This paper describes ultra wideband (UWB) radio propagation measurements and modeling for wireless body area network (WBAN) applications in different environments. Several propagation measurement campaigns and associated modelings were carried out in either a radio anechoic chamber or a specific room type; however, dependence of the radio propagation on surrounding environments was not studied. Multipaths (mainly reflected from floor, ceiling, and walls) highly depend on the environment. To address this problem, radio propagation around the human body was measured in a radio anechoic chamber and four different-sized rooms. Parameters in a conventional loss model derived from the measurements were found to significantly diverge and depend on room volume and line-of-sight (LOS)/non-LOS (NLOS) cases. A modified model considering the impact of room volume has been proposed for the LOS/NLOS cases. Different propagation mechanisms were discussed along with parameter derivation. Probability distributions for the UWB propagation losses were also examined.

We present an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based multichannel slotted ALOHA for cognitive radio networks (OMSA-CR). The performance of an infinite population based OMSA-CR system is analyzed in terms of channel capacity, throughput, delay, and packet capture effect. We investigate the channel capacity for OMSA-CR with perfect or imperfect spectrum sensing. We introduce the proposed CR MAC based on two channel selection schemes: non-agile channel selection (NCS) and agile channel selection (ACS). Comparing them, we show the tradeoff between complexity and system performance. We verify the proposed CR system model using numerical analysis. In particular, using simulation with a finite populated linear feedback model, we observe the OMSA-CR MAC tradeoff between throughput and minimum delay whose results matched those of the analytical framework. Numerical results for the proposed system throughput are also compared to conventional MACs, including pure ALOHA based CR MAC.

A Gaussian MIMO broadcast channel (GMBC) models the MIMO transmission of Gaussian signals from a transmitter to one or more receivers. Its capacity region and different precoding schemes for it have been well investigated, especially for the case wherein there are only transmit power constraints. In this paper, a special case of GMBC is investigated, wherein receive power constraints are also included. By imposing receive power constraints, the model, called protected GMBC (PGMBC), can be applied to certain scenarios in spatial spectrum sharing, secretive communications, mesh networks and base station cooperation. The sum capacity, capacity region, and application examples for the PGMBC are discussed in this paper. Sub-optimum precoding algorithms are also proposed for the PGMBC, where standard user precoding techniques are performed over a BC with a modified channel, which we refer to as the "protection-implied BC." In the protection-implied BC, the receiver protection constraints have been implied in the channel, which means that by satisfying the transmit power constraints on the protection implied channel, receiver protection constraints are guaranteed to be met. Any standard single-user or multi-user MIMO precoding scheme may then be performed on the protection-implied channel. When SINR-matching duality-based precoding is applied on the protection-implied channel, sum-capacity under full protection constraints (zero receive power), and near-sum-capacity under partial protection constraints (limited non-zero receive power) are achieved, and were verified by simulations.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) repeater systems have been discussed in several published papers. When a repeater has only one antenna element, the propagation environment is called keyhole. In this kind of scenario the achievable channel capacity and link quality are decreased. Another limit is when the number of the antenna elements of a repeater is larger than that of a MIMO transceiver, the channel capacity cannot be increased. In this paper, in order to obtain an upper bound of the channel capacity, we express a propagation process of the distributed MIMO repeater system with amplify-and-forward method by the numerical formular, and optimize the position of each repeater.

Base Station (BS) cooperation has been considered as a promising technology to mitigate co-channel interference (CCI), yielding great capacity improvement in cellular systems. In this paper, by combining frequency domain cooperation and space domain cooperation together, we design a new CCI mitigation scheme to maximize the total utility for a multi-cell OFDMA network. The scheme formulates the CCI mitigation problem as a mixture integer programming problem, which involves a joint user-set-oriented subcarrier assignment and power allocation. A computationally feasible algorithm based on Lagrange dual decomposition is derived to evaluate the optimal value of the problem. Moreover, a low-complexity suboptimal algorithm is also presented. Simulation results show that our scheme outperforms the counterparts incorporating BS cooperation in a single domain considerably, and the proposed low-complexity algorithm achieves near optimal performance.

With the increasing popularity of multicast and real-time streaming service applications, efficient channel assignment algorithms that handle both multicast and unicast traffic in wireless mesh networks are needed. One of the most effective approaches to enhance the capacity of wireless networks is to use systems with multiple channels and multiple radio interfaces. However, most of the past works focus on vertex coloring of a general contention graph, which is NP-Complete, and use the greedy algorithm to achieve a suboptimal result. In this paper, we combine unicast and multicast with a transmission set, and propose a framework named Chordal Graph Based Channel Assignment (CGCA) that performs channel assignment for multicast and unicast traffic in multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks. The proposed framework based on chordal graph coloring minimizes the interference of the network and prevents unicast traffic from starvation. Simulation results show that our framework provides high throughput and low end-to-end delay for both multicast and unicast traffic. Furthermore, our framework significantly outperforms other well-known schemes that have a similar objective in various scenarios.

