Frequencies around 300GHz offer extremely broad atmospheric transmission window with relatively low losses of up to 10dB/km and can be regarded as the ultimate platform for ultrahigh-speed wireless communications with near-fiber-optic data rates. This paper reviews technical challenges and recent advances in integrated circuits targeted at communications using these and nearby “terahertz (THz)” frequencies. Possible new applications of THz wireless links that are hard to realize by other means are also discussed.

It is necessary to estimate channel state information coherently to equalize the received signal in wireless communication systems. The pilot symbol, known at the receiver, aided channel estimator degrades the transmission efficiency because it requires the signal spaces and the energy for the transmission. In this paper, we assume a fixed wireless communication system in line of sight slowly varying channel and propose a new blind channel estimation method without help from the pilot symbol for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing systems. The proposed estimator makes use of the Expectation-Maximization algorithm and the correlation property among the channel frequency responses by considering the assumed channel environment. By computer simulations, we show that the proposed estimator can asymptotically achieve bit error rate performance by using the ideal channel estimation.

In the evolution of wireless networks such as wireless sensor networks, mobile ad-hoc networks, and delay/disruption tolerant networks, the Store-Carry-Forward (SCF) message relaying paradigm has been commonly featured and studied with much attention. SCF networking is essential for offsetting the deficiencies of intermittent and range limited communication environments because it allows moving wireless communication nodes to act as “mobile relay nodes”. Such relay nodes can store/carry/process messages, wait for a better opportunity for transmission, and finally forward the messages to other nodes. This paper starts with a short overview of SCF routing and then examines two SCF networking scenarios. The first one deals with large content delivery across multiple islands using existing infrastructural transportation networks (e.g., cars and ferries) in which mobility is uncontrollable from an SCF viewpoint. Simulations show how a simple coding technique can improve flooding-based SCF. The other scenario looks at a prototype system of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for high-quality video surveillance from the sky in which mobility is partially controllable from an SCF viewpoint. Three requisite techniques in this scenario are highlighted - fast link setup, millimeter wave communications, and use of multiple links. Through these examples, we discuss the benefits and issues of the practical use of SCF networking-based systems.

One of the major subjects for marine resources development and information processing is how to realize underwater short-range and large-capacity data transmissions. The acoustic wave is an effective carrier and has been used for underwater data transmissions because it has lower attenuation in seawater than the radio wave, and has average propagation distance of about 10km or more. However, along with the imaging of transmission data, the inherent low speed of the acoustic wave makes it cannot and become an ideal carrier for high-speed and large-capacity communications. On the other hand, visible-light wave with wavelength of 400nm-650nm is an ideal carrier, which has received much attention. Its attractive features are high transparency and low attenuation rate in underwater, easily control the propagation direction and range by the visibility, and high data rate and capacity, making it excellent for application in underwater wireless communications. However, visible-light waves in the seawater have the spectral attenuation characteristics due to different marine environment. Therefore, in this paper an underwater optical wireless communication method with adaptation seawater function is considered for seawater turbidity of the spatio-temporal change. Two crucial components in the underwater optical wireless communication system, the light wavelength and the modulation method are controlled using wavelength- and modulation-adaptation techniques, respectively. The effectiveness of the method of the adaptation wavelength is demonstrated in underwater optical image transmissions.

Wireless caching is one of the promising technologies to mitigate the traffic burden of cellular networks and the large cost of deploying a higher volume of wired backhaul by introducing caching storage. In the manner of “cutting” wired equipments, all types of vehicles can be readily leveraged as serving access points with caching storage, where their moving nature should be taken into account to improve latency and data throughput. In this paper, we consider a mobility-aware vehicular caching which has a role in offloading delay-tolerable contents from cellular networks. We first clarify the influence of mobility in cellular caching networks, then set the mobility-aware optimization problem of vehicular caching to carry on delay-tolerable contents. Trace-driven numerical results based on rural and urban topographies show that, in presence of individual demand for delay-tolerable contents, the proposed vehicular caching scheme enhances the quality-of-service (QoS) (maximally twofold) relying on the contents delivery being centrally or distributedly controlled.

With the proliferation of hand-held devices in recent years, mobile video streaming has become an extremely popular application. However, Internet video streaming to mobile devices faces several problems, such as unstable connections, long latency, high jitter, etc. We present a system, OptVid, which enhances the user's experiences of video streaming service on cellular networks. OptVid takes the user's profile and provides seamless adaptive bitrate streaming by leveraging the video transcoding solution. It provides very agile bitrate adaptation, especially in the mobile scenario where the wireless channel is not stable. We prototype video transcoding on a WiMAX testbed to bridge the gap between the wireless channel capacity and the video quality. Our evaluations reveal that OptVid provides better user experience than conventional schemes in terms of PSNR, video stalls, and buffering time. OptVid does not require any additional storage since it transcodes videos on-the-fly upon receiving requests and delivers them directly to the client.

This paper investigates the data persistence problem with compressive sensing (CS) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where the sensed readings should be temporarily stored among the entire network in a distributed manner until gathered by a mobile sink. Since there is an energy-performance tradeoff, conventional CS-based schemes only focus on reducing the energy consumption or improving the CS construction performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient Compressive Sensing based Data Persistence (CSDP) scheme to achieve the optimum balance between energy consumption and reconstruction performance. Unlike most existing CS-based schemes which require packets visiting the entire network to reach the equilibrium distribution, in our proposed scheme information exchange is only performed among neighboring nodes. Therefore, such an approach will result in a non-uniform distribution of measurements, and the CS measurement matrix depends heavily on the node degree. The CS reconstruction performance and energy consumption are analyzed. Simulation results confirm that the proposed CSDP scheme consumes the least energy and computational overheads compared with other representative schemes, while almost without sacrificing the CS reconstruction performance.

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) based on the IEEE 802.11 standard have been increasingly used. Access Points (APs) are being established in various public places, such as railway stations and airports, as well as private residences. Moreover, the rate of public WLAN services continues to increase. Throughput prediction of an AP in a multi-rate environment, i.e., predicting the amount of receipt data (including retransmission packets at an AP), is an important issue for wireless network design. Moreover, it is important to solve AP placement and selection problems. To realize the throughput prediction, we have proposed an AP throughput prediction method that considers terminal distribution. We compared the predicted throughput of the proposed method with a method that uses linear order computation and confirmed the performance of the proposed method, not by a network simulator but by the numerical computation. However, it is necessary to consider the impact of CSMA/CA in the MAC layer, because throughput is greatly influenced by frame collision. In this paper, we derive an effective transmission rate considering CSMA/CA and frame collision. We then compare the throughput obtained using the network simulator NS2 with a prediction value calculated by the proposed method. Simulation results show that the maximum relative error of the proposed method is approximately 6% and 15% for UDP and TCP, respectively, while that is approximately 17% and 21% in existing method.

Wireless body area networks (BANs) are attracting much attention due to their suitable for healthcare and medical applications. Unfortunately, electrostatic discharge (ESD) is a major electromagnetic (EM) noise source that can degrade wireless communication performance. In this study, we measure EM noise power in the 2.4GHz and 30MHz bands for indirect ESD testing specified in IEC 61000-4-2 standard, and derived a statistical ESD noise model from the measurement results. The ESD noise power was found to follow a lognormal distribution in both 2.4GHz and 30MHz bands. We use this ESD noise model to conduct bit error rate (BER) simulations in a communication channel with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) plus ESD noise at 2.4GHz and 30MHz bands. The result is that the BER performance is virtually the same in both bands, and decreases with the signal to noise power ratio (SNR). It is also shown that an error floor exists in the BER performances at both frequencies, which, if the ESD noise power is larger than the Gaussian noise, cannot be improved by increasing the SNR. Although the ESD noise power at 2.4GHz band is nearly 30dB smaller than that at 30MHz band, the signal attenuation along the human body at 2.4GHz band is much larger compared to 30MHz band. This may yield a similar SNR level at 30MHz and 2.4GHz bands in an ESD-dominated environment, so that the 2.4GHz band does not have an obvious merit for BAN applications. Since there are so many in-band interference sources at 2.4GHz band, the 30MHz band seems more promising for vital data transmission in a BAN scenario even in an ESD-dominated environment.

This letter proposes an Index based on Irregular Partition of data identifiers (IIP), to enable clients to quickly access multiple data items on a wireless broadcast channel. IIP improves the access time by reducing the index waiting time when clients access multiple data items, through the use of irregular partitioning of the identifier space of data items. Our performance evaluation shows that with respect to access time, the proposed IIP outperforms the existing index schemes supporting multiple data access.

Sensor networks are often used to understand underlying phenomena that are reflected through sensing data. In real world applications, this understanding supports decision makers attempting to access a disaster area or monitor a certain event regularly and thus necessary actions can be triggered in response to the problems. Practitioners designing such systems must overcome difficulties due to the practical limitations of the data and the fidelity of a network condition. This paper explores the design of a network solution for the data acquisition domain with the goal of increasing the efficiency of data gathering efforts. An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is introduced to address various real-world sensor network challenges such as limited resources, lack of real-time representative data, and mobility of a relay station. Towards this goal, we introduce a novel cooperative path selection framework to effectively collect data from multiple sensor sources. The framework consists of six main parts ranging from the system initialization to the UAV data acquisition. The UAV data acquisition is useful to increase situational awareness or used as inputs for data manipulation that support response efforts. We develop a system-based simulation that creates the representative sensor networks and uses the UAV for collecting data packets. Results using our proposed framework are analyzed and compared to existing approaches to show the efficiency of the scheme.

A novel virtual sensors-based positioning method has been presented in this paper, which can make use of both direct paths and indirect paths. By integrating the virtual sensor idea and Bayesian state and observation framework, this method models the indirect paths corresponding to persistent virtual sensors as virtual direct paths and further reformulates the wireless positioning problem as the maximum likelihood estimation of both the mobile terminal's positions and the persistent virtual sensors' positions. Then the method adopts the EM (Expectation Maximization) and the particle filtering schemes to estimate the virtual sensors' positions and finally exploits not only the direct paths' measurements but also the indirect paths' measurements to realize the mobile terminal's positions estimation, thus achieving better positioning performance. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Internal power losses in lumped-element impedance matching circuits are formulated by means of Q factors of the elements and port impedances to be matched. Assuming that Q factors are relatively high, the above mentioned loss is expressed by a simple formula containing only the tangents of the impedances. The formula is a powerful tool for such applications that put emphasis on power efficiency as wireless power transfer. As well as the formulation, we illustrate some design examples with the derived formula: design of the least lossy L-section circuit and two-stage low-pass ladder. The examples provide ready-to-use knowledge for low-loss matching design.

Channel state estimation-based backoff algorithms for channel access are being widely studied to solve wireless channel accessing and sharing problem especially in super dense wireless networks. In such algorithms, the precision of the channel state estimation determines the performance. How to make the estimation accurate in an efficient way to meet the system requirements is essential in designing the new channel access algorithms. In this paper, we first study the distribution and properties of inaccurate estimations using a novel biased estimation analysis model. We then propose an efficient backoff algorithm based on the theory of confidence interval estimation (BA-CIE), in which the minimum sample size is deduced to improve the contention window tuning efficiency, while a fault-tolerance interval structure is applied to reduce the inaccurate estimations so as to improve the contention window tuning accuracy. Our simulation results show that the throughput of our proposed BA-CIE algorithm can achieve 99% the theoretical maximum throughput of IEEE 802.11 networks, thanks to the improved contention window tuning performance.

Recently, many wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have employed mobile sensor nodes to collect a variety of data from mobile elements such as humans, animals and cars. In this letter, we propose an efficient mobile data aggregation scheme to improve the overall performance in gathering the data of the mobile nodes. We first propose a spatial mobile data aggregation scheme to aggregate the data of the mobile node spatially, which is then extended to a two-tier mobile data aggregation by supplementing a temporal mobile data aggregation scheme to aggregate the data of multiple mobile nodes temporally. Simulation results show that our scheme significantly reduces the energy consumption and gathering delay for data collection from mobile nodes in WSNs.

