Impulse ultra-wideband (UWB) is an attractive technology for large ad hoc sensor networks due to its precise ranging capacity, multi-path fading robustness and low radiation power. The transient and carrier-less nature of low radiation pulse and harsh multipath channel condition makes it cumbersome to implement carrier sensing. We proposed clear channel assessment (CCA) based on preamble-assisted modulation (PAM) for UWB sensor networks. Preamble symbols are periodically inserted into the frame payload in the time domain to serve as regular feature for reliable CCA. We simulated the CCA performance in the multipath UWB channel model developed by IEEE 802.15.4a. PAM and CCA configurations were optimized for the distributed carrier sense multiple access protocol. PAM was accepted by 802.15.4a group as an optional feature. Furthermore, the multiplexed preamble symbols can be exploited for channel estimation to improve communication and ranging.

This paper experimentally studies and models the angular-delay power spectrum density at the mobile station based on the site-specific measurement in a macrocell in urban area of Tokyo. The authors first show the azimuth power spectral density at the mobile station. It is decomposed into the "classes" which represent specific contributions within limited azimuth range, as well as the residual. The site-specific propagation mechanism of the classes are next discussed. Finally, the angular-delay PSD models of both classes and residual are proposed and verified. The analysis and modeling in this paper are antenna independent with the full polarimetric information. Consequently, the results are useful to evaluate the performance of arbitrary array antennas with mixed polarization. Due to the rare number of antenna-independent and full-polarimetric measurements, the significant contribution of the angular-delay PSD channel model can be expected.

This study deals with two linear precoders: the maximization of the minimum Euclidean distance between received symbol-vectors, called here max-dmin, and the maximization of the post-processing signal-to-noise ratio termed max-SNR or beamforming. Both have been designed for reliable MIMO transmissions operating over uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels. Here, we will explain why performances in terms of bit error rates show a significant enhancement of the max-dmin over the max-SNR whenever the number of antennas is increased. Then, from theoretical developments, we will demonstrate that, like the max-SNR precoder, the max-dmin precoder achieves the maximum diversity order, which is warrant of reliable transmissions. The current theoretical knowledge will be applied to the case-study of a system with two transmit- or two receive-antennas to calculate the probability density functions of two channel parameters directly linked to precoder performances for uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels. At last, this calculation will allow us to quickly get the BER of the max-dmin precoder further to the derivation of a tight semi-theoretical approximation.

We present a TCP flow level performance evaluation on error rate aware scheduling algorithms in Evolved UTRA and UTRAN networks. With the introduction of the error rate, which is the probability of transmission failure under a given wireless condition and the instantaneous transmission rate, the transmission efficiency can be improved without sacrificing the balance between system performance and user fairness. The performance comparison with and without error rate awareness is carried out dependant on various TCP traffic models, user channel conditions, schedulers with different fairness constraints, and automatic repeat request (ARQ) types. The results indicate that error rate awareness can make the resource allocation more reasonable and effectively improve the system and individual performance, especially for poor channel condition users.

Digital superconductor electronics has been experiencing rapid maturation with the emergence of smaller-scale, lower-cost communications applications which became the major technology drivers. These applications are primarily in the area of wireless communications, radar, and surveillance as well as in imaging and sensor systems. In these areas, the fundamental advantages of superconductivity translate into system benefits through novel Digital-RF architectures with direct digitization of wide band, high frequency radio frequency (RF) signals. At the same time the availability of relatively small 4 K cryocoolers has lowered the foremost market barrier for cryogenically-cooled digital electronic systems. Recently, we have achieved a major breakthrough in the development, demonstration, and successful delivery of the cryocooled superconductor digital-RF receivers directly digitizing signals in a broad range from kilohertz to gigahertz. These essentially hybrid-technology systems combine a variety of superconductor and semiconductor technologies packaged with two-stage commercial cryocoolers: cryogenic Nb mixed-signal and digital circuits based on Rapid Single Flux Quantum (RSFQ) technology, room-temperature amplifiers, FPGA processing and control circuitry. The demonstrated cryocooled digital-RF systems are the world's first and fastest directly digitizing receivers operating with live satellite signals in X-band and performing signal acquisition in HF to L-band at ~30 GHz clock frequencies.

We present a multichannel speech enhancement method based on MAP speech spectral magnitude estimation using a generalized gamma model of speech prior distribution, where the model parameters are adapted from actual noisy speech in a frame-by-frame manner. The utilization of a more general prior distribution with its online adaptive estimation is shown to be effective for speech spectral estimation in noisy environments. Furthermore, the multi-channel information in terms of cross-channel statistics are shown to be useful to better adapt the prior distribution parameters to the actual observation, resulting in better performance of speech enhancement algorithm. We tested the proposed algorithm in an in-car speech database and obtained significant improvements of the speech recognition performance, particularly under non-stationary noise conditions such as music, air-conditioner and open window.

