Wireless Network Localization via Cooperation

This dissertation details two classes of cooperative localization methods for wireless networks in mixed line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight (LOS/NLOS) environments. The classes of methods depend on the amount of prior knowledge available. The methods used for both classes are based on the assumptions in practical localization environments that neither NLOS identification nor experimental campaigns are affordable. Two major contributions are, first, in methods that provide satisfactory localization accuracy whilst relaxing the requirement on statistical knowledge about the measurement model. Second, in methods that provide significantly improved localization performance without the requirement of good initialization. In the first half of the dissertation, cooperative localization using received signal strength (RSS) measurements in homogeneous mixed LOS/NLOS environments is considered for the case where the key model parameter, the path loss exponent, is unknown. The approach taken is to model the positions and the path ...

Jin, Di — Signal Processing Group, Technische Universität Darmstadt


ULTRA WIDEBAND LOCATION IN SCENARIOS WITHOUT CLEAR LINE OF SIGHT: A PRACTICAL APPROACH

Indoor location has experienced a major boost in recent years. location based services (LBS), which until recently were restricted to outdoor scenarios and the use of GPS, have also been extended into buildings. From large public structures such as airports or hospitals to a multitude of industrial scenarios, LBS has become increasingly present in indoor scenarios. Of the various technologies that can be used to achieve this indoor location, the ones based on ultra- wideband (UWB) signals have become ones of the most demanded due primarily to their accuracy in position estimation. Additionally, the appearance in the market of more and more manufacturers and products has lowered the prices of these devices to levels that allow to think about their use for large deployments with a contained budget. By their nature, UWB signals are very resistant to the multi-path phenomenon, ...

Barral, Valentín — Universidade da Coruña


Phase Noise and Wideband Transmission in Massive MIMO

In the last decades the world has experienced a massive growth in the demand for wireless services. The recent popularity of hand-held devices with data exchange capabilities over wireless networks, such as smartphones and tablets, increased the wireless data traffic even further. This trend is not expected to cease in the foreseeable future. In fact, it is expected to accelerate as everyday apparatus unrelated with data communications, such as vehicles or household devices, are foreseen to be equipped with wireless communication capabilities. Further, the next generation wireless networks should be designed such that they have increased spectral and energy efficiency, provide uniformly good service to all of the accommodated users and handle many more devices simultaneously. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (Massive MIMO) systems, also termed as large-scale MIMO, very large MIMO or full-dimension MIMO, have recently been proposed as a candidate ...

Pitarokoilis, Antonios — Linköping University


Synchronization and Multipath Delay Estimation Algorithms for Digital Receivers

This thesis considers the development of synchronization and signal processing techniques for digital communication receivers, which is greatly influenced by the digital revolution of electronic systems. Eventhough synchronization concepts are well studied and established in the literature, there is always a need for new algorithms depending on new system requirements and new trends in receiver architecture design. The new trend of using digital receivers where the sampling of the baseband signal is performed by a free running oscillator reduces the analog components by performing most of the functions digitally, which increases the flexibility, configurability, and integrability of the receiver. Also, this new design approach contributes greatly to the software radio (SWR) concept which is the natural progression of digital radio receivers towards multimode, multistandard terminals where the radio functionalities are defined by software. The first part of this research work ...

Hamila, Ridha — Tampere University of Technology


Fading in Wearable Communications Channels and its Mitigation

The fabrication of miniature electronics and sensors has encouraged the creation of a wide range of wireless enabled devices designed to be worn on the human body. This has led to the prominence of so-called wearable communications, which have emerged to satisfy the demand for wireless connectivity between these devices and with external networks. The work in this thesis has focused on the characterization of the composite fading (i.e combined multipath and shadowing) observed in wearable communications channels. It has also investigated the mitigation of the deleterious effects of both of these propagation phenomena in wearable communications. In order to accurately characterize the behaviour of the composite fading signal observed in wearable communications channels, new fading models such as F, $\kappa$-$\mu$ / inverse gamma and $\eta$-$\mu$ / inverse gamma composite fading models, have been proposed. The generality and utility of ...

Seong Ki Yoo — Queen's University Belfast


Probabilistic modeling for sensor fusion with inertial measurements

In recent years, inertial sensors have undergone major developments. The quality of their measurements has improved while their cost has decreased, leading to an increase in availability. They can be found in stand-alone sensor units, so-called inertial measurement units, but are nowadays also present in for instance any modern smartphone, in Wii controllers and in virtual reality headsets. The term inertial sensor refers to the combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes. These measure the external specific force and the angular velocity, respectively. Integration of their measurements provides information about the sensor’s position and orientation. However, the position and orientation estimates obtained by simple integration suffer from drift and are therefore only accurate on a short time scale. In order to improve these estimates, we combine the inertial sensors with additional sensors and models. To combine these different sources of information, also ...

Kok, Manon — Linköping University


Optimization of Positioning Capabilities in Wireless Sensor Networks: from power efficiency to medium access

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 ...

Moragrega, Ana — Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya


Distributed Processing Techniques for Parameter Estimation and Efficient Data Gathering in Wireless Communication and Sensor Networks

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 ...

