This paper proposes a group demodulator that employs multi-symbol chirp Fourier transform to demodulate pulse shaped and time asynchronous signals without degradation; this is not possible with conventional group demodulators based on chirp Fourier transform. Computer simulation results show that the bit error rate degradation of the proposed group demodulator at BER=10-3 is less than 0.3dB even when a root Nyquist (α=0.5) filter is used as the transmission pulse shaping filter and the symbol timing offset between the desired channel and the chirp sweep is half the symbol period.

This paper proposes a hybrid on-demand content delivery scheme employing modified pyramid broadcasting. Our scheme delivers a fixed-sized head portion of the video content to each client individually via an individual channel and the remaining portion via multiple broadcasting channels by using a modified form of pyramid broadcasting. The feature of this scheme is that it can be used together with forward error correction using block coding. Therefore, it can deliver high-quality content upon request with high network bandwidth efficiency even if data containers, such as Ethernet frames, are lost in the IP network. This is not possible with conventional schemes. Evaluation results show that its network bandwidth performance is still excellent even though it supports well-known FEC schemes using block coding.

This paper proposes a new effective data transfer method for IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs by integrating priority control and multirate mechanism. The IEEE 802.11 PHY layer supports a multirate mechanism with dynamic rate switching and an appropriate data rate is selected in transmitting a frame. However, the multirate mechanism is used with the CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance) protocol, low rate transmissions need much longer time than high rate transmissions to finish sending a frame. As a result, the system capacity is decreased. The proposed method assumes the same number of priority levels as the data rates, and a data rate is associated to a priority level. Priority of a transmission goes up with the used data rate. For this purpose, we have modified the CSMA/CA protocol to support prioritized transmission. By selecting the appropriate priority depending on the data rate and giving more transmission opportunities for high rate transmission, the system capacity is increased. The effect of the proposed mechanism is confirmed by computer simulations.

We have proposed a quality of experience (QoE)-oriented wireless local area network (WLAN) to provide sufficient QoE to important application flows. Unlike ordinary IEEE 802.11 WLAN, the proposed QoE-oriented WLAN dynamically performs admission control with the aid of the prediction of a “loadable capacity” criterion. This paper proposes an algorithm for dynamic network reconfiguration by centralized control among multiple basic service sets (BSSs) of the QoE-oriented WLAN, in order to maximize the number of traffic flows whose QoE requirements can be satisfied. With the proposed dynamic reconfiguration mechanism, stations (STAs) can change access point (AP) to connect. The operating frequency channel of a BSS also can be changed. These controls are performed according to the current channel occupancy rate of each BSS and the required radio resources to satisfy the QoE requirement of the traffic flow that is not allowed to transmit its data by the admission control. The effectiveness of the proposed dynamic network reconfiguration is evaluated through indoor experiments with assuming two cases. One is a 14-node experiment with QoE-oriented WLAN only, and the other is a 50-node experiment where the ordinary IEEE 802.11 WLAN and the QoE-oriented WLAN coexist. The experiment confirms that the QoE-oriented WLAN can significantly increase the number of traffic flows that satisfy their QoE requirements, total utility of network, and QoE-satisfied throughput, which is the system throughput contributing to satisfy the QoE requirement of traffic flows. It is also revealed that the QoE-oriented WLAN can protect the traffic flows in the ordinary WLAN if the border of the loadable capacity is properly set even in the environment where the hidden terminal problem occurs.

