Design considerations for a filter bank based TVWS transceiver

This paper discusses the design of a filter bank based transceiver capable of simultaneously up- or downconverting the entire TV white space (TVWS) frequency band. The spectral mask requirements favour a filter bank based approach, whereby RF sampling and the use of an FPGA for digital up- and down-conversion dictates a two-stage approach. Some of the design considerations, including filter design approaches, are discussed in this contribution

Efficient TV white space filter bank transceiver

Future devices operating in the TV white space (TVWS) spectrum will require to access different bands at different locations and times in order to avoid interference to incumbent users, requiring agility and sufficient spectral masks to satisfy regulators. Further, with very high-speed ADCs and DACs becoming reality, the purpose of this paper is to present a transceiver front-end capable of simultaneously up- and downconverting a significant portion of the UHF band. The proposed approach takes a two-stage filter-bank conversion for implementation on state-of-the-art FPGAs. We present three different parameterisations, which are compatible with the 40 TVWS channels between 470 and 790MHz in Europe, and compare them in terms of complexity and latency

Digital RF multiplexing for a TVWS transceiver implementation

Future devices operating in the TV white space (TVWS) spectrum will require to access different bands at different locations and times in order to avoid interference to incumbent users, requiring agility and sufficient spectral masks to satisfy regulators. In order to realise radio devices capable of this, we briefly review design efforts on a radio transceiver capable up- and downconverting the 40 8MHz TVWS channels residing between 470MHz and 790MHz. While we briefly address the overall proposed structure, the aim of this contribution is to address the practical issues of interfacing data conversion devices sampling at RF to state-of-the-art FPGAs which can then perform the digital operations required for up- and downconversion

TVWS filter bank transceiver on OMAP-L137 evaluation module

Communications devices operating in the TV white space (TVWS) spectrum will be strictly regulated, requiring compliance with spectral masks to protect incumbent users and sufficient frequency agility to allow access to numerous frequency bands at different times and locations. Therefore, future designs operating at radio frequency (RF) have been proposed. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate an implementation of such a transceivers at a scale-down frequency implemented on the OMAP--L137 evaluation module, whereby the RF link can be replaced by the device's audio I/O, thus enabling easier observation and algorithm testing for students

Readiness for Discharge in Parents of Hospitalized Children

Parental preparation for a child\u27s discharge from the hospital sets the stage for successful transitioning to care and recovery at home. In this study of 135 parents of hospitalized children, the quality of discharge teaching, particularly the nurses\u27 skills in “delivery” of parent teaching, was associated with increased parental readiness for discharge, which was associated with less coping difficulty during the first 3 weeks postdischarge. Parental coping difficulty was predictive of greater utilization of posthospitalization health services. These results validate the role of the skilled nurse as a teacher in promoting positive outcomes at discharge and beyond the hospitalization

Partially reconfigurable TVWS transceiver for use in UK and US markets

With more and more countries opening up sections of unlicensed spectrum for use by TV White Space (TVWS) devices, the prospect of building a device capable of operating in more than one world region is appealing. The difficulty is that the locations of TVWS bands within the radio spectrum are not globally harmonised. With this problem in mind, the purpose of this paper is to present a TVWS transceiver design which is capable of being reconfigured to operate in both the UK and US spectrum. We present three different configurations: one covering the UK TVWS spectrum and the remaining two covering the various locations of the US TVWS bands

Energy-efficient wideband transceiver with per-band equalisation and synchronisation

To emit in the TV white space (TVWS) spectrum, the regulator has requested very strict spectral masks, which can be fulfilled using a FFT-modulated filter-bank multi-carrier system (FBMC) to extract one or several TVWS channels in the 470--790MHz range. Such a system reduces the channel dispersion, but even with near-perfectly reconstructing filter bank, the need for equalisation and synchronisation remains. In this work, we propose a per-band equalisation and synchronisation approach, performed by a constant modulus algorithms running concurrently with a direction-directed adaptation process for faster convergence and reduced phase ambiguity. We compare symbol- and fractionally-spaced versions, and investigate their fixed-point implementation on an FPGA. We compare the performance of the different systems in terms of mean squared error, computational cost, and robustness towards noise

Hepatitis E: A Newcomer to the Hepatitis Alphabet – Case Report and Review of the Literature

The first Canadian case of hepatitis E is described in a patient who travelled to Asia for a six-month period and spent most of his time in India. Hepatitis E shares some similarities with hepatitis A, notably the mode of transmission and the absence of chronic course. However, a few important differences have been noted, including a higher mortality rate and a high fatality rate in pregnant women. Hepatitis E is very common in developing countries and should be suspected more often in individuals with gastrointestinal complaints returning from endemic areas

FPGA implementation of a cyclostationary detector for OFDM signals

Due to the ubiquity of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based communications standards such as IEEE 802.11 a/g/n and 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE), a growing interest has developed in techniques for reliably detecting the presence of these signals in dynamic radio systems. A popular approach for detection is to exploit the cyclostationary nature of OFDM communications signals. In this paper, we focus on a frequency domain cyclostationary detection algorithm first introduced by Giannakis and Dandawate and study its performance in detecting IEEE 802.11a OFDM signals in the presence of practical radio impairments such as Carrier Frequency offset (CFO), Phase Noise, I/Q Imbalance, Multipath Fading and DC offset. We then present a hardware implementation of this algorithm developed using MathWorks HDL Coder and provide implementation results after targeting to a Xilinx 7 Series FPGA device