A rake receiver, which resolves multipath signals corrupted by a fading channel, is the most complex and power consuming block of a modem chip. Therefore, it is essential to design a rake receiver be efficient in hardware and power. We investigated a design of a rake receiver for the WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) system, which is a third generation wireless communication system. Our rake receiver design is targeted for mobile units, in which low-power consumption is highly important. We made judicious judgments throughout our design process to reduce the overall circuit complexity by trading with the performance. The reduction of the circuit complexity results in low power dissipation for our rake receiver. As the first step in the design of a rake receiver, we generated a software prototype in MATLAB. The prototype included a transmitter and a multipath Rayleigh fading channel, as well as a rake receiver with four fingers. Using the software prototype, we verified the functionality of all blocks of our rake receiver, estimated the performance in terms of bit error rate, and investigated trade-offs between hardware complexity and performance. After the verification and design trade-offs were completed, we manually developed a rake receiver at the RT (Register Transfer) level in VHDL. We proposed and incorporated several schemes in the RT level design to enhance the performance of our rake receiver. As the final step, the RT level design was synthesized to gate level circuits targeting TSMC 0.18 mm CMOS technology under the supply voltage of 1.8 V. We estimated the performance of our rake receiver in area and power dissipation. Our experimental results indicate that the total power dissipation for our rake receiver is 56 mW and the equivalent NAND2 circuit complexity is 983,482. We believe that the performance of our rake receiver is quite satisfactory. / Master of Science

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<p>In this thesis the problem of multitarget tracking in multistatic sensor networks is studied. This thesis focuses on tracking airborne targets by utilizing transmitters of opportunity in the surveillance region. Passive Coherent Location (PCL) system, which uses existing commercial signals (e.g., FM broadcast, digital TV) as the illuminators of opportunity for target tracking, is an emerging technology in air defence systems. PCL systems have many advantages over conventional radar systems such as low cost, covert operation and low vulnerability to electronic counter measures.</p> <p>One of another opportunistic signals available in the surveillance region is multipath signal. In this thesis, the multipath target return signals from distinct propagation modes that are resolvable by the receiver are exploited. When resolved multipath returns are not utilized within the tracker, i.e., discarded as clutter, potential information conveyed by the multipath detections of the same target is wasted. In this case, spurious tracks are formed using target-originated multipath measurements, but with an incorrect propagation mode assumption. Integrating multipath information into the tracker (and not discarding it) can help improve the accuracy of tracking and reduce the number of false tracks.</p> <p>In this thesis, these opportunistic measurements, i.e., commercial broadcast signals measurements in PCL tracking and resolvable multipath target return measurements in multipath assisted tracking are exploited. We give the optimal formulations for all of the above problems as well as the performance evaluations using PCRLB. Simulation results illustrate the performance of the algorithms.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Les réseaux sans fil sont sujets à des perturbations voire des pannes de liens et de noeuds en raison des caractéristiques intrinsèques de leur support de communication ; ces pannes sont aggravées par les particularités de relayage et de mobilité des noeuds dans les réseaux ad hoc. Ces réseaux requièrent donc la conception et la mise oeuvre des protocoles robustes au niveau de toutes les couches protocolaires. Dans cette thèse, nous choisissons une approche de robustesse pour améliorer les performances des communications dans un réseau mobile ad hoc. Nous proposons et étudions deux architectures de protection (protection par une analyse prédictive et protection par redondance de routes) qui sont couplées avec une restauration de niveau routage. Concernant la phase de détection, le protocole de routage utilise les notifications de niveau liaison pour détecter les pannes de liens. La première solution repose sur un protocole de routage réactif unipath dont le critère de sélection de routes est modifié. L’idée est d’utiliser des métriques capables de prédire l’état futur des routes dans le but d’améliorer leur durée de vie. Pour cela, deux métriques prédictives reposant sur la mobilité des noeuds sont proposées : la fiabilité des routes et une combinaison fiabilité-minimum de sauts. Pour calculer ces métriques prédictives, nous proposons une méthode analytique de calcul de la fiabilité de liens entre noeuds. Cette méthode prend compte le modèle de mobilité des noeuds et les caractéristiques de la communication sans fil notamment les collisions inter-paquets et les atténuations du signal. Les modèles de mobilité étudiés sont les modèles Random Walk et Random Way Point. Nous montrons l’impact de ces métriques sur les performances en termes de taux de livraison de paquets, de surcoût normalisé et de ruptures de routes. La seconde solution est une protection par redondance de routes qui s’appuie sur un protocole de routage multipath. Dans cette architecture, l’opération de recouvrement consiste soit à un basculement sur une route secondaire soit à une nouvelle découverte. Nous montrons que la redondance de routes améliore la robustesse de la communication en réduisant le temps de restauration. Ensuite, nous proposons une comparaison analytique entre les différentes politiques de recouvrement d’un protocole multipath. Nous en deduisons qu’un recouvrement segmenté donne les meilleurs résultats en termes de temps de restauration et de fiabilité / Due to the unreliability characteristics of wireless communications, and nodes mobility, Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) suffer from frequent failures and reactivation of links. Consequently, the routes frequently change, causing significant number of routing packets to discover new routes, leading to increased network congestion and transmission latency. Therefore, MANETs demand robust protocol design at all layers of the communication protocol stack, particularly at the MAC, the routing and transport layers. In this thesis, we adopt robustness approach to improve communication performance in MANET. We propose and study two protection architectures (protection by predictive analysis and protection by routes redundancy) which are coupled with a routing level restoration. The routing protocol is responsible of the failure detection phase, and uses the mechanism of link-level notifications to detect link failures. Our first proposition is based on unipath reactive routing protocol with a modified route selection criterion. The idea is to use metrics that can predict the future state of the route in order to improve their lifetime. Two predictive metrics based on the mobility of nodes are proposed : the routes reliability and, combining hop-count and reliability metrics. In order to determine the two predictive metrics, we propose an analytical formulation that computes link reliability between adjacent nodes. This formulation takes into account nodes mobility model and the the wireless communication characteristics including the collisions between packets and signal attenuations. Nodes mobility models studied are Random Walk and Random Way Point. We show the impact of these predictive metrics on the networks performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, normalized routing overhead and number of route failures. The second proposition is based on multipath routing protocol. It is a protection mechanism based on route redundancy. In this architecture, the recovery operation is either to switch the traffic to alternate route or to compute a new route. We show that the routes redundancy technique improves the communication robustness by reducing the failure recovery time. We propose an analytical comparison between different recovery policies of multipath routing protocol. We deduce that segment recovery is the best recovery policy in terms of recovery time and reliability

