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No description available.

The aim of this work is to study data transmission over a microwave digital mobile radio channel at 900 MHz, where the channel is subjected to multipath fading. Besides the fading, the other impairments assumed here are additive noise, co-channel interference and adjacent channel interference. Two modulation techniques are investigated in this work, namely Quadrature-Amplitude-Modulation (QAM) and Quadrature-Phase-Shift- Keying (QPSK). The channel is characterised digitally, assuming multipath Rayleigh fading in the presence of noise. The detection process studied here are near-maximum likelihood schemes: non-linear equalisation methods are also considered in detail. The thesis is also concerned with carrier synchronisation and channel estimation under conditions of Rayleigh fading. Since the carrier syncn,honisation is a most important requirement in mobile radio, a Digital Phase Locked Loop (DPLL) technique has been designed and investigated in the form of a feedback digital synchronisation system. Two types of channel estimation technique, namely feedforward and feedback estimators, are also investigated in this work. The feedback estimator is modified by the addition of a digital control system, in order to reduce its delay, and to cope with rapidly fading signals. Successful carrier synchronisation is demonstrated by the use of space diversity. The study was completed using models of the component parts of the system, and by the use of extensive computer simulations to analyse the system under various operating conditions.

With the proliferation of cheap bulk SSD storage and better batteries in the last few years we are experiencing an explosion in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices flooding the market, smartphone connected point-of-sale devices (e.g. Square), home monitoring devices (e.g. NEST), fitness monitoring devices (e.g. Fitbit), and smart-watches. With new IoT devices come new security threats that have yet to be adequately evaluated. We propose uLeech, a new embedded trusted platform module for next-generation power scavenging devices. Such power scavenging devices are already widely deployed. For instance, the Square point-of-sale reader uses the microphone/speaker interface of a smartphone for communications and as a power supply. Such devices are being used as trusted devices in security-critical applications, without having been adequately evaluated. uLeech can securely store keys and provide cryptographic services to any connected smartphone. Our design also facilitates physical side-channel security analysis by providing interfaces to facilitate the acquisition of power traces and clock manipulation attacks. Thus uLeech empowers security researchers to analyze leakage in next- generation embedded and IoT devices and to evaluate countermeasures before deployment. Even the most secure systems reveal their secrets through secret-dependent computation. Secret- dependent computation is detectable by monitoring a system’s time, power, or outputs. Common defenses to side-channel emanations include adding noise to the channel or making algorithmic changes to mitigate specific side-channels. Unfortunately, existing solutions are not automatic, not comprehensive, or not practical. We propose an isolation-based approach for eliminating power and timing side-channels that is automatic, comprehensive, and practical. Our approach eliminates side-channels by leveraging integrated decoupling capacitors to electrically isolate trusted computation from the adversary. Software has the ability to request a fixed- power/time quantum of isolated computation. By discretizing power and time, our approach controls the granularity of side-channel leakage; the only burden on programmers is to ensure that all secret-dependent execution differences converge within a power/time quantum. We design and implement three approaches to power/time-based quantization and isolation: a wholly-digital version, a hybrid version that uses capacitors for time tracking, and a full- custom version. We evaluate the overheads of our proposed controllers with respect to software implementations of AES and RSA running on an ARM- based microcontroller and hardware implementations AES and RSA using a 22nm process technology. We also validate the effectiveness and real-world efficiency of our approach by building a prototype consisting of an ARM microcontroller, an FPGA, and discrete circuit components. Lastly, we examine the root cause of Electromagnetic (EM) side-channel attacks on Integrated Circuits (ICs) to augment the Quantized Computing design to mitigate EM leakage. By leveraging the isolation nature of our Quantized Computing design, we can effectively reduce the length and power of the unintended EM antennas created by the wire layers in an IC.

Previous studies on the rat P2X2 receptor demonstrated that structural modifications to amino acid side chains within the second transmembrane domain lead to receptor activation in the absence of exogenously applied ATP (Rassendren et al, 1997. Cao et al, 2007. Cao et al, 2009). Present work has been aimed towards the characterization of these apparently ATP-independent currents, to investigate the molecular mechanism underlying this phenomenon using a combination of computer modeling, amino acid substitution, heterologous expression in HEK293 cells, the real time modification of engineered cysteines by MTS compounds and electrophysiological techniques. A screen of cysteine substituted receptors at TM2 positions (from G323 to T354) with the membrane permeable MTS compound, MTSP, found that the compound evoked substantial currents from cells expressing P2X2[I328C] receptors, but not from cells expressing other TM2 cysteine substituted, nor wild type receptors. MTSP-evoked currents had similar properties to ATP currents in terms of rectification, NMDG+ permeability and unitary currents. Further investigation indicated that hydrophobic, unbranched modifications to the side chain at position 328 were the most effective. Overall, the results from this work demonstrate that increasing the length and hydrophobicity of an unbranched side-chain at position 328 leads to full receptor activation without the requirement for ATP. These results suggest that the highly conserved native Ile at position 328 stabilizes the closed of the receptor due to its branched nature.

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Ultra Wideband (UWB) communication systems occupy large bandwidths with very low power spectral densities. This feature makes UWB channels highly rich in multipaths. To exploit the temporal diversity, a UWB receiver usually incorporates Rake reception. Each multipath in the channel carries just a fraction of the signal energy. This phenomenon dictates a Rake receiver with a large number of fingers to achieve good energy capture and output signal to noise ratio (SNR). Eventually, the Rake structure becomes very complex from analysis and design perspectives and incurs higher manufacturing cost. The first contribution of this thesis is to propose channel shortening or time domain equalization as a technique to reduce the complexity of the UWB Rake receiver. It is analyzed that most of the existing channel shortening equalizer (CSE) designs are either system specific or optimize a parameter not critical or even available in UWB systems. The CSE designs which are more generic and use commonly critical cost functions may perform poorly due to particular UWB channel profiles and related statistical properties. Consequently, the main contribution of the thesis is to propose several CSE designs to address the specific needs of UWB systems. These CSE designs not only exploit some general but also some UWB specific features to perform the task more efficiently. The comparative analysis of the proposed CSEs, some existing designs and the conventional Rake structures leads towards the conclusion. It is finally shown that the use of CSE at the receiver front end greatly simplifies the Rake structure and the associated signal processing.

<p>In wireless transmissions the communication is often degraded by random fades, noise and other performance reducing phenomena. One way of improving the stability and reducing the error rates is to use relaying techniques where several nodes cooperate in a transmission between two of them. This thesis analyzes some of the available Decode-and-Forward relaying schemes for wireless transmission. The investigated schemes are conventional repetition coding, partial repetition coding and non-collaborative direct transmission. I have developed a three-node communication system using an audio channel to test the performance of repetition coding and direct transmission. This audio communication system can also be used to demonstrate some basic phenomena in wireless transmissions and how different scenarios change the performance of the communication. A theoretical performance analysis and computer simulations of the schemes performance over a Rayleigh fading channel are done as a basis for comparison. As a result we see that in the audio communication system repetition coding actually degrades the performance, compared to direct transmission, when using a relatively slow data rate in comparison to the speed of the fading in the audio channel.</p>

<p>Prediction of the rapidly fading envelope of a mobile radio channel enables a number of capacity improving techniques like fast resource allocation and fast link adaptation. This thesis deals with linear prediction of the complex impulse response of a channel and unbiased quadratic prediction of the power. The design and performance of these predictors depend heavily on the correlation properties of the channel. Models for a channelwhere the multipath is caused by clusters of scatterers are studied. The correlation for the contribution from a cluster can be approximated as a damped complex sinusoid. A suitable model for the dynamics of the channel is an ARMA-process. This motivates the use of linear predictors.</p><p>A limiting factor in the prediction are the estimation errors on the observed channels. This estimation error, caused by measurement noise and time variation, is analyzed for a block based least squares algorithm which operates on a Jakes channel model. Efficient noise reduction on the estimated channel impulse responses can be obtained with Wienersmoothers that are based on simple models for the dynamics of the channel combined with estimates of the variance of the estimation error.</p><p>Power prediction that is based on the squared magnitude of linear prediction of the taps will be biased. Hence, a bias compensated power predictor is proposed and the optimal prediction coefficients are derived for the Rayleigh fading channel. The corresponding probability density functions for the predicted power are also derived. A performance evaluation of the prediction algorithm is carried out on measured broadband mobile radio channels. The performance is highly dependent on the variance of the estimation error and the dynamics of the individual taps.</p>