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 ...

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of wireless devices for individual use to the point of being ubiquitous. Recent trends have been incorporating many of these devices (or nodes) together, which acquire signals and work in unison over wireless channels, in order to accomplish a predefined task. This type of cooperative sensing and communication between devices form the basis of a so-called wireless sensor network (WSN). Due to the ever increasing processing power of these nodes, WSNs are being assigned more complicated and computationally demanding tasks. Recent research has started to exploit this increased processing power in order for the WSNs to perform tasks pertaining to audio signal acquisition and processing forming so-called wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs). Audio signal processing poses new and unique problems when compared to traditional sensing applications as the signals observed often have ...

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of wireless devices for individual use to the point of being ubiquitous. Recent trends have been incorporating many of these devices (or nodes) together, which acquire signals and work in unison over wireless channels, in order to accomplish a predefined task. This type of cooperative sensing and communication between devices form the basis of a so-called wireless sensor network (WSN). Due to the ever increasing processing power of these nodes, WSNs are being assigned more complicated and computationally demanding tasks. Recent research has started to exploit this increased processing power in order for the WSNs to perform tasks pertaining to audio signal acquisition and processing forming so-called wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs). Audio signal processing poses new and unique problems when compared to traditional sensing applications as the signals observed often have ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

This dissertation deals with the design of satellite-based navigation receivers. The term Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) refers to those navigation systems based on a constellation of satellites, which emit ranging signals useful for positioning. Although the american GPS is probably the most popular, the european contribution (Galileo) will be operative soon. Other global and regional systems exist, all with the same objective: aid user's positioning. Initially, the thesis provides the state-of-the-art in GNSS: navigation signals structure and receiver architecture. The design of a GNSS receiver consists of a number of functional blocks. From the antenna to the fi nal position calculation, the design poses challenges in many research areas. Although the Radio Frequency chain of the receiver is commented in the thesis, the main objective of the dissertation is on the signal processing algorithms applied after signal digitation. These ...

Due to significant advances made over the last few decades in the areas of (wireless) networking, communications and microprocessor fabrication, the use of sensor networks to observe physical phenomena is rapidly becoming commonplace. Over this period, many aspects of sensor networks have been explored, yet a thorough understanding of how to analyse and process the vast amounts of sensor data collected remains an open area of research. This work, therefore, aims to provide theoretical, as well as practical, advances this area. In particular, we consider the problem of inferring certain underlying properties of the monitored phenomena, from our sensor measurements. Within mathematics, this is commonly formulated as an inverse problem; whereas in signal processing, it appears as a (multidimensional) sampling and reconstruction problem. Indeed it is well known that inverse problems are notoriously ill-posed and very demanding to solve; meanwhile ...

In this study, the respiratory system are modelled by three linear and one non-linear lumped parameter respiratory model, the equations of the models are driven and the parameters are estimated by using statistical signal processing methods. Linear RIC, Viscoelastic and Mead models and proposed basic non-linear RC model are used to resemble the respiratory system of the patient with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) under non-invasive ventilation. Statistical signal processing methods such as Minimum Variance Unbiased Estimation (MVUE), Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), Kalman Filter (KF), Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) and Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) are very powerful methods to estimate the parameters of the systems embedded in the unknown noise. In the first part of this thesis, artificial respiratory signals (airway flow and airway pressure) are used for the performance measurement criteria. Posterior Cramer Rao Lower Bound (PCRLB) is computed ...

In recent years, advances in signal processing have led the wireless sensor networks to be capable of mobility. The signal processing in a wireless sensor network differs from that of a traditional wireless network mainly in two important aspects. Unlike traditional wireless networks, in a sensor network the signal processing is performed in a fully distributed manner as the sensor measurements in a distributed fashion across the network collected. Additionally, due to the limited onboard resource of a sensor network it is essential to develop energy and bandwidth efficient signal processing algorithms. The thesis is devoted to discuss the state of the arte of algorithms commonly known as tracking algorithms. Although tracking algorithms have only been attracting research and development attention recently, already a wide literature and great variety of proposed approaches regarding the topic exist. The dissertation focus on ...

Over the last decade there has been an increasing interest in solutions for the continuous monitoring of health status with wireless, and in particular, wearable devices that provide remote analysis of physiological data. The use of wireless technologies have introduced new problems such as the transmission of a huge amount of data within the constraint of limited battery life devices. The design of an accurate and energy efficient telemonitoring system can be achieved by reducing the amount of data that should be transmitted, which is still a challenging task on devices with both computational and energy constraints. Furthermore, it is not sufficient merely to collect and transmit data, and algorithms that provide real-time analysis are needed. In this thesis, we address the problems of compression and analysis of physiological data using the emerging frameworks of Compressive Sensing (CS) and sparse ...

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) aim for accurate data gathering and representation of one or multiple physical variables from the environment, by means of sensor reading and wireless data packets transmission to a Data Fusion Center (DFC). There is no comprehensive common set of requirements for all WSN, as they are application dependent. Moreover, due to specific node capabilities or energy consumption constraints several tradeoffs have to be considered during the design, and particularly, the price of the sensor nodes is a determining factor. The distinction between small and large scale WSNs does not only refers to the quantity of sensor nodes, but also establishes the main design challenges in each case. For example, the node organization is a key issue in large scale WSNs, where many inexpensive nodes have to properly work in a coordinated manner. Regarding the amount of ...

This dissertation presents the outcome of investigations which envisaged to develop improved state and ‘combined state and parameter’ estimation algorithms for nonlinear signal models (during the contingent situations) where the complete knowledge of process and/or measurement noise covariance are not available. Variants of “adaptive nonlinear estimators” capable of providing satisfactory estimation results in the face of unknown noise covariance have been proposed in this dissertation. The proposed adaptive nonlinear estimators incorporate adaptation algorithms with which they can implicitly or explicitly, estimate unknown noise covariances along with estimation of states and parameters. Adaptation algorithms have been mathematically derived following different methods of adaptation which include Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), Covariance Matching method and Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) method. The adaptive nonlinear estimators which have been proposed in this dissertation are formulated with the help of a general framework for adaptive nonlinear ...

The advent of multi-microphone setups on a plethora of commercial devices in recent years has generated a newfound interest in the development of robust microphone array signal processing methods. These methods are generally used to either estimate parameters associated with acoustic scene or to extract signal(s) of interest. In most practical scenarios, the sources are located in the far-field of a microphone array where the main spatial information of interest is the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of the plane waves originating from the source positions. The focus of this thesis is to incorporate robustness against either lack of or imperfect/erroneous information regarding the DOAs of the sound sources within a microphone array signal processing framework. The DOAs of sound sources is by itself important information, however, it is most often used as a parameter for a subsequent processing method. One of the ...

Inspired by new emerging technologies and networks of devices with high collective computational power, I focus my work on the problematics of distributed algorithms. While each device runs a relatively simple algorithm with low complexity, the group of interconnected units (agents) determines a behavior of high complexity. Typically, such units have their own memory and processing unit, and are interconnected and capable to exchange information with each other. More specifically, this work is focused on the distributed consensus algorithms. Such algorithms allow the agents to coordinate their behaviour and to distributively find a common agreement (consensus). To understand and analyze their behaviour, it is necessary to analyze the convergence of the consensus algorithm, i.e., under which conditions the algorithm reaches a consensus and under which it does not. Naturally, the communication channel can change and the agents may function asynchronously ...