Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a very fast emerging technology that wirelessly transmits the identity of a tag attached to an object or a person. It usually operates in a dense tag environment. My work is focused on passive Ultra High Frequency (UHF) tags whose transmission on the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer is scheduled by Framed Slotted Aloha (FSA). In this thesis, I propose the use of multiple antennas at the reader side in order to recover from collision. By exploiting the fact that a tag signal is real-valued while all other components of a received signal are complexed-valued, I have separated real and imaginary part and in that way I have achieved a recovery from a collision that contains a two times higher number of tags than the number of the receive antennas at the reader, under perfect ...

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the ability of sensor nodes to know its position is an enabler for a wide variety of applications for monitoring, control, and automation. Often, sensor data is meaningful only if its position can be determined. Many WSN are deployed indoors or in areas where Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signal coverage is not available, and thus GNSS positioning cannot be guaranteed. In these scenarios, WSN may be relied upon to achieve a satisfactory degree of positioning accuracy. Typically, batteries power sensor nodes in WSN. These batteries are costly to replace. Therefore, power consumption is an important aspect, being performance and lifetime ofWSN strongly relying on the ability to reduce it. It is crucial to design effective strategies to maximize battery lifetime. Optimization of power consumption can be made at different layers. For example, at the ...

This thesis aims at contributing to the incessant evolution of wireless communications. The focus is on the design of medium access control (MAC) protocols for ad hoc and cooperative wireless networks. A comprehensive state of the art and a background on the topic is provided in a first preliminary part of this dissertation. The motivations and key objectives of the thesis are also presented in this part. Then, the contributions of the thesis are divided into two fundamental parts. The first part of the thesis is devoted to the design, analysis, and performance evaluation of a new high-performance MAC protocol. It is the Distributed Queueing MAC Protocol for Ad hoc Networks (DQMAN) and constitutes an extension and adaptation of the near-optimum Distributed Queueing with Collision Avoidance (DQCA) protocol, designed for infrastructure-based networks, to operate over networks without infrastructure. DQMAN introduces ...

Over the last few decades, transistor miniaturization has enabled a tremendous increase in the processing capability of commercial electronic devices, which, combined with the reduction of production costs, has tremendously fostered the usage of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) both in terms of number of users and required data rates. In turn, this has led to a tremendous increment in the energetic demand of the ICT sector, which is expected to further grow during the upcoming years, reaching unsustainable levels of greenhouse gas emissions as reported by the European Council. Additionally, the autonomy of battery operated devices is getting reduced year after year since battery technology has not evolved fast enough to cope with the increase of energy consumption associated to the growth of the node’s processing capability. Energy harvesting, which is known as the process of collecting energy ...

In scalable image/video coding, high resolution content is encoded to the highest visual quality and the bit-streams are adapted to cater various communication channels, display devices and usage requirements. These content adaptations, which include quality, resolution and frame rate scaling may also affect the content protection data, such as, watermarks and are considered as a potential watermark attack. In this thesis, research on robust watermarking techniques for scalable coded image and video, are proposed and the improvements in robustness against various content adaptation attacks, such as, JPEG 2000 for image and Motion JPEG 2000, MC-EZBC and H.264/SVC for video, are reported. The spread spectrum domain, particularly wavelet-based image watermarking schemes often provides better robustness to compression attacks due to its multi-resolution decomposition and hence chosen for this work. A comprehensive and comparative analysis of the available wavelet-based watermarking schemes,is performed ...

Recent academic developments have initiated a paradigm shift in the way spatial sensor data can be acquired. Traditional localized and regularly arranged sensor arrays are replaced by sensor nodes that are randomly distributed over the entire spatial field, and which communicate with each other or with a master node through wireless communication links. Together, these nodes form a so-called ‘wireless sensor network’ (WSN). Each node of a WSN has a local sensor array and a signal processing unit to perform computations on the acquired data. The advantage of WSNs compared to traditional (wired) sensor arrays, is that many more sensors can be used that physically cover the full spatial field, which typically yields more variety (and thus more information) in the signals. It is likely that future data acquisition, control and physical monitoring, will heavily rely on this type of ...

Device-to-Device (D2D) is one of the important proposed solutions to increase the capacity, offload the traffic, and improve the energy effciency in next generation cellular networks. D2D communication is known as a direct communication between two users without using cellular infrastructure networks. Despite of large expected bene fits in terms of capacity in D2D, the coexistence of D2D and cellular networks in the same spectrum creates new challenges in interference management and network design. To limit the interference power control schemes on cellular networks and D2D networks are typically adopted. Even though power control is introduced to limit the interference level, it does not prevent cellular and D2D users from experiencing coverage limitation when sharing the same radio resources. Therefore, the design of such networks requires the availability of suitable methods able to properly model the eff ect of interference ...

VIDEO streaming over cellular networks has been made possible in the last years by better performing video codecs and wireless cellular networks oriented to data transmission. The interaction between two heterogeneous worlds, the telecommunication infrastructure and the coding video software, calls for advanced optimization mechanisms. The actors involved in the optimization process are the cellular system's access network, UMTS and HSDPA, the wireless transmission channel and the fi nal user equipped with a mobile device capable of decoding video sequences. The knowledge and characterization of each of the building blocks allow the optimization of each element to the specifi c needs of the others. This doctoral thesis discusses three main contributions. In the fi rst part, the e ffects of transmission errors on video streams are analyzed. Incorrectly received video packets are usually discarded by the lower layers and not ...

