartphones.ope
Ultra-wideband MIMO radio channel characterisation for body-centric wireless communication
No abstract available
State-of-the-art assessment of 5G mmWave communications
Deliverable D2.1 del proyecto 5GWirelessMain objective of the European 5Gwireless project, which is part of the H2020 Marie Slodowska-
Curie ITN (Innovative Training Networks) program resides in the training and involvement of young
researchers in the elaboration of future mobile communication networks, focusing on innovative
wireless technologies, heterogeneous network architectures, new topologies (including ultra-dense
deployments), and appropriate tools. The present Document D2.1 is the first deliverable of Work-
Package 2 (WP2) that is specifically devoted to the modeling of the millimeter-wave (mmWave)
propagation channels, and development of appropriate mmWave beamforming and signal
processing techniques. Deliver D2.1 gives a state-of-the-art on the mmWave channel measurement,
characterization and modeling; existing antenna array technologies, channel estimation and
precoding algorithms; proposed deployment and networking techniques; some performance
studies; as well as a review on the evaluation and analysis toolsPostprint (published version
Dynamic Channel Modeling for Indoor Millimeter-Wave Propagation Channels Based on Measurements
In this contribution, a recently conducted measurement campaign for indoor millimeter-wave propagation channels is introduced. A vector network analyzer (VNA)-based channel sounder was exploited to record the channel characteristics at the frequency band from 28-30 GHz. A virtual uniform circular array (UCA) with a radius of 0.25m was formed using a rotator with 360 steps. Moreover, by taking advantage of fiber-optic technique applied in the channel sounder, measurements at 50 positions were performed from an indoor hall to an indoor corridor along a long pre-defined route. A low-complexity highresolution propagation estimation (HRPE) algorithm is exploited to estimate the propagation parameters of multipath components (MPCs). Based on the HRPE estimation results, a novel clustering identification and tracking algorithm is proposed to trace clusters. Composite channel characteristics, cluster-level characteristics and dynamic (or birth-death) behaviours of the clusters are investigated, which constitute a dynamic model for the indoor millimeter-wave channel
The characterisation and modelling of the wireless propagation channel in small cells scenarios
“A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy”.The rapid growth in wireless data traffic in recent years has placed a great strain on the wireless spectrum and the capacity of current wireless networks. In addition, the makeup of the typical wireless propagation environment is rapidly changing as a greater percentage of data traffic moves indoors, where the coverage of radio signals is poor. This dual fronted assault on coverage and capacity has meant that the tradition cellular model is no longer sustainable, as the gains from constructing new macrocells falls short of the increasing cost. The key emerging concept that can solve the aforementioned challenges is smaller base stations such as micro-, pico- and femto-cells collectively known as small cells. However with this solution come new challenges: while small cells are efficient at improving the indoor coverage and capacity; they compound the lack of spectrum even more and cause high levels of interference. Current channel models are not suited to characterise this interference as the small cells propagation environment is vast different. The result is that overall efficiency of the networks suffers. This thesis presents an investigation into the characteristics of the wireless propagation channel in small cell environments, including measurement, analysis, modelling, validation and extraction of channel data. Two comprehensive data collection campaigns were carried out, one of them employed a RUSK channel sounder and featured dual-polarised MIMO antennas. From the first dataset an empirical path loss model, adapted to typical indoor and outdoor scenarios found in small cell environments, was constructed using regression analysis and was validated using the second dataset. The model shows good accuracy for small cell environments and can be implemented in system level simulations quickly without much requirements
Antenna and radio channel characterisation for low‐power personal and body area networks
PhDThe continuous miniaturisation of sensors, as well as the progression in wearable electronics,
embedded software, digital signal processing and biomedical technologies, have led to new usercentric
networks, where devices can be carried in the user’s pockets, attached to the user’s body.
Body-centric wireless communications (BCWCs) is a central point in the development of fourth
generation mobile communications. Body-centric wireless networks take their place within the
personal area networks, body area networks and sensor networks which are all emerging
technologies that have a wide range of applications (such as, healthcare, entertainment,
surveillance, emergency, sports and military). The major difference between BCWC and
conventional wireless systems is the radio channels over which the communication takes place.
The human body is a hostile environment from a radio propagation perspective and it is therefore
important to understand and characterise the effects of the human body on the antenna elements,
the radio channel parameters and, hence, system performance. This thesis focuses on the study of
body-worn antennas and on-body radio propagation channels.
The performance parameters of five different narrowband (2.45 GHz) and four UWB (3.1-
10.6 GHz) body-worn antennas in the presence of human body are investigated and compared.
This was performed through a combination of numerical simulations and measurement
campaigns. Parametric studies and statistical analysis, addressing the human body effects on the
performance parameters of different types of narrowband and UWB antennas have been
presented. The aim of this study is to understand the human body effects on the antenna
parameters and specify the suitable antenna in BCWCs at both 2.45 GHz and UWB frequencies.
Extensive experimental investigations are carried out to study the effects of various antenna
types on the on-body radio propagation channels as well. Results and analysis emphasize the best
body-worn antenna for reliable and power-efficient on-body communications. Based on the
results and analysis, a novel dual-band and dual-mode antenna is proposed for power-efficient
and reliable on-body and off-body communications. The on-body performance of the DBDM
antenna at 2.45 GHz is compared with other five narrowband antennas. Based on the results and
analysis of six narrowband and four UWB antennas, antenna specifications and design guidelines
are provided that will help in selecting the best body-worn antenna for both narrowband and
UWB systems to be applied in body-centric wireless networks (BCWNs). A comparison between
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the narrowband and UWB antenna parameters are also provided. At the end of the thesis, the
subject-specificity of the on-body radio propagation channel at 2.45 GHz and 3-10 GHz was
experimentally investigated by considering eight real human test subjects of different shapes,
heights and sizes. The subject-specificity of the on-body radio propagation channels was
compared between the narrowband and UWB systems as well
Characterization of a 60 GHz scattered wireless channel with different antenna polarizations for underground multimedia applications
ABSTRACT: Large scale (i.e. <10 m) and small scale (i.e. 1 × 1× 1 cm) measurements and characterization of a scattered wireless channel with different antenna polarizations and configurations in the underground mine galleries at 60 GHz are addressed. Results show that the rough surface scattering and the gallery dimensions affect the path loss (PL) exponent and it becomes smaller than the free space. Vertically polarized antennas give a lower value of the PL exponent and root mean square (RMS) delay spread compared to the horizontal one. The small scale 3D measurement results show that the power loss of around 1–5 dB within a small scale cubical area. Results also show that the channel is less time dispersive in a wider gallery and observed a higher value of the RMS delay spread compared to a smaller gallery. The statistical results of the small scale multipath amplitude fading provide a better fit with the Rician distribution. The effects such as scattering, polarization, antenna radiation patterns, and waveguide which caused increase and decrease of the value of PL exponent and delay spread are also analysed. Results revealed that a directional narrow beam dual-polarized antenna configuration might be a good candidate in this environment
Interference charecterisation, location and bandwidth estimation in emerging WiFi networks
Wireless LAN technology based on the IEEE 802.11 standard, commonly referred
to as WiFi, has been hugely successful not only for the last hop access to the Internet
in home, office and hotspot scenarios but also for realising wireless backhaul in mesh
networks and for point -to -point long- distance wireless communication. This success
can be mainly attributed to two reasons: low cost of 802.11 hardware from reaching
economies of scale, and operation in the unlicensed bands of wireless spectrum.The popularity of WiFi, in particular for indoor wireless access at homes and offices,
has led to significant amount of research effort looking at the performance issues
arising from various factors, including interference, CSMA/CA based MAC protocol
used by 802.11 devices, the impact of link and physical layer overheads on application
performance, and spatio-temporal channel variations. These factors affect the performance
of applications and services that run over WiFi networks. In this thesis, we
experimentally investigate the effects of some of the above mentioned factors in the
context of emerging WiFi network scenarios such as multi- interface indoor mesh networks,
802.11n -based WiFi networks and WiFi networks with virtual access points
(VAPs). More specifically, this thesis comprises of four experimental characterisation
studies: (i) measure prevalence and severity of co- channel interference in urban WiFi
deployments; (ii) characterise interference in multi- interface indoor mesh networks;
(iii) study the effect of spatio-temporal channel variations, VAPs and multi -band operation
on WiFi fingerprinting based location estimation; and (iv) study the effects of
newly introduced features in 802.11n like frame aggregation (FA) on available bandwidth
estimation.With growing density of WiFi deployments especially in urban areas, co- channel
interference becomes a major factor that adversely affects network performance. To
characterise the nature of this phenomena at a city scale, we propose using a new measurement
methodology called mobile crowdsensing. The idea is to leverage commodity
smartphones and the natural mobility of people to characterise urban WiFi co- channel
interference. Specifically, we report measurement results obtained for Edinburgh, a
representative European city, on detecting the presence of deployed WiFi APs via the
mobile crowdsensing approach. These show that few channels in 2.4GHz are heavily
used and there is hardly any activity in the 5GHz band even though relatively it
has a greater number of available channels. Spatial analysis of spectrum usage reveals
that co- channel interference among nearby APs operating in the same channel
can be a serious problem with around 10 APs contending with each other in many locations. We find that the characteristics of WiFi deployments at city -scale are similar
to those of WiFi deployments in public spaces of different indoor environments. We
validate our approach in comparison with wardriving, and also show that our findings
generally match with previous studies based on other measurement approaches. As
an application of the mobile crowdsensing based urban WiFi monitoring, we outline a
cloud based WiFi router configuration service for better interference management with
global awareness in urban areas.For mesh networks, the use of multiple radio interfaces is widely seen as a practical
way to achieve high end -to -end network performance and better utilisation of
available spectrum. However this gives rise to another type of interference (referred to
as coexistence interference) due to co- location of multiple radio interfaces. We show
that such interference can be so severe that it prevents concurrent successful operation
of collocated interfaces even when they use channels from widely different frequency
bands. We propose the use of antenna polarisation to mitigate such interference and
experimentally study its benefits in both multi -band and single -band configurations. In
particular, we show that using differently polarised antennas on a multi -radio platform
can be a helpful counteracting mechanism for alleviating receiver blocking and adjacent
channel interference phenomena that underlie multi -radio coexistence interference.