In this thesis a new approach for characterisation of digital mobile radio channels is investigated. The new approach is based on recognition of the fact that while the fading which is characteristic of the mobile radio channel is very rapid, the processes underlying this fading may vary much more slowly. The comparative stability of these underlying processes has not been exploited in system designs to date. Channel models are proposed which take account of the stability of the channel. Estimators for the parameters of the models are proposed, and their performance is analysed theoretically and by simulation and measurement. Bounds are derived for the extent to which the mobile channel can be predicted, and the critical factors which define these bounds are identified. Two main applications arise for these channel models. The first is the possibility of prediction of the overall system performance. This may be used to avoid channel fading (for instance by change of frequency), or compensate for it (by change of the signal rate or by power control). The second application is in channel equalisation. An equaliser based on a model which has parameters varying only very slowly can offer improved performance especially in the case of channels which appear to be varying so rapidly that the convergence rate of an equaliser based on the conventional model is not adequate. The first of these applications is explored, and a relationship is derived between the channel impulse response and the performance of a broadband system.

Cette thèse présente une solution pour améliorer la mobilité des réseaux, dans le cadre de communications véhiculaires ainsi que pour la distribution de contenu. Les solutions actuelles pour les communications véhiculaires (c'est-à-dire lorsqu'un réseau est mobile) reposent sur la mise en place de tunnels, permettant également d'utiliser simultanément les différentes interfaces disponibles sur le véhicule (multi-homing). Même avec des tunnels, ces solutions ne sont pas en mesure d'équilibrer le trafic sur les interfaces réseau disponibles, elles ne parviennent pas à tirer partie du multi-homing. De plus, certaines des solutions existantes pour la mobilité de réseau cachent la mobilité aux hôtes connectés au routeur mobile. De fait, cela empêche les hôtes de participer aux décisions relatives au multi-homing, telles que le choix de l'interface réseau à utiliser, ce qui est pourtant utile pour réaliser du routage à moindre coût. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons de combiner un protocole de mobilité réseau (tel que NEMO) avec le protocole de TCP-multivoies (MPTCP), ce qui permet aux nœuds hôtes de participer à la mobilité et au multi-homing. Cette nouvelle combinaison améliore significativement le routage et l'encapsulation de paquets causée par les tunnels. En outre, cela augmente le débit, la tolérance de panne, le temps d'aller-retour et réduit le délai de transmission. La deuxième contribution de ce travail propose une solution de continuité de session pour la distribution de contenu dans les réseaux 5G. Dans le réseau 5G, les équipements d'accès IP seront au plus proche des nœuds terminaux afin d'améliorer l'expérience utilisateur et de réduire la charge de trafic dans le réseau central. Le fait est qu'à un instant donné un terminal ne peut être raccordé qu'à une seule passerelle (SGW/PGW) à la fois. Et comme la passerelle change lors de la mobilité, les sessions en cours seront rompues, impactant les applications temps réelle, le streaming vidéo, les jeux, etc. Pour cela, la thèse présente une solution de continuité de session avec l'aide de TCP-multivoie en bénéficiant du fait que les serveurs de contenu sont stationnaires. / This thesis presents a solution for boosting network mobility in the context of vehicular communications and content distribution in fixed network. Existing solutions for vehicular communications (i.e., network mobility), relies on tunneling in order to use multiple available interfaces on a vehicle. Even with tunnels, these solutions are unable to balance the traffic over available network interfaces thus do not reach the goal to provide optimum multi-homing benefits. Moreover, some of the existing solutions for network mobility, hide the mobility from the hosts connected to the mobile router. This in result inhibits the host nodes from participating in multi-homing related decisions such as interface selection which can be helpful in performing least cost routing. In this thesis, we propose to combine network mobility protocol with MPTCP which enables the host nodes to participate in mobility and multi-homing. This novel combination significantly improves routing and tunneling packet overhead. Moreover it increases throughput, fault tolerance, round-trip time and reduces transmission delay. The second contribution of this work is providing a solution for session continuity in context of content distribution in 5G networks. In 5G network, the IP edges will be closer to the host nodes in order to improve the user experience and reduce traffic load in the core network. The fact that a host can only be connected to a single gateway (SGW/PGW) at a time, would break the ongoing sessions for real time applications like video streaming or gaming during an occurