Recently there has been a significant amount of interest in the area of wideband and ultra-wideband (UWB) signaling for use in indoor wireless systems. This interest is in part motivated by the notion that the use of large bandwidth signals makes systems less sensitive to the degrading effects of multipath propagation. By reducing the sensitivity to multipath, more robust and higher capacity systems can be realized. However, as signal bandwidth is increased, the complexity of a Rake receiver (or other receiver structure) required to capture the available power also increases. In addition, accurate channel estimation is required to realize this performance, which becomes increasingly difficult as energy is dispersed among more multipath components. In this thesis we quantify the channel response for six signal bandwidths ranging from continuous wave (CW) to 1 GHz transmission bandwidths. We present large scale and small scale fading statistics for both LOS and NLOS indoor channels based on an indoor measurement campaign conducted in Durham Hall at Virginia Tech. Using newly developed antenna positioning equipment we also quantify the spatial correlation of these signals. It is shown that the incremental performance gains due to reduced fading of large bandwidths level off as signals approach UWB bandwidths. Furthermore, we analyze the performance of Rake receivers for the different signal bandwidths and compare their performance for binary phase modulation (BPSK). It is shown that the receiver structure and performance is critical in realizing the reduced fading benefit of large signal bandwidths. We show practical channel estimation degrades performance more for larger bandwidths. We also demonstrate for a fixed finger Rake receiver there is an optimal signal bandwidth beyond which increased signal bandwidth produces degrading results. / Master of Science

High-bandwidth fuel modulation is currently one of the most promising methods for active combustion control. To attenuate the large pressure oscillations in the combustion chamber, the fuel is pulsed so that the heat release rate fluctuations damp the pressure oscillations in the combustor. This thesis focuses on the development and implementation of a high-bandwidth, proportional modulation system for liquid-fuel active combustion control. The throttle valve modulation system, discussed in this thesis, uses a 500-um piezoelectric stack coupled with an off-the-shelf valve. After comparing three other types of actuators, the piezoelectric stack was selected because of its compact size, bandwidth capabilities, and relatively low cost. Using the acoustic resonance of the fuel line, the system is able to achieve 128% pressure modulation, relative to the mean pressure, and is capable of producing more than 75% flow modulation at 115 Hz. Additionally, at 760 Hz the system produces 40% pressure modulation and 21% flow modulation with flow rates between 0.4 and 10 gph. Control authority was demonstrated on a single-nozzle kerosene combustor which exhibits a well-pronounced instability at ~115 Hz. Using the modulation system, the fundamental peak of the combustion instability was reduced by 30 dB, and the broadband sound pressure levels inside the combustor were reduced by 12 dB. However, the most important conclusion from the combustion control experiments was not the system?s accomplishments, but rather its inability to control the combustor at high global equivalence ratios. Our work indicates that having the ability to modulate a large percentage of the primary fuel is not always sufficient for active combustion control. / Master of Science

In obtaining a regression fit to a set of data, ordinary least squares regression depends directly on the parametric model formulated by the researcher. If this model is incorrect, a least squares analysis may be misleading. Alternatively, nonparametric regression (kernel or local polynomial regression, for example) has no dependence on an underlying parametric model, but instead depends entirely on the distances between regressor coordinates and the prediction point of interest. This procedure avoids the necessity of a reliable model, but in using no information from the researcher, may fit to irregular patterns in the data. The proper combination of these two regression procedures can overcome their respective problems. Considered is the situation where the researcher has an idea of which model should explain the behavior of the data, but this model is not adequate throughout the entire range of the data. An extension of partial linear regression and two methods of model robust regression are developed and compared in this context. These methods involve parametric fits to the data and nonparametric fits to either the data or residuals. The two fits are then combined in the most efficient proportions via a mixing parameter. Performance is based on bias and variance considerations. / Ph. D. / incomplete_metadata

As the Internet continues to evolve, without providing any performance guarantees or explicit feedback to applications, the only way to infer the state of the network and to dynamically react to congestion is through end-to-end measurements. The emph{available bandwidth} (avail-bw) is an important metric that characterizes the dynamic state of a network path. Its measurement has been the focus of significant research during the last 15 years. However, its estimation remained elusive for several reasons. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of the first estimation methodology for the avail-bw in a network path using end-to-end measurements. In more detail, our first contribution is an end-to-end methodology, called SLoPS, to determine whether the avail-bw is larger than a given rate based on the sequence of one-way delays experienced by a periodic packet stream. The second contribution is the design of two algorithms, based on SLoPS, to estimate the mean and the variation range, respectively, of the avail-bw process. These algorithms have been implemented in two measurement tools, referred to as PathLoad and PathVar. We have validated the accuracy of the tools using analysis, simulation, and extensive experimentation. Pathload has been downloaded by more than 6000 users since 2003. We have also used PathVar to study the variability of the avail-bw process as a function of various important factors, including traffic load and degree of multiplexing. Finally, we present an application of avail-bw estimation in video streaming. Specifically, we show that avail-bw measurements can be used in the dynamic selection of the best possible overlay path. The proposed scheme results in better perceived video quality than path selection algorithms that rely on jitter or loss-rate measurements.

With a new United States Army initiative to exploit commercially developed information technology, there is a heightened interest in using Internet protocols over the military's geosynchronous satellite links. TCP is the dominant Internet protocol used for reliable data exchange, but its own design limits performance when used over long delay network links such as satellites. Initially this research set out to compare TCP with another proposed protocol, the Satellite Transport Protocol (STP). However through a series of tests, we found that STP does not fulfill its claims of increased throughput over TCP and uncovered a flaw in STP's founding research. In addition, this thesis proposes and demonstrates novel performance enhancing techniques that significantly improve transport protocol throughput.

Multicast has long been considered an attractive service for the Internet for the provision of multiparty applications. For over a decade now multicast has been a proposed IETF standard. Though there is a strong industry push towards deploying multicast, there has been little multicast deployment by commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and more importantly most end-users still lack multicast capabilities. Depending on the underlying network infrastructure, the ISP has several options of implementing his multicast capabilities. With significantly faster and more sophisticated protocols being designed and prototyped, it is expected that a whole new gamut of applications that are delay sensitive will come into being. However, the incentives to resolve the conflicting interests of the ISPs and the end-users have to be provided for successful implementation of these protocols. Thus we arrive at the following economic questions: What is the strategy that will enable the ISP recover his costs ? How can the end-user be made aware of the cost of his actions ? Naturally, the strategies of the ISP and the end-user depend on each other and form an economic game. The research problems addressed in this thesis are: A pricing model that is independent of the underlying transmission protocols is prefered. We have proposed such a pricing scheme for multicast independent of the underlying protocols, by introducing the concept of pricing points* These pricing points provide a range of prices that the users can expect during a particular time period and tune their usage accordingly. Our pricing scheme makes both the sender and receiver accountable. Our scheme also provides for catering to heterogeneous users and gives incentive for differential pricing. We explore a number of formulations of resource allocation problems arising in communication networks as optimization models. Optimization-based methods were only employed for unicast congestion control. We have extended this method for single rate multicast. We have also devised an optimization-based approach for multicast congestion control that finds an allocation rate to maximize the social welfare. Finally we also show that the session-splitting problem can also be cast as an optimization problem. The commonly used "max-min" fairness criteria suffers from serious limitations like discriminating sessions that traverse large number of links and poor network utilization. We provide an allocation scheme that reduces discrimination towards multicast sessions that traverse many links and also improves network utilization.

QoS routing is one of the major building blocks for supporting QoS in communication networks and, hence, a necessary component of future communication networks. Bandwidth- Constrained Routing Algorithm (BCRA) may help to satisfy QoS requirements such as end-to-end delay, delay-jitter etc when WFQ-like (Weighted Fair Queuing) scheduling mechanisms are deployed. The existing algorithms for bandwidth constrained routing suffer from high message overhead and have a high computational and space complexity. The work presented in the thesis, therefore, focuses on the different techniques that an be used to reserve bandwidth for a unicast connection with low protocol overhead in terms of number of messages. We have compared the performance of the proposed routing algorithms using simulation studies with other bandwidth constrained routing algorithms. The call blocking ratio and message overhead have been used as the performance metric to compare the proposed algorithm with the existing ones. We present three source routing algorithms for unicast connections satisfying the band- width requirement. The first two routing algorithms are based on the partitioning of the network. The link-state broadcasts are limited to the partition. In the first algorithm, the source node queries the other partitions for the state information on a connection request and computes the path based on the information received from the other partitions. The second algorithm is based on state aggregation. The aggregated state of other partitions is maintained at every node. The source node finds a feasible path based on the aggregated information. The path is expanded in every partition, if required, at the time of resource reservation. The third QoS routing algorithm uses the Distance Vector Tables to find a route for a connection. If the shortest path satisfies the bandwidth requirement, then it is selected; otherwise a random deviation is taken at the point where bandwidth requirement is not satisfied and shortest path algorithm is again followed. In all the three algorithms presented, the packets carry the entire path information to the destination node. Therefore, no per connection information is required to be maintained at the intermediate nodes. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithms indeed help educing the protocol overhead considerably, and at the same time they give comparable or better performance in terms of resource utilization across a wide range of workloads.

No description available.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 27-30, 1997 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) currently achieves a bandwidth efficiency (h ) of 0.5 to 1.0 bps/Hz by using traditional modulation schemes, such as, BPSK and QFSK. SNL has an interest in increasing the present bandwidth efficiency by a factor of 4 or higher with the same allocated bandwidth (about 10 MHz). Simulations have shown that 32- QAM trellis-coded modulation (TCM) gives a good bit error rate (BER) performance, and meets the requirements as far as the bandwidth efficiency is concerned. Critical to achieving this is that the receiver be able to achieve timing synchronization. This paper examines a particular timing recovery algorithm for all-digital receivers. Timing synchronization in a digital receiver can be achieved in different ways. One way of achieving this is by interpolating the original sampled sequence to produce another sampled sequence synchronized to the symbol rate or a multiple of the symbol rate. An adaptive sampling conversion algorithm which performs this function was developed by Floyd Gardner in 1993. In the present work, his algorithm was applied to two different modulation schemes, BPSK and 4-ary PAM. The two schemes were simulated in the presence of AWGN and ISI along with Gardner’s algorithm for timing recovery, and a fractionally spaced equalizer (T/2 FSE) for equalization. Simulations show that the algorithm gives good BER performance for BPSK in all the situations, and at different sampling frequencies, but unfortunately poor performance for the 4-ary PAM scheme. This indicates that Gardner’s algorithm for sampling conversion is not suitable for multi-level signaling schemes.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Today’s large-scale signal processing systems impose massive bandwidth requirements on both internal and external communication systems. Most often, these bandwidth requirements are met by scalable input/output architectures built around high-performance, standards-based technology. Several such technologies are available and are in common use as internal and/or external communication mechanisms. This paper provides an overview of some of the more common scalable technologies used for internal and external communications in real-time data acquisition systems. With respect to internal communications mechanisms this paper focuses on three ANSI-standard switched fabric technologies: RACEway (ANSI/VITA 5-1994), SKYchannel (ANSI/VITA 10-1995) and Myrinet (ANSI/VITA 26-1998). The discussion then turns to how Fibre Channel, HiPPI, and ATM are used to provide scalable external communications in real-time systems. Finally, glimpse of how these technologies are evolving to meet tomorrow’s requirements is provided.