Synchronization in wireless communications

The last decade has witnessed an immense increase of wireless communications services in order to keep pace with the ever increasing demand for higher data rates combined with higher mobility. To satisfy this demand for higher data rates, the throughput over the existing transmission media had to be increased. Several techniques were proposed to boost up the data rate: multicarrier systems to combat selective fading, ultra wide band (UWB) communications systems to share the spectrum with other users, MIMO transmissions to increase the capacity of wireless links, iteratively decodable codes (e.g., turbo codes and LDPC codes) to improve the quality of the link, cognitive radios, and so forth

A New Protocol for Cooperative Spectrum Sharing in Mobile Cognitive Radio Networks

To optimize the usage of limited spectrum resources, cognitive radio (CR) can be used as a viable solution. The main contribution of this article is to propose a new protocol to increase throughput of mobile cooperative CR networks (CRNs). The key challenge in a CRN is how the nodes cooperate to access the channel in order to maximize the CRN's throughput. To minimize unnecessary blocking of CR transmission, we propose a so-called new frequency-range MAC protocol (NFRMAC). The proposed method is in fact a novel channel assignment mechanism that exploits the dependence between signal's attenuation model, signal's frequency, communication range, and interference level. Compared .to the conventional methods, the proposed algorithm considers a more realistic model for the mobility pattern of CR nodes and also adaptively selects the maximal transmission range of each node over which reliable transmission is possible. Simulation results indicate that using NFRMAC leads to an increase of the total CRN's throughput by 6% and reduces the blocking rate by 10% compared to those of conventional methods

A Scalable 6-to-18 GHz Concurrent Dual-Band Quad-Beam Phased-Array Receiver in CMOS

This paper reports a 6-to-18 GHz integrated phased- array receiver implemented in 130-nm CMOS. The receiver is easily scalable to build a very large-scale phased-array system. It concurrently forms four independent beams at two different frequencies from 6 to 18 GHz. The nominal conversion gain of the receiver ranges from 16 to 24 dB over the entire band while the worst-case cross-band and cross-polarization rejections are achieved 48 dB and 63 dB, respectively. Phase shifting is performed in the LO path by a digital phase rotator with the worst-case RMS phase error and amplitude variation of 0.5° and 0.4 dB, respectively, over the entire band. A four-element phased-array receiver system is implemented based on four receiver chips. The measured array patterns agree well with the theoretical ones with a peak-to-null ratio of over 21.5 dB