Bogdanovic, Nikola — University of Patras


Spatial Consistency of 3D Channel Models

Developing realistic channel models is one of the greatest challenges for describing wireless communications. Their quality is crucial for accurately predicting the performance of a wireless system. While on the one hand, channel models have to be accurate in describing the physical properties of wave propagation, on the other hand, they have to be as least complex as possible. With the recent emergence of antennas with a massive amount of elements as a promising technology for a further enhancement of spectral efficiency, new channel models that characterize the propagation environment in both azimuth and elevation become necessary. While standardization bodies such as 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and International Telecommunications Unit (ITU) have introduced a 3-dimensional (3D) geometry-based stochastic channel model, a system-level modeling has been missing to serve the purpose of further analysis and evaluations. Furthermore, with such a ...

Fjolla Ademaj — TU Wien


Virtual-MIMO Systems with Compress-and-Forward Cooperation

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems have recently emerged as one of the most significant wireless techniques, as they can greatly improve the channel capacity and link reliability of wireless communications. These benefits have encouraged extensive research on a virtual MIMO system where the transmitter has multiple antennas and each of the receivers has a single antenna. Single-antenna receivers can work together to form a virtual antenna array and reap some performance benefits of MIMO systems. The idea of receiver-side local cooperation is attractive for wireless networks since a wireless receiver may not have multiple antennas due to size and cost limitations. In this thesis we investigate a virtual-MIMO wireless system using the receiver-side cooperation with the compress-and-forward (CF) protocol. Firstly, to perform CF at the relay, we propose to use standard source coding techniques, based on the analysis of its expected ...

Jiang, Jing — University of Edinburgh


Low-Complexity Localization using Standard-Compliant UWB Signals

This thesis puts a focus on the analysis of key aspects of low-complexity Ultra Wideband (UWB) localizations systems. It is well known that UWB allows for highly robust and accurate ranging even in multipath intensive environments. On the other hand, the huge bandwidth leads to very challenging receiver designs and so low complexity and low power consumption are not achieveable for common receiver structures. The energy detector is a promising alternative. But in contrast to high-complexity coherent receivers, their performance is strongly dependent on the system parameters of the air interface protocol. IEEE 802.15.4a is a UWB standard with high-precision localization capability (better than 1m). The standard defines many system parameters, whose impact on the ranging and localization performance is studied in the thesis. These parameters have also a significant impact on the maximum allowed transmit energy, which limits the ...

Gigl, Thomas — Graz University of Technology


Design and Exploration of Radio Frequency Identification Systems by Rapid Prototyping

In this thesis I describe the setup and design of a flexible rapid prototyping platform for RFID systems to provide an experimental verification environment for RFID systems, that allows their real-time exploration in distinct measurement setups. Furthermore, I use this system to test the feasibility of novel signal processing algorithms for RFID reader receivers, which promise a performance increase to state-of-the-art-receivers. Three different scenarios are considered: 1. In the first scenario, a single tag communicates with a single receive antenna reader. The performance of the optimal maximum likelihood sequence decoder is identified, and losses due to channel estimation and synchronisation are discussed. Due to the wide deviation from the nominal data rate in the uplink communication, especially synchronisation shows to be a critical issue. 2. In the second scenario, the single tag communicates with a multiple receive antenna RFID reader. ...

Angerer, Christoph — Vienna University of Technology


Reduced-Complexity Code Synchronization in Multipath Channels for BOC Modulated CDMA Signals with Applications in Galileo and Modernized GPS Systems

Applications for the new generations of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are developing rapidly and attract a great interest. Both US Global Positioning System (GPS) and European Galileo signals use Direct Sequence-Code Division Multiple Access (DS-CDMA) technology, where code and frequency synchronization are important stages at the receiver. The GNSS receivers estimate jointly the code phase and the Doppler spread through a two-dimensional searching process in time-frequency plane. Since both GPS and Galileo systems will send several signals on the same carriers, a new modulation type - the Binary Offset Carrier (BOC) modulation, has been selected. The main target of this modulation is to provide a better spectral separation with the existing BPSK-modulated GPS signals, while allowing optimal usage of the available bandwidth for different GNSS signals. The BOC modulation family includes several BOC variants, such as sine BOC (SinBOC), ...

Burian, Adina — Universitat Trier


Acoustic sensor network geometry calibration and applications

In the modern world, we are increasingly surrounded by computation devices with communication links and one or more microphones. Such devices are, for example, smartphones, tablets, laptops or hearing aids. These devices can work together as nodes in an acoustic sensor network (ASN). Such networks are a growing platform that opens the possibility for many practical applications. ASN based speech enhancement, source localization, and event detection can be applied for teleconferencing, camera control, automation, or assisted living. For this kind of applications, the awareness of auditory objects and their spatial positioning are key properties. In order to provide these two kinds of information, novel methods have been developed in this thesis. Information on the type of auditory objects is provided by a novel real-time sound classification method. Information on the position of human speakers is provided by a novel localization ...

Plinge, Axel — TU Dortmund University


Signal Strength Based Localization and Path-loss Exponent Self-Estimation in Wireless Networks

Wireless communications and networking are gradually permeating our life and substantially influencing every corner of this world. Wireless devices, particularly those of small size, will take part in this trend more widely, efficiently, seamlessly and smartly. Techniques requiring only limited resources, especially in terms of hardware, are becoming more important and urgently needed. That is why we focus this thesis around analyzing wireless communications and networking based on signal strength (SS) measurements, since these are easy and convenient to gather. SS-based techniques can be incorporated into any device that is equipped with a wireless chip. More specifically, this thesis studies \textbf{SS-based localization} and \textbf{path-loss exponent (PLE) self-estimation}. Although these two research lines might seem unrelated, they are actually marching towards the same goal. The former can easily enable a very simple wireless chip to infer its location. But to solve ...

Hu, Yongchang — Delft University of Technology

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