A multiband system can flexibly create spectral holes to avoid interference between different systems. When two systems within the same frequency band coexist, the multiband system must immediately detect the signals from all users to remove unwanted interference. The complication of creating spectral holes is to obtain an occupied frequency band and an angle-of-arrival of interfering system. These parameters must be measured at the receiver of multiband system and then fed back to the transmitter. This paper presents a channel estimator with an interference detector that is developed to implement and test it's functionality in a multiband system. The proposed estimator can precisely detect the parameters before demodulation, and quickly feed back the interfering system parameters to transmitter. The effective design and the detection error rate were evaluated via verification tests in an anechoic chamber and computer simulations. The results of the proposed technique show an ability of interference detection as well as channel estimation.

The need for efficient movement and precise location of robots in intelligent robot control systems within complex buildings is becoming increasingly important. This paper proposes an indoor positioning and communication platform using Fluorescent Light Communication (FLC) employing a newly developed nine-channel receiver, and discusses a new location estimation method using FLC, that involves a simulation model and coordinate calculation formulae. A series of experiments is performed. Distance errors of less than 25 cm are achieved. The enhanced FLC system yields benefits such as greater precision and ease of use.

In this letter, we apply recently proposed compressive projection principal component analysis (CPPCA) for MIMO channel feedback. A novel scheme with compressed feedback and efficient reconstruction is presented. Simulation results based on 3GPP spatial channel model (SCM) demonstrate the scheme is beneficial for large-scale MIMO systems.

Duty-cycle MAC protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to reduce the energy consumed by idle listening, but they introduce significant end-to-end delivery latency. Several works have attempted to mitigate this latency, but they still have a problem on handling the packet loss. The quality of the wireless channel in WSNs is quite bad, so packets are frequently lost. In this letter, we present a novel duty-cycle MAC protocol, called REMAC (Retransmission-Enhanced duty-cycle MAC), which exploits both the network layer and the physical layer information. REMAC estimates the quality of the wireless channel and properly reserves the wireless channel to handle the packet loss. It can reduce the end-to-end packet delivery latency caused by the packet loss without sacrificing the energy efficiency. Simulation results show that REMAC outperforms RMAC in terms of the end-to-end packet delivery latency.

In this paper, the outage probability and diversity order of opportunistic decode-and-forward (DF) cooperation are analyzed under Rayleigh fading channels, where the impacts of channel estimation error, relay selection feedback delay and the availability of the direct link between the source and the destination are considered comprehensively. The closed-form expressions of outage probability in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region are derived as well as the diversity order. The theoretical results demonstrate that the achievable diversity order is zero when channel estimation error exists, and this conclusion holds no matter whether the direct link is available, even if the relay selection feedback is delay-free. For the perfect channel estimation scenario, the achievable diversity order is related to the potential relay number K, the channel delay correlation coefficient ρd and the availability of the direct link. If relay selection feedback is not delayed, i.e., ρd = 1, the diversity order is K when the direct link is blocked, and it becomes K+1 when the direct link is available. For delayed relay selection feedback, i.e., ρd < 1, the diversity order achievable is only related to the availability of the direct link. In this case, if the direct link does not exist, the diversity order is 1, otherwise the diversity order of 2 can be obtained. Simulation results verify the analytical results of outage probability and diversity order.

Recently, broadcast services are introduced in cellular networks and macro diversity is an effective way to combat fading. In this paper, we propose a kind of distributed space-time block codes (STBCs) for macro diversity which is constructed from the total antennas of multiple cooperating base stations, and all the antennas form an equivalent multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system. This code is termed High-Dimension-Full-Rate-Quasi-Orthogonal STBC (HDFR-QOSTBC) which can be characterized as: (1) It can be applied with any number of transmit antennas especially when the number of transmit antennas is large; (2) The code is with full transmit rate of one; (3) The Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding complexity of this code is controllable and limited to Nt/2-symbol-decodable for total Nt transmit antennas. Then, we completely analyze the structure of the equivalent channel for the kind of codes and reveal a property that the eigenvectors of the equivalent channel are constant and independent from the channel realization, and this characteristic can be exploited for a new transmission structure with single-symbol linear decoder. Furthermore, we analyze different macro diversity schemes and give a performance comparison. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme is practical for the broadcast systems with significant performance improvement comparing with soft-combination and cyclic delay diversity (CDD) methods.

