A comparative investigation on performance and which is the preferred methodology for spectrum management; geo-location spectrum database or spetrum sensing

A Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of Witwatersrand, in the partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering Johannesburg, 2015.Due to the enormous demand for multimedia services which relies hugely on the availability of spectrum, service providers and technologist are devising a means or method which is able to fully satisfy these growing demands. The availability of spectrum to meet these demands has been a lingering issue for the past couple of years. Many would have it tagged as spectrum scarcity but really the main problem is not how scarce the spectrum is but how efficiently allocated to use is the spectrum. Once such inefficiency is tackled effectively, then we are a step closer in meeting the enormous demands for uninterrupted services. However, to do so, there are techniques or methodologies being developed to aid in the efficient management of spectrum. In this research project, two methodologies were considered and the efficiency of these methodologies in the areas of spectrum management. The Geo-location Spectrum Database (GLSD) which is the most adopted technique and the Cognitive radio spectrum sensing technique are currently the available techniques in place. The TV whitespaces (TVWS) was explored using both techniques and certain comparison based on performances; implementation, practicability, cost and flexibility were used as an evaluation parameter in arriving at a conclusion. After accessing both methodologies, conclusions were deduced on the preferred methodology and how its use would efficiently solve the issues encountered in spectrum managemen

Reti Wireless Cognitive Cooperanti su TV White e Grey Spaces

Wireless networks rapidly became a fundamental pillar of everyday activities. Whether at work or elsewhere, people often benefits from always-on connections. This trend is likely to increase, and hence actual technologies struggle to cope with the increase in traffic demand. To this end, Cognitive Wireless Networks have been studied. These networks aim at a better utilization of the spectrum, by understanding the environment in which they operate, and adapt accordingly. In particular recently national regulators opened up consultations on the opportunistic use of the TV bands, which became partially free due to the digital TV switch over. In this work, we focus on the indoor use of of TVWS. Interesting use cases like smart metering and WiFI like connectivity arise, and are studied and compared against state of the art technology. New measurements for TVWS networks will be presented and evaluated, and fundamental characteristics of the signal derived. Then, building on that, a new model of spectrum sharing, which takes into account also the height from the terrain, is presented and evaluated in a real scenario. The principal limits and performance of TVWS operated networks will be studied for two main use cases, namely Machine to Machine communication and for wireless sensor networks, particularly for the smart grid scenario. The outcome is that TVWS are certainly interesting to be studied and deployed, in particular when used as an additional offload for other wireless technologies. Seeing TVWS as the only wireless technology on a device is harder to be seen: the uncertainity in channel availability is the major drawback of opportunistic networks, since depending on the primary network channel allocation might lead in having no channels available for communication. TVWS can be effectively exploited as offloading solutions, and most of the contributions presented in this work proceed in this direction

Synchronization in Cognitive Overlay Systems

The primary purpose of this thesis is to study the effect of synchronization problems in cognitive radio based overlay systems. In such systems the secondary transmitter should know the transmission timing of the primary transmitter for cooperation to take place between the two systems. The thesis also investigates the effect of relaying in overlay systems. By splitting the secondary transmission power into two parts by a ratio alpha, the secondary transmitter can relay the primary transmission while transmitting its own message. Another aim of the thesis is to study the effects of time and frequency offsets in the primary and the secondary systems. Hence, time and frequency synchronization issues are investigated for DVB-T and LTE systems individually. Cell search and selection procedures are also studied for LTE systems. Two N200 Universal Software Radio Peripherals (USRPs) were used to transmit and receive the signal using the Gnu Radio platform and the captured signals were post processed in Matlab to study the effects of time offset and frequency offset of the devices. Moreover, a Matlab simulation was used to investigate the effect of timing offset between primary and secondary transmitters in overlay systems. From the investigation of the overlay scenario with relay, we have found out that the relaying introduce a multi-path effect at the secondary receiver. If there is a delay between the primary and the secondary receivers, the components of the multi-path signal might be added-up in such a way that it is impossible to separate the primary and the secondary signals at the secondary receiver. Hence, we have implemented synchronization and equalization algorithms to estimate the delay and frequency offsets. We observed that the performance of the equalizer at the secondary receiver deteriorates for high delays and low alpha values