A new linear prediction analysis method for multichannel signals was devised, with the goal of enhancing the compression performance of the MPEG-4 Audio Lossless Coding (ALS) compliant encoder and decoder. The multichannel coding tool for this standard carries out an adaptively weighted subtraction of the residual signals of the coding channel from those of the reference channel, both of which are produced by independent linear prediction. Our linear prediction method tries to directly minimize the amplitude of the predicted residual signal after subtraction of the signals of the coding channel, and the method has been implemented in the MPEG-4 ALS codec software. The results of a comprehensive evaluation show that this method reduces the size of a compressed file. The maximum improvement of the compression ratio is 14.6% which is achieved at the cost of a small increase in computational complexity at the encoder and without increase in decoding time. This is a practical method because the compressed bitstream remains compliant with the MPEG-4 ALS standard.

Much research has shown that a carefully designed auto rate medium access control can utilize the underlying physical multi-rate capability to exploit the time-variation of the channel. In this paper, we develop a simple analytical model to elucidate the rule that maximizes the throughput of RTS/CTS based multi-rate wireless local area networks. Based on the discovered rule, we propose two distributed fair auto rate medium access control schemes called FARM and FARM+ from the viewpoint of throughput fairness and time-share fairness, respectively. With the proposed schemes, after receiving a RTS frame, the receiver selectively returns the CTS frame to inform the transmitter the maximum feasible rate probed by the signal-to-noise ratio of the received RTS frame. The key feature of the proposed schemes is that they are capable of maintaining throughput/time-share fairness in asymmetric situation where the distribution of SNR varies with stations. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed schemes outperform the existing throughput/time-share fair auto rate schemes in time-varying channel conditions.

It is well known that cooperative transmission among the single antenna wireless nodes and a proper combining at destination can obtain spatial diversity. In this paper, we introduce a new form of combining technique in cooperative communication. For a coded transmission scheme code-combining can obtain a near optimal low rate code by combining repeated codewords. Instead of MRC (maximal ratio combining) based combining of received coded packets from source and relays, we propose a simple code-combining at destination. For same data rate and power consumption code-combining offers better or similar performance with less complexity than MRC. Moreover using a puncturing technique at the relay we can get a same diversity order as MRC with reduced packet relaying time; equivalently, with higher data rate for over all system. This reduction of transmission time at relay allows us to increase the diversity order by using more than one relay for one source; where each relay forwards a punctured portion of received data. Alternatively, when the relays are not available to improve diversity order, we can use only one relay to cooperate M source nodes where all sources obtain a diversity order of 2 with a higher data rate.

Recently, multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) has been attracting much attention as a broadband wireless access technique for the next generation mobile communication systems. Frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion can take advantage of the channel frequency-selectivity and improve the average bit error rate (BER) performance due to frequency-diversity gain. The conventional FDE requires the insertion of the guard interval (GI) to avoid the inter-block interference (IBI), resulting in the transmission efficiency loss. In this paper, an overlap FDE technique, which requires no GI insertion, is presented for MC-CDMA transmission. An expression for the conditional BER is derived for the given set of channel gains. The average BER performance in a frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel is evaluated by Monte-Carlo numerical computation method using the derived conditional BER and is confirmed by computer simulation of the signal transmission.

We investigate the MIMO broadcast channels with imperfect channel knowledge due to estimation error and much more users than transmit antennas to exploit multiuser diversity. The channel estimation error causes the interference among users, resulting in the sum-rate loss. A tight upper bound of this sum-rate loss based on zeroforcing beamforming is derived theoretically. This bound only depends on the channel estimation quality and transmit antenna number, but not on the user number. Based on this upper bound, we show this system maintains full multiuser diversity, and always benefits from the increasing transmit power.

This letter considers multiuser time delay estimation in a sparse channel environment for radiolocation. The generalized successive interference cancellation (GSIC) algorithm is used to eliminate the multiple access interference (MAI). To adapt GSIC to sparse channels the alternating maximization (AM) algorithm is considered, and the continuous time delay of each path is estimated without requiring a priori known data sequences.

We address pilot-aided channel estimation for a flat-fading spatially-correlated MIMO system, which employing Uniform Linear Arrays (ULA) on dual side and working in sparse scattering (multipath) environment. In case of sparse scattering, channel matrix and spatial correlation of flat-fading MIMO systems are parameterized by structure of multipaths, which is represented as Direction of Arrivals (DOAs), Direction of Departures (DODs) and complex path fading of each path. Based on this and block-fading property of channel, we design a channel estimation method via estimating multipath parameters using ESPRIT-like DOA-Matrix method which exploits shift-invariance property of ULA. The proposed method is able to obtain improved Mean-Square-Error performance than Least-Square method without prior information of spatial correlation.