In this letter, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) for the maxima of the OSTBC-MIMO channel capacity in a temporal interval is estimated using the first-order Rice series approximation. As the estimation of the maxima distribution using the Rice series is applicable only to Gaussian random processes, the Gaussian-approximated probability density function (PDF) for the OSTBC-MIMO channel capacity is derived from existing exact PDF (non-Gaussian). The resulting CDF for the maxima capacity is useful to design OSTBC-MIMO systems.

In this work, a high performance LDPC decoder architecture is presented. It is a partially-parallel architecture for low-complexity consideration. In order to eliminate the idling time and hardware complexity in conventional partially-parallel decoders, the decoding process, decoder architecture and memory structure are optimized. Particularly, the parity-check matrix is optimally partitioned into four unequal sub-matrices that lead to high efficiency in hardware sharing. As a result, it can handle two different codewords simultaneously with 100% hardware utilization. Furthermore, for minimizing the performance loss due to round-off errors in fixed-point implementations, the well-known modified min-sum decoding algorithm is enhanced by our recently proposed high-performance CMVP decoding algorithm. Overall, the proposed decoder has high throughput, low complexity, and good BER performances. In the circuit implementation example of the (576,288) parity check matrix for IEEE 802.16e standard, the decoder achieves a data rate of 5.5 Gbps assuming 10 decoding iterations and 7 quantization bits, with a small area of 653 K gates, based on UMC 90 nm process technology.

In this paper, a novel pseudo-random noise complementary pair (PNCP) is proposed and adopted as the guard intervals in the time-domain synchronous OFDM (TDS-OFDM) system. The proposed PNCP has nearly ideal aperiodic auto-correlation property and inherits the differential property of the PN sequence. Simulations demonstrate the proposed TDS-OFDM system padded with PNCP could achieve better performance in both synchronization and channel estimation than the conventional TDS-OFDM system.

This paper proposes a stabilized multichannel random access protocol based on slotted ALOHA for relay deployed cellular networks. To ensure the stability of random access, the proposed protocol dynamically controls the number of random access channels in a BS and a RS and the retransmission probability of the random access packets under heavy load conditions. A mathematical formula is also developed that derives an optimal partition ratio of the shared random access channels between a base station and a relay station without and with capture effect. Numerical results show that the proposed protocol can guarantee the required utilization and delay even in high offered load, which otherwise can cause bistable problem of slotted ALOHA.

Recently, novel full-diversity full-rate quasi-orthogonal space-time block codes (QSTBCs) with power scaling and double-symbol maximum likelihood (ML) decoding was proposed. Specifically, the codes can achieve full-diversity through linearly combining two adequately power scaled orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs). In this letter, we derive expressions for mutual information and post-processing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for a system with four transmit antennas. By exploiting these formulas, we propose three transmit antenna grouping (TAG) methods for a closed-loop system with low-rate feedback information. The TAG methods make it possible to provide an excellent error-rate performance even with a low-complexity zero-forcing (ZF) detection, especially in spatially correlated fading channels.

We study the use of the additive white Gaussian noise channel to achieve a cryptographic primitive that is important in secure multiparty computation. A protocol for unconditionally secure oblivious transfer is presented. We show that channel input alphabets with a certain algebraic structure and their partitions are useful in achieving the requirements on the primitive. Signal design for a protocol with high information rate is discussed.

We propose the Combined Symbol-based Closed-Loop Orthogonal Space-Time Block Code (CS-CL-OSTBC) for four transmit antennas. In the multiple antenna systems, the CS-CL-OSTBC not only achieves full rate and full diversity with linear maximum-likelihood detection but also obtains higher feedback gain than existing CL-OSTBCs due to more efficient utilization of channel feedback information. In the proposed scheme, all the complex-valued channel coefficients are rotated to positive real values with exact channel phase feedback information. As a result, the channel gain can be expressed as the square of the sum of all positive real values and can obtain the maximum value without any loss. Simulation results on bit error rate performance show that the CS-CL-OSTBC outperforms existing CL-OSTBCs for various modulation schemes.

In this paper, joint water filling and maximal ratio transmission (joint WF-MRT) downlink transmit diversity for a single-carrier distributed antenna network (SC DAN) is proposed. The joint WF-MRT transmit weight allocates the transmit power in both transmit antenna dimension and frequency dimension, i.e., the power allocation is done both across frequencies based on WF theorem and across transmit antennas based on MRT strategy. The cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the channel capacity achievable by joint WF-MRT transmit diversity is evaluated by Monte-Carlo numerical computation method. The channel capacities achievable with joint WF-MRT, MRT, and WF transmit weight (WF transmit weight is done across transmit antennas and frequencies based on WF theorem) are compared. It is shown that the joint WF-MRT transmit weight provides the highest channel capacity among three transmit weights.