We also validate observations about adjacent channel interference from previous
studies via direct and microscopic observation of MAC behaviour.Location is an indispensable information for navigation and sensing applications.
The rapidly growing adoption of smartphones has resulted in a plethora of mobile
applications that rely on position information (e.g., shopping apps that use user position
information to recommend products to users and help them to find what they want
in the store). WiFi fingerprinting is a popular and well studied approach for indoor
location estimation that leverages the existing WiFi infrastructure and works based on
the difference in strengths of the received AP signals at different locations. However,
understanding the impact of WiFi network deployment aspects such as multi -band
APs and VAPs has not received much attention in the literature. We first examine the
impact of various aspects underlying a WiFi fingerprinting system. Specifically, we
investigate different definitions for fingerprinting and location estimation algorithms
across different indoor environments ranging from a multi- storey office building to
shopping centres of different sizes. Our results show that the fingerprint definition
is as important as the choice of location estimation algorithm and there is no single
combination of these two that works across all environments or even all floors of a given environment. We then consider the effect of WiFi frequency bands (e.g., 2.4GHz
and 5GHz) and the presence of virtual access points (VAPs) on location accuracy with
WiFi fingerprinting. Our results demonstrate that lower co- channel interference in the
5GHz band yields more accurate location estimation. We show that the inclusion of
VAPs has a significant impact on the location accuracy of WiFi fingerprinting systems;
we analyse the potential reasons to explain the findings.End -to -end available bandwidth estimation (ABE) has a wide range of uses, from
adaptive application content delivery, transport-level transmission rate adaptation and
admission control to traffic engineering and peer node selection in peer -to- peer /overlay
networks [ 1, 2]. Given its importance, it has been received much research attention in
both wired data networks and legacy WiFi networks (based on 802.11 a/b /g standards),
resulting in different ABE techniques and tools proposed to optimise different criteria
and suit different scenarios. However, effects of new MAC/PHY layer enhancements
in new and next generation WiFi networks (based on 802.11n and 802.11ac
standards) have not been studied yet. We experimentally find that among different
new features like frame aggregation, channel bonding and MIMO modes (spacial division
multiplexing), frame aggregation has the most harmful effect as it has direct
effect on ABE by distorting the measurement probing traffic pattern commonly used
to estimate available bandwidth. Frame aggregation is also specified in both 802.11n
and 802.1 lac standards as a mandatory feature to be supported. We study the effect of
enabling frame aggregation, for the first time, on the performance of the ABE using an
indoor 802.11n wireless testbed. The analysis of results obtained using three tools -
representing two main Probe Rate Model (PRM) and Probe Gap Model (PGM) based
approaches for ABE - led us to come up with the two key principles of jumbo probes
and having longer measurement probe train sizes to counter the effects of aggregating
frames on the performance of ABE tools. Then, we develop a new tool, WBest+ that
is aware of the underlying frame aggregation by incorporating these principles. The
experimental evaluation of WBest+ shows more accurate ABE in the presence of frame
aggregation.Overall, the contributions of this thesis fall in three categories - experimental
characterisation, measurement techniques and mitigation/solution approaches for performance
problems in emerging WiFi network scenarios. The influence of various factors
mentioned above are all studied via experimental evaluation in a testbed or real - world setting. Specifically, co- existence interference characterisation and evaluation
of available bandwidth techniques are done using indoor testbeds, whereas characterisation of urban WiFi networks and WiFi fingerprinting based location estimation are
carried out in real environments. New measurement approaches are also introduced
to aid better experimental evaluation or proposed as new measurement tools. These
include mobile crowdsensing based WiFi monitoring; MAC/PHY layer monitoring of
co- existence interference; and WBest+ tool for available bandwidth estimation. Finally,
new mitigation approaches are proposed to address challenges and problems
identified throughout the characterisation studies. These include: a proposal for crowd - based interference management in large scale uncoordinated WiFi networks; exploiting
antenna polarisation diversity to remedy the effects of co- existence interference
in multi -interface platforms; taking advantage of VAPs and multi -band operation for
better location estimation; and introducing the jumbo frame concept and longer probe
train sizes to improve performance of ABE tools in next generation WiFi networks
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