Radio channel characterisation and system-level modelling for ultra wideband body-centric wireless communications

PhDThe next generation of wireless communication is evolving towards user-centric networks, where constant and reliable connectivity and services are essential. Bodycentric wireless network (BCWN) is the most exciting and emerging 4G technology for short (1-5 m) and very short (below 1 m) range communication systems. It has got numerous applications including healthcare, entertainment, surveillance, emergency, sports and military. The major difference between the BCWN and conventional wireless systems is the radio channel over which the communication takes place. The human body is a hostile medium from the radio propagation perspective and it is therefore important to understand and characterise the effect of the human body on the antenna elements, the radio propagation channel parameters and hence the system performance. In addition, fading is another concern that affects the reliability and quality of the wireless link, which needs to be taken into account for a low cost and reliable wireless communication system for body-centric networks. The complex nature of the BCWN requires operating wireless devices to provide low power requirements, less complexity, low cost and compactness in size. Apart from these characteristics, scalable data rates and robust performance in most fading conditions and jamming environment, even at low signal to noise ratio (SNR) is needed. Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is one of the most promising candidate for BCWN as it tends to fulfill most of these requirements. The thesis focuses on the characterisation of ultra wideband body-centric radio propagation channel using single and multiple antenna techniques. Apart from channel characterisation, system level modelling of potential UWB radio transceivers for body-centric wireless network is also proposed. Channel models with respect to large scale and delay analysis are derived from measured parameters. Results and analyses highlight the consequences of static and dynamic environments in addition to the antenna positions on the performance of body-centric wireless communication channels. Extensive measurement i campaigns are performed to analyse the significance of antenna diversity to combat the channel fading in body-centric wireless networks. Various diversity combining techniques are considered in this process. Measurement data are also used to predict the performance of potential UWB systems in the body-centric wireless networks. The study supports the significance of single and multiple antenna channel characterisation and modelling in producing suitable wireless systems for ultra low power body-centric wireless networks.University of Engineering and Technology Lahore Pakista

Final Year Project Allocations for Undergraduate Engineering Students in TNE Programs

Final year project allocations become a challenging task, particularly, in the case of a large number of undergraduate students enthusiast to get a project of their interest and/or to work with a supervisor of their choice. The problem is challenging as the interest of all the students should be matched while keeping the staff workload in balance. It becomes a matching problem with the constraints of staff workload, student preferences, and staff skillset. Particularly, in the Transnational Education (TNE) programs, the physical availability (or lack of it) of the staff plays an important part in the student project selections which gives an additional challenge to the allocation problem. Authors provide a review of different final year project allocation methods currently in practice and discuss their strengths and weaknesses with respect to the constraints highlighted. Authors finally conclude by discussing an algorithm which can work effectively and efficiently in the context of project allocations for TNE programs

Miniature Implantable Antenna Design for Blood Glucose Monitoring

In this paper, a miniaturised implantable antenna with the dimensions of 8×8×1 mm 3 has been studied for continuous monitoring of Blood Glucose Levels (BGL). The antenna performance is analysed numerically for both free space and implanted operation. It has the lowest resonant frequency of 3.58 GHz in free space with a gain 1.18 GHz while operates at 2.58 GHz with a gain of 4.18 dBi when implanted. Good performance and small size make it a good for implantable glucose monitoring devices

Orientation insensitive UHF RFID Tag Antenna With Polarization Diversity Using Characteristic Mode Analysis

This paper presents a UHF RFID tag antenna design with polarization diversity using characteristic mode analysis. The proposed tag antenna consists of two meander dipole-like structure and shorting stubs. By analyzing characteristic modes, the diagonal slots are created to scale down the resonating modes. Since the modes are depicting inductive behavior in the frequency band from 902 MHz to 928 MHz, therefore, the small capacitive slots are created to achieve mode resonance in the required RFID band. Moreover, the proposed tag design is low-cost due to the absence of vias and provide a bandwidth of more than 40 MHz with a 3D orientation insensitive read range pattern. Furthermore, the proposed tag design is able to provide a read range of 7.5 m and 4 m on a metal plate and low permittivity dielectric materials

Millimetre-wave antennas and systems for the future 5G

Editorial of the special issue on Millimetre-Wave Antennas and Systems for the Future 5

Improving Student Engagement in a Transnational Engineering Education Programme Using Piazza

No abstract available

Extremely low profile flexible antenna for medical body area networks

Medical Body Area Networks (MBAN) are widely used in healthcare systems employing in- and on-body applications. An extremely low profile patch antenna for the MBANs is presented in this paper. The antenna consists of two flexible printed circuit boards (FPCB) separated by an air gap and uses a rectangular radiating patch with four slots. Two variants of the antenna having single and dual band operation are discussed. The single band antenna operates at 2.4 GHz while the dual band antenna works at frequencies of 2.4 GHz and 4.3 GHz. Both versions of the proposed antenna offer good bandwidth, high gain and radiation coverage for the MBAN applications

A convolutional neural network-based decision support system for neonatal quiet sleep detection

Sleep plays an important role in neonatal brain and physical development, making its detection and characterization important for assessing early-stage development. In this study, we propose an automatic and computationally efficient algorithm to detect neonatal quiet sleep (QS) using a convolutional neural network (CNN). Our study used 38-hours of electroencephalography (EEG) recordings, collected from 19 neonates at Fudan Children's Hospital in Shanghai, China (Approval No. (2020) 22). To train and test the CNN, we extracted 12 prominent time and frequency domain features from 9 bipolar EEG channels. The CNN architecture comprised two convolutional layers with pooling and rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation. Additionally, a smoothing filter was applied to hold the sleep stage for 3 minutes. Through performance testing, our proposed method achieved impressive results, with 94.07% accuracy, 89.70% sensitivity, 94.40% specificity, 79.82% F1-score and a 0.74 kappa coefficient when compared to human expert annotations. A notable advantage of our approach is its computational efficiency, with the entire training and testing process requiring only 7.97 seconds. The proposed algorithm has been validated using leave one subject out (LOSO) validation, which demonstrates its consistent performance across a diverse range of neonates. Our findings highlight the potential of our algorithm for real-time neonatal sleep stage classification, offering a fast and cost-effective solution. This research opens avenues for further investigations in early-stage development monitoring and the assessment of neonatal health

Towards sparse characterisation of on-body ultra-wideband wireless channels

With the aim of reducing cost and power consumption of the receiving terminal, compressive sensing (CS) framework is applied to on-body ultra-wideband (UWB) channel estimation. It is demonstrated in this Letter that the sparse on-body UWB channel impulse response recovered by the CS framework fits the original sparse channel well; thus, on-body channel estimation can be achieved using low-speed sampling devices