Vehicular Dynamic Spectrum Access: Using Cognitive Radio for Automobile Networks

Vehicular Dynamic Spectrum Access (VDSA) combines the advantages of dynamic spectrum access to achieve higher spectrum efficiency and the special mobility pattern of vehicle fleets. This dissertation presents several noval contributions with respect to vehicular communications, especially vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Starting from a system engineering aspect, this dissertation will present several promising future directions for vehicle communications, taking into consideration both the theoretical and practical aspects of wireless communication deployment. This dissertation starts with presenting a feasibility analysis using queueing theory to model and estimate the performance of VDSA within a TV whitespace environment. The analytical tool uses spectrum measurement data and vehicle density to find upper bounds of several performance metrics for a VDSA scenario in TVWS. Then, a framework for optimizing VDSA via artificial intelligence and learning, as well as simulation testbeds that reflect realistic spectrum sharing scenarios between vehicle networks and heterogeneous wireless networks including wireless local area networks and wireless regional area networks. Detailed experimental results justify the testbed for emulating a mobile dynamic spectrum access environment composed of heterogeneous networks with four dimensional mutual interference. Vehicular cooperative communication is the other proposed technique that combines the cooperative communication technology and vehicle platooning, an emerging concept that is expected to both increase highway utilization and enhance both driver experience and safety. This dissertation will focus on the coexistence of multiple vehicle groups in shared spectrum, where intra-group cooperation and inter-group competition are investigated in the aspect of channel access. Finally, a testbed implementation VDSA is presented and a few applications are developed within a VDSA environment, demonstrating the feasibility and benefits of some features in a future transportation system

Interference cancellation and Resource Allocation approaches for Device-to-Device Communications

Network assisted Device-to-Device (D2D) communication as an underlay to cellular spectrum has attracted much attention in mobile network standards for local area connectivity as a means to improve the cellular spectrum utilization and to reduce the energy consumption of User Equipments (UEs). The D2D communication uses resources of the underlying mobile network which results in different interference scenarios. These include interference from cellular to D2D link, D2D to cellular link and interference among D2D links when multiple D2D links share common resources. In this thesis, an orthogonal precoding interference cancellation method is initially presented to reduce the cellular to D2D and D2D to cellular interferences when the cellular channel resources are being shared by a single D2D link. Three different scenarios have been considered when establishing a D2D communication along with a Base Station-to-UE communication. The proposed method is analytically evaluated in comparison with the conventional precoding matrix allocation method in terms of ergodic capacity. This method is then extended for a cluster based multi-link D2D scenario where interference between D2D pairs also exists in addition to the other two interference scenarios. In this work, cluster denotes a group of devices locally communicating through multi-link D2D communications sharing the same radio resources of the Cluster Head. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated and compared for different resource sharing modes. The analyses illustrate the importance of cluster head in each cluster to save the battery life of devices in that cluster. The outage probability is considered as a performance evaluation matrix for guaranteeing QoS constrain of communication links. Hence, the mathematical expressions for outage probability of the proposed method for single-link and multi-link D2D communications are presented and compared with an existing interference cancellation technique. To execute the cluster based interference cancellation approach, a three-step resource allocation scheme is then proposed. It first performs a mode selection procedure to choose the transmission mode of each UEs. Then a clustering scheme is developed to group the links that can share a common resource to improve the spectral efficiency. For the selection of suitable cellular UEs for each cluster whose resource can be shared, a cluster head selection algorithm is also developed. Maximal residual energy and minimal transmit power have been considered as parameters for the cluster head selection scheme. Finally, the expression for maximum number of links that the radio resource of shared UE can support is analytically derived. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using a WINNER II A1 indoor office model. The performance of D2D communication practically gets limited due to large distance and/or poor channel conditions between the D2D transmitter and receiver. To overcome these issues, a relay-assisted D2D communication is introduced in this thesis where a device relaying is an additional transmission mode along with the existing cellular and D2D transmission modes. A transmission mode assignment algorithm based on the Hungarian algorithm is then proposed to improve the overall system throughput. The proposed algorithm tries to solve two problems: a suitable transmission mode selection for each scheduled transmissions and a device selection for relaying communication between user equipments in the relay transmission mode. Simulation results showed that our proposed algorithm improves the system performance in terms of the overall system throughput and D2D data rate in comparison with traditional D2D communication schemes