In this thesis we focus on the development of energy-efficient adaptive algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks. Its contributions can be arranged in two main lines. Firstly, we focus on the efficient management of energy resources in WSNs equipped with finite-size batteries and energy-harvesting devices. To that end, we propose a censoring scheme by which the nodes are able to decide if a message transmission is worthy or not given their energetic condition. In order to do so, we model the system using a Markov Decision Process and use this model to derive optimal policies. Later, these policies are analyzed in simplified scenarios in order to get insights of their features. Finally, using Stochastic Approximation, we develop low-complexity censoring algorithms that approximate the optimal policy, with less computational complexity and faster convergence speed than other approaches such as Q-learning. Secondly, we ...

With the latest developments in video coding technology and fast deployment of end-user broadband internet connections, real-time media applications become increasingly interesting for both private users and businesses. However, the internet remains a best-effort service network unable to guarantee the stringent requirements of the media application, in terms of high, constant bandwidth, low packet loss rate and transmission delay. Therefore, efficient adaptation mechanisms must be derived in order to bridge the application requirements with the transport medium characteristics. Lately, different network architectures, e.g., peer-to-peer networks, content distribution networks, parallel wireless services, emerge as potential solutions for reducing the cost of communication or infrastructure, and possibly improve the application performance. In this thesis, we start from the path diversity characteristic of these architectures, in order to build a new framework, specific for media streaming in multipath networks. Within this framework we ...

The work presented in this thesis covers topics that extend the scalability functionalities in video coding and improve the compression performance. Two main novel approaches are presented, each targeting a different part of the scalable video coding (SVC) architecture: motion adaptive wavelet transform based on the wavelet transform in lifting implementation, and a design of a flexible framework for generalised spatio-temporal decomposition. Motion adaptive wavelet transform is based on the newly introduced concept of connectivity-map. The connectivity-map describes the underlying irregular structure of regularly sampled data. To enable a scalable representation of the connectivity-map, the corresponding analysis and synthesis operations have been derived. These are then employed to define a joint wavelet connectivity-map decomposition that serves as an adaptive alternative to the conventional wavelet decomposition. To demonstrate its applicability, the presented decomposition scheme is used in the proposed SVC framework, ...

The number of mobile devices and the amount of traffic generated by them has grown at a tremendous pace in the last years and it is expected to continue growing. This growth contrasts with the limited bandwidth that needs to be shared among users. Network densification has been proposed as a promising technique to satisfy the previous demands over a shared bandwidth. This is realized by increasing the density of base stations deployed. Although network densification can improve the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the users located close to the serving base station, it can also increase the inter-cell interference received by other users. In current cellular networks, base stations deal with inter-cell interference by splitting the bandwidth in two parts. The first one is assigned to users with low interference (typically in the cell center) and it is reused in ...

The wireless communication industry has seen a tremendous growth in the last few decades. The ever increasing demand to stay connected at home, work, and on the move, with voice and data applications, has continued the need for more sophisticated end-user devices. A typical smart communication device these days consists of a radio system that can access a mixture of mobile cellular services (GSM, UMTS, etc), indoor wireless broadband services (WLAN-802.11b/g/n), short range and low energy personal communications (Bluetooth), positioning and navigation systems (GPS), etc. A smart device capable of meeting all these requirements has to be highly flexible and should be able to reconfigure radio transmitters and receivers as and when required. Further, the radio modules used in these devices should be extremely small so that the device itself is portable. In addition, the device should also be economical ...

This dissertation deals with the distributed processing techniques for parameter estimation and efficient data-gathering in wireless communication and sensor networks. The estimation problem consists in inferring a set of parameters from temporal and spatial noisy observations collected by different nodes that monitor an area or field. The objective is to derive an estimate that is as accurate as the one that would be obtained if each node had access to the information across the entire network. With the aim of enabling an energy aware and low-complexity distributed implementation of the estimation task, several useful optimization techniques that generally yield linear estimators were derived in the literature. Up to now, most of the works considered that the nodes are interested in estimating the same vector of global parameters. This scenario can be viewed as a special case of a more general ...

To satisfy the continuously growing demands for higher data rates, modern radio communication systems employ larger bandwidths and more complex waveforms. Furthermore, radio devices are expected to support a rich mixture of standards such as cellular networks, wireless local-area networks, wireless personal area networks, positioning and navigation systems, etc. In general, a "smart'' device should be flexible to support all these requirements while being portable, cheap, and energy efficient. These seemingly conflicting expectations impose stringent radio frequency (RF) design challenges which, in turn, call for their proper understanding as well as developing cost-effective solutions to address them. The direct-conversion transceiver architecture is an appealing analog front-end for flexible and multi-standard radio systems. However, it is sensitive to various circuit impairments, and modern communication systems based on multi-carrier waveforms such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple ...