Bayesian CFO estimation in OFDM systems

This paper addresses the problem of carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems using Bayesian method. Depending on the availability of the noise variance, two general CFO estimators are derived. Furthermore, the two general maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimators are developed into several special cases based on different degrees of prior information on parameters. The relationships between the proposed estimators and existing estimators are comprehensively investigated. Finally, numerical results demonstrate the effects of employing different prior information on the estimation performances. © 2009 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe IEEE Conference on Wireless Communications and Networking (WCNC 2009), Budapest, Hungary, 5-8 April 2009. In Proceedings of IEEE WCNC, 2009, p. 1-

Implementation Aspects of a Transmitted-Reference UWB Receiver

In this paper, we discuss the design issues of an ultra wide band (UWB) receiver targeting a single-chip CMOS implementation for low data-rate applications like ad hoc wireless sensor networks. A non-coherent transmitted reference (TR) receiver is chosen because of its small complexity compared to other architectures. After a brief recapitulation of the UWB fundamentals and a short discussion on the major differences between coherent and non-coherent receivers, we discuss issues, challenges and possible design solutions. Several simulation results obtained by means of a behavioral model are presented, together with an analysis of the trade-off between performance and complexity in an integrated circuit implementation

On robust and secure wireless communication system design using software-defined radios

This dissertation is composed of three parts: airborne multi input multi output (MIMO) communications, physical layer authentication, and software radio design for DARPA Spectrum Challenge. A common theme for the three distinct problems is the system perspective that we have adopted throughout this dissertation. Instead of considering isolated issues within these problems, we have provided a holistic design approach to the three problems and have implemented all three systems using the GNU Radio/USRP (Universal Software Radio Peripheral) platform. In the first part, we develop a MIMO communication system for airborne platforms. MIMO communication has long been considered to be suitable only for environment that is rich in scatterers. This, unfortunately is not the case for airborne platforms. However, this lack of scattering can be compensated by the large aperture of the airborne MIMO platform; this is corroborated by our careful analysis using real measurement data. Our analysis of the airborne MIMO channels leads to the development of a variable rate MIMO transceiver architecture. This architecture is numerically shown to improve the bit error rate (BER) over conventional transceiver architectures that are developed for rich scattering environments. A software radio based MIMO system is then implemented to demonstrate experimentally the efficacy of the developed architecture. In the second part, we develop a physical layer authentication scheme as a counter measure to primary user emulation attack (PUEA) in cognitive radio (CR) networks. In this attack, a malicious user emulates the signal characteristics of the primary user (PU) when it is silent which prevents unsuspecting secondary user (SU) from utilizing the network. The developed physical layer authentication is based on embedding cryptographic hash signatures, referred to as authentication tags, within PU\u27s signal constellations. The embedding is performed such that the legacy receivers are not affected. We analyze the scheme using the fast fading Rayleigh channel model and present an optimal scheme to embed signals in PU\u27s constellations which minimizes the tag BER. Experimental results are obtained that corroborate our theoretical claims, thereby establish that reliable authentication can be achieved without sacrificing signal quality at the primary receivers. In the final part, we describe in detail our design of software radios developed as part of the DARPA Spectrum Challenge (DSC), a year long competition that started in January 2013 and concluded in March 2014 with the final tournament held in Arlington, VA at the DARPA headquarter. DSC was comprised of two tournaments, competitive and cooperative. In the competitive mode two radio pairs, each composed of a transmitter and a receiver, are pitted against each other to transmit the most amount of data error-free while operating concurrently in the same frequency band. In the cooperative mode, three radio pairs have to share a frequency band in a cooperative manner wherein the goal is to maximize the throughput of all the three pairs. We describe the design of our software radio system that integrates some key technologies crucial in operating in an environment that does not allow user coordination and spectrum pre-planning, including: spectrum sensing, adaptive transmission both in spectrum utilization and transmission rate, opportunistic jamming, and sliding window feedback. The developed radio is robust in the presence of unknown interference and achieves the desired balance between throughput and reliability in an uncoordinated transmission environment

Measurement and Optimization of LTE Performance

4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile system is the fourth generation communication system adopted worldwide to provide high-speed data connections and high-quality voice calls. Given the recent deployment by mobile service providers, unlike GSM and UMTS, LTE can be still considered to be in its early stages and therefore many topics still raise great interest among the international scientific research community: network performance assessment, network optimization, selective scheduling, interference management and coexistence with other communication systems in the unlicensed band, methods to evaluate human exposure to electromagnetic radiation are, as a matter of fact, still open issues. In this work techniques adopted to increase LTE radio performances are investigated. One of the most wide-spread solutions proposed by the standard is to implement MIMO techniques and within a few years, to overcome the scarcity of spectrum, LTE network operators will offload data traffic by accessing the unlicensed 5 GHz frequency. Our Research deals with an evaluation of 3GPP standard in a real test best scenario to evaluate network behavior and performance