A new load balanced channel sharing method (CSM), namely Heuristic Traffic Load Balanced (HTLB) CSM, is proposed for metro-wavelength division multiple access (WDMA) networks. In particular, HTLB CSM is designed to be effective for pre-allocation based medium access control (MAC) protocols by balancing traffic loads corresponding to pre-assigned destinations per time slot. As a result, HTLB CSM is shown to provide lower time complexity than the well-known sub-optimal load balanced CSM, MULTIFIT CSM. Furthermore, the Jain Index of the HTLB CSM is shown to be higher and more consistent than the MULTIFIT CSM and other pre-fixed CSMs under diverse traffic conditions.

This paper proposes a new partial channel state information (CSI) reporting method for spatial scheduling in TDD/MIMO systems. In the proposed method, a terminal transmits pilot signals using transmit beams which have large channel gains between the base station (BS) and the terminal. Then, the BS can obtain partial CSI through responses of the pilot signals. Furthermore, adaptive allocation of pilot signals is proposed, in which pilot signals for CSI reporting are adaptively allocated to terminals depending on the number of terminals. We evaluate system throughput of spatial scheduling under the partial CSI reporting from multiple terminals. Numerical results show that the proposed method reduces uplink signalling for CSI reporting effectively, keeping high system throughput of spatial scheduling.

In this letter, we propose a new preamble structure for channel estimation in a MIMO OFDM-based WLAN system. Both backward compatibility with IEEE 802.11a and low overhead are considered in designing the preamble. Simulation results show that the proposed preamble has low overhead and good performance gain for channel estimation.

Multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) has been considered as one of the promising techniques for the next generation of mobile communication systems because of its efficient bandwidth usage, robustness to the multi-path fading and simple channel-sharing scheme. However, MC-CDMA cannot be employed in the uplink communication where the transmitted signal from each user propagates through the different multi-path fading channel, and the received signals are no longer orthogonal at the base station. As a result, bit error rate (BER) performance in the uplink MC-CDMA communication would be strongly degraded due to the occurrence of multi-user interference (MUI). To solve the MUI problem in the uplink MC-CDMA, the pre-equalization method was proposed in which the uplink signal is pre-equalized at the user terminal by using the channel response estimated from the downlink. Although the pre-equalization method is very effective for the stationary uplink channel with fixed users, it is hard to be employed in the time varying fading channel with mobile users, because there is a big difference in the channel responses between downlink and uplink. For the efficient MUI compensation, each user terminal would be required to predict the future channel conditions based on the current observation. This paper proposes a method for model based uplink channel response prediction by employing the spectral decomposition of the downlink channel impulse response. Computer simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve the accurate prediction of channel response for mobile users during the uplink transmission and allows the effective MUI compensation.

In this paper, we propose a novel MAC protocol with the patterned preamble technique to improve performance in terms of low power, channel utilization, and delay in wireless sensor networks. B-MAC is one of typical MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks using the duty cycle in order to achieve low-power operation. Since it works in an asynchronous fashion, B-MAC employs extended preamble and preamble sampling techniques. Even if it has outstanding performance in idle state, the overhead of these techniques is very large when packets are sent and received, because there is a lot of waste in the traditional preamble method. Instead of the simple preamble, our proposed MAC solution is to introduce more intelligent preamble with some patterns consisting of 2 phases (Tx phase & Ack phase). With this concept we implement real source code working on the mica2 platform with Tinyos-1.x version. Also, the test set-up is presented, and the test results demonstrate that the proposed protocol provides better performance in terms of delay compared to B-MAC.

Various space time code (STC) designs have been proposed to obtain full diversity at full rate in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels for uncoded systems. However, commercial wireless systems typically employ powerful channel codes such as turbo codes and low density parity check (LDPC) codes together with an STC. For these applications, an STC optimized for uncoded systems may not provide the best performance. In this paper, an STC with relatively good performance over a wide range of code rates is proposed. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed robust STC is very close to the best performance of the SM and the Golden code in various code rates.

In this letter, we analyze symbol error probability (SEP) and diversity gain of orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs) in spatially correlated Rician fading channel. We derive the moment generating function (MGF) of an effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver and use it to derive the SEP for M-PSK modulation. We use this result to show that the diversity gain is achieved by the product of the rank of the transmit and receive correlation matrix, and the loss in array gain is quantified as a function of the spatial correlation and the line of sight (LOS) component.