The mesh topology based on the standard IEEE 802.11 for wireless LANs (WLANs) appears to be a very promising architecture on the way to realizing an ubiquitous high-speed wireless Internet access in the future. However, the current IEEE 802.11 protocol is aimed at single Access Point (AP) environments and many problems related to the wireless meshed interconnection of APs and Mobile Terminals (MTs) remain unsolved. Some proposed solutions to build such mesh architectures are based on ad-hoc-oriented single-channel schemes that modify IEEE 802.11 protocol. The main problem with this type of schemes, however, lies in the very low performance of the single-channel architecture itself when the network becomes larger or the offered traffic load increases. The task group IEEE 802.11s is currently discussing and working out a standard for IEEE 802.11-compliant mesh architectures for various usage scenarios including residential, office and campus/community/public access network but much work is ahead since the group was recently established. In this paper we propose a new multi-radio multi-channel mesh architecture for WLAN hot spots, which works using a Distributed Coordination Function (DCF)-based technique for interconnecting APs, and also a radio-aware packet forwarding scheme among APs. A major advantage of the system is that, putting routing issues aside, it introduces no changes into the MAC protocol of IEEE 802.11. The simulation results obtained in OPNET v.10.0 show the great potential of our mesh architecture to support real-time traffic with any packet size, and the effectiveness of the radio-aware forwarding scheme in improving the delay performance of the mesh network.

This paper proposes a new vector error measurement scheme for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems that is used to define transmit modulation accuracy. The transmit modulation accuracy is defined to guarantee inter-operability among wireless terminals. In OFDM systems, the transmit modulation accuracy measured by the conventional vector error measurement scheme can not guarantee inter-operability due to the effect of phase noise. To overcome this problem, the proposed vector error measurement scheme utilizes pilot signals in multiple OFDM symbols to compensate the phase rotation caused by the phase noise. Computer simulation results show that the vector error measured by the proposed scheme uniquely corresponds to the C/N degradation in packet error rate even if phase noise exists in the OFDM signals. This means that the proposed vector error measurement scheme makes it possible to define the transmit modulation accuracy and so guarantee inter-operability among wireless terminals.

This paper proposes a new maximal ratio combining (MRC) frequency diversity automatic-repeat-request (ARQ) scheme suitable for high-speed orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems that is based on the conventional packet combining ARQ scheme. The proposed scheme regularly changes the previously prepared subcarrier assignment pattern at each retransmission according to the number of retransmissions. This scheme sharply reduces the number of ARQ retransmissions and much improves the throughput performance in slow fading environments by virtue of the frequency diversity effect while it requires no complex adaptive operations. Computer simulation results show that the proposed scheme reduces the required number of retransmissions to about 3 at the accumulative correct packet reception rate (ACPRR) of 0.9.

This paper proposes a frequency diversity transmission scheme that obtains a frequency diversity gain and does not degrade spectrum efficiency; it utilizes multiple carrier frequencies alternately, not simultaneously. This scheme improves the bit error rate (BER) of significant information bits by sacrificing that of insignificant bits in fading channels. Simulation results show that the error floor of significant information bits is reduced to less than 1/5 while that of insignificant bits is doubled. They also show that the proposed scheme improves the received 4-bit ADPCM voice signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by approximately 4 dB even when the frequency correlation is 0. 5.

This paper proposes a new cell station (CS) configuration for personal communication systems. The proposed CS employs a modified coherent demodulator with 4-branch maximal ratio combining diversity and a burst-by-burst automatic frequency control (AFC) to enhance the coverage. The proposed CS also employs an antenna-sharing diversity transmission to incorporate more than one transceiver block into a small unit with high power efficiency. With these techniques, the BER performance of the uplink control channel (CCH) is flattened regardless of carrier frequency errors within 12 kHz; the diversity gain of uplink traffic channel (TCH) is improved by 2 dB; the downlink transmission power is reduced by 1.9 dB.

This paper proposes a novel space diversity reception scheme suitable for packet-based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) wireless access systems that achieves large diversity gain by improving the accuracy of both carrier frequency synchronization and phase tracking. Phase tracking compensates the phase rotation caused by residual carrier frequency error and phase noise and is necessary for high data rate OFDM systems that use coherent detection. In the proposed scheme, the accuracy of carrier frequency synchronization is improved by combining the information of the carrier frequency offset detected on all diversity branches; the accuracy of phase tracking is improved by using pilot signals whose signal to noise ratio (SNR) is raised by maximal ratio combining of the pilot signals extracted from all branches. Computer simulation results show that the proposed scheme effectively improves the diversity gain even in severe environments such as those with low carrier to noise ratios (CNR) and large delay spreads.