The relationship between choice of spectrum sensing device and secondary-user intrusion in database-driven cognitive radio systems

As radios in future wireless systems become more flexible and reconfigurable whilst available radio spectrum becomes scarce, the possibility of using TV White Space devices (WSD) as secondary users in the TV Broadcast Bands (without causing harmful interference to licensed incumbents) becomes ever more attractive. Cognitive Radio encompasses a number of technologies which enable adaptive self-programming of systems at different levels to provide more effective use of the increasingly congested radio spectrum. Cognitive Radio has the potential to use spectrum allocated to TV services, which is not actually being used by these services, without causing disruptive interference to licensed users by using channel selection aided by use of appropriate propagation modelling in TV White Spaces.The main purpose of this thesis is to explore the potential of the Cognitive Radio concept to provide additional bandwidth and improved efficiency to help accelerate the development and acceptance of Cognitive Radio technology. Specifically, firstly: three main classes of spectrum sensing techniques (Energy Detection, Matched Filtering and Cyclostationary Feature Detection) have compare in terms of time and spectrum resources consumed, required prior knowledge and complexity, ranking the three classes according to accuracy and performance. Secondly, investigate spectrum occupancy of the UHF TV band in the frequency range from 470 to 862 MHz by undertaking spectrum occupancy measurements in different locations around the Hull area in the UK, using two different receiver devices; a low cost Software-Defined Radio device and a laboratory-quality spectrum analyser. Thirdly, investigate the best propagation model among three propagation models (Extended-Hata, Davidson-Hata and Egli) for use in the TV band, whilst also finding the optimum terrain data resolution to use (1000, 100 or 30 m). it compares modelled results with the previously-mentioned practical measurements and then describe how such models can be integrated into a database-driven tool for Cognitive Radio channel selection within the TV White Space environment. Fourthly, create a flexible simulation system for creating a TV White Space database by using different propagation models. Finally, design a flexible system which uses a combination of Geolocation Database and Spectrum Sensing in the TV band, comparing the performance of two spectrum analysers (Agilent E4407B and Agilent EXA N9010A) with that of a low cost Software-Defined Radio in the real radio environment. The results shows that white space devices can be designed using SDRs based on the Realtek RTL2832U chip (RTL-SDR), combined with a geolocation database for identifying the primary user in the specific location in a cost-effective manner. Furthermore it is shown that improving the sensitivity of RTL-SDR will affect the accuracy and performance of the WSD

Understanding the Challenges of TV White Space Databases for Mobile Usage

Transition to the Digital Television (DTV) has freed up large spectrum bands, known as a digital dividend. These frequencies are now available for opportunistic use and referred to as Television White Space (TVWS). The usage of the TVWS is regulated by licensing, and there are primary users, mostly TV broadcasters, that have bought the license to use certain channels, and secondary users, who can use channels that primary users are not currently utilizing. The coexistence can be facilitated either by spectrum sensing or White Space Databases (WSDBs) and in this thesis, we are concentrating on the latter. Technically, WSDB is a geolocational database that stores location and other relevant transmitter characteristics of primary users, such as antenna height and transmission power. WSDB calculates safety zone of the primary user by applying radio wave propagation model to the stored information. The secondary user sends a request to WSDB containing its location and receives a list of available channels. The main problem we are going to concentrate on is specific challenges that mobile devices face in using WSDBs. Current regulations demand that after moving each 100 meters, the mobile device has to query WSDB, consequently increasing device's energy consumption and network load. Fast moving devices confront the even more severe problem: there is always some delay in communications with WSDB, and it is possible that while waiting for the response the device moves another 100 meters. In that case, instead of using the reply the device has to query the WSDB again. For fast moving devices (e.g. contained inside vehicles) the vicious loop can continue indefinitely long, resulting in an inability to use TVWS at all. A. Majid has proposed predictive optimization algorithm called Nuna to deal with the problem. Our approach is different, we investigate spatiotemporal variations of the spectrum and basing on over than six months of observations we suggest the spectrum caching technique. According to our data, there are minimal temporal variations in TVWS spectrum, and that makes caching very appealing. We also sketch technical details for a possible spectrum caching solution