Energy harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs) are being actively studied in order to solve the problems faced by battery-operated WSNs, namely the cost for battery replacement and the negative impact on the environment. In EH-WSNs, each node harvests ambient energy, such as light, heat, vibration, and uses it for sensing, computations, and wireless communications, where the amount of harvested energy of each node varies depending on their environments. MAC protocols for EH-WSNs need to be designed to achieve high throughput and fairness, however, the conventional MAC protocols proposed for EH-WSNs do not adapt to the harvesting rate of each node, resulting in poor fairness. In this paper, we propose a fair MAC protocol based on polling scheme for EH-WSNs. The proposed scheme adjusts contention probability of each node according to its harvesting rate, thereby increasing the throughput of nodes with low harvesting rate. We evaluate throughput and fairness of the proposed fair polling scheme by theoretical analysis and computer simulations, and show that the proposed scheme can improve fairness with little degradation of the overall network throughput.

In the near future, many sensors and terminals will be connected to the public network to provide various convenient IoT/M2M services. In order to connect many sensors to the network efficiently, wireless communication systems in the 920MHz band are seen as attractive solutions. We are focusing on the 920MHz band to research and develop high-capacity protocols that can accommodate many terminals, and low power consumption technologies for battery-driven terminals. In this paper, we describe the following three concrete wireless systems that use our proposals. (1) A physical distribution pallet management system that can handle thousands of pallet-embedded sensors and a wireless module with a battery lifetime of about ten years. (2) Water leakage monitoring system for underground pipes by using sensors and a wireless module in each valve box. (3) A wide-area and high-capacity radio relay system for smart metering services like the reading of gas meters. The radio relay system can accommodate various sensors and terminals and has large potential for providing various IoT/M2M services in conjunction with smart metering services.

One problem in the use of wireless Content Centric Networks (CCNs) is the need for substantial overhead to achieve reliability in content delivery due to the requirement for a request packet per each data packet transmission. This paper introduces a novel protocol to reduce overhead and achieve reliability. The protocol allows an interest packet to request multiple data packets and an intermediate node, rather than the provider, to send the data packet. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol improves the performance of wireless CCN.

Deterioration of sewer pipes is one of very important problems in Japan. Sewer inspections have been carried out mainly by visual check or wired remote robots with a camera. However, such inspection schemes involve high labor and/or monetary cost. Sewer inspection with boat-type video cameras or unwired robots takes a long time to check the result of the inspection because video data are obtained after the equipment is retrieved from the pipe. To realize low cost, safe and quick inspection of sewer pipes, we have proposed a sewer inspection system using drifting wireless sensor nodes. Water, soil, and the narrow space in the pipe make the long-range and high throughput wireless radio communication difficult. Therefore, we have to identify suitable radio frequency and antenna configuration based on wireless communication characteristics in sewer pipes. If the frequency is higher, the Fresnel zone, the needed space for the line of sight is small, but the path loss in free space is large. On the other hand, if the frequency is lower, the size of the Fresnel zone is large, but the path loss in free space is small. We conducted wireless communication experiments using 920MHz, 2.4GHz, and 5GHz band off-the-shelf devices in an experimental underground pipe. The measurement results show that the wireless communication range of 5GHz (IEEE 802.11a) is over 8m in a 200mm-diameter pipe and is longer than 920MHz (ARIB STD-T108), 2.4GHz (IEEE 802.11g, IEEE 802.15.4) band at their maximum transmission power. In addition, we confirmed that devices that use IEEE 802.11a and 54Mbps bit rate can transmit about 43MB data while they are in the communication range of an AP and drift at 1m/s in a 200mm-diameter pipe, and it is bigger than one of devices that use other bit rate.

A compact multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) was proposed and studied. The DRA consists of three antenna ports. The antennas operate at 2.4GHz, where one of the antenna ports was placed at the center and resonates in the monopole mode, and the two other ports were located at the sides and resonate in the TEy111 mode. Both simulation and measurements were carried out, and reasonably good agreement was obtained. In addition, a study for miniaturization with different permittivities for the DRA and a comparison of the throughput with the reference antennas of a commercial wireless LAN router were performed. Our proposed MIMO DRA gave similar performance as that of the reference antennas but was more compact in size.