CYCLOSTATIONARY DETECTION FOR OFDM IN COGNITIVE RADIO SYSTEMS

Research on cognitive radio systems has attracted much interest in the last 10 years. Cognitive radio is born as a paradigm and since then the idea has seen contribution from technical disciplines under different conceptual layers. Since then improvements on processing capabilities have supported the current achievements and even made possible to move some of them from the research arena to markets. Cognitive radio implies a revolution that is even asking for changes in current business models, changes at the infrastructure levels, changes in legislation and requiring state of the art technology. Spectrum sensing is maybe the most important part of the cognitive radio system since it is the block designed to detect signal presence on the air. This thesis investigates what cognitive radio systems require, focusing on the spectrum sensing device. Two voice applications running under different Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) schemes are chosen. These are WiFi and Wireless Microphone. Then, a Cyclostationary Spectrum Sensing technique is studied and applied to define a device capable of detecting OFDM signals in a noisy environment. One of the most interesting methodologies, in terms of complexity and computational requirements, known as FAM is developed. Study of the performance and frequency synchronization results are shown, including the development of a blind synchronization technique for offset estimation. 

CYCLOSTATIONARY DETECTION FOR OFDM IN COGNITIVE RADIO SYSTEMS

Research on cognitive radio systems has attracted much interest in the last 10 years. Cognitive radio is born as a paradigm and since then the idea has seen contribution from technical disciplines under different conceptual layers. Since then improvements on processing capabilities have supported the current achievements and even made possible to move some of them from the research arena to markets. Cognitive radio implies a revolution that is even asking for changes in current business models, changes at the infrastructure levels, changes in legislation and requiring state of the art technology. Spectrum sensing is maybe the most important part of the cognitive radio system since it is the block designed to detect signal presence on the air. This thesis investigates what cognitive radio systems require, focusing on the spectrum sensing device. Two voice applications running under different Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) schemes are chosen. These are WiFi and Wireless Microphone. Then, a Cyclostationary Spectrum Sensing technique is studied and applied to define a device capable of detecting OFDM signals in a noisy environment. One of the most interesting methodologies, in terms of complexity and computational requirements, known as FAM is developed. Study of the performance and frequency synchronization results are shown, including the development of a blind synchronization technique for offset estimation. 

CYCLOSTATIONARY DETECTION FOR OFDM IN COGNITIVE RADIO SYSTEMS

Research on cognitive radio systems has attracted much interest in the last 10 years. Cognitive radio is born as a paradigm and since then the idea has seen contribution from technical disciplines under different conceptual layers. Since then improvements on processing capabilities have supported the current achievements and even made possible to move some of them from the research arena to markets. Cognitive radio implies a revolution that is even asking for changes in current business models, changes at the infrastructure levels, changes in legislation and requiring state of the art technology. Spectrum sensing is maybe the most important part of the cognitive radio system since it is the block designed to detect signal presence on the air. This thesis investigates what cognitive radio systems require, focusing on the spectrum sensing device. Two voice applications running under different Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) schemes are chosen. These are WiFi and Wireless Microphone. Then, a Cyclostationary Spectrum Sensing technique is studied and applied to define a device capable of detecting OFDM signals in a noisy environment. One of the most interesting methodologies, in terms of complexity and computational requirements, known as FAM is developed. Study of the performance and frequency synchronization results are shown, including the development of a blind synchronization technique for offset estimation. 

High-performance signal acquisition algorithms for wireless communications receivers

Due to the uncertainties introduced by the propagation channel, and RF and mixed signal circuits imperfections, digital communication receivers require efficient and robust signal acquisition algorithms for timing and carrier recovery, and interfer- ence rejection. The main theme of this work is the development of efficient and robust signal synchronization and interference rejection schemes for narrowband, wideband and ultra wideband communications systems. A series of novel signal acquisition schemes together with their performance analysis and comparisons with existing state-of-the- art results are introduced. The design effort is first focused on narrowband systems, and then on wideband and ultra wideband systems. For single carrier modulated narrowband systems, it is found that conventional timing recovery schemes present low efficiency, e.g., certain feedback timing recov- ery schemes exhibit the so-called hang-up phenomenon, while another class of blind feedforward timing recovery schemes presents large self-noise. Based on a general re- search framework, we propose new anti-hangup algorithms and prefiltering techniques to speed up the feedback timing recovery and reduce the self-noise of feedforward tim- ing estimators, respectively. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique is well suited for wideband wireless systems. However, OFDM receivers require high performance car-rier and timing synchronization. A new coarse synchronization scheme is proposed for efficient carrier frequency offset and timing acquisition. Also, a novel highly accurate decision-directed algorithm is proposed to track and compensate the residual phase and timing errors after the coarse synchronization step. Both theoretical analysis and computer simulations indicate that the proposed algorithms greatly improve the performance of OFDM receivers. The results of an in-depth study show that a narrowband interference (NBI) could cause serious performance loss in multiband OFDMbased ultra-wideband (UWB) sys- tems. A novel NBI mitigation scheme, based on a digital NBI detector and adaptive analog notch filter bank, is proposed to reduce the effects of NBI in UWB systems. Simulation results show that the proposed NBI mitigation scheme improves signifi- cantly the performance of a standard UWB receiver (this improvement manifests as a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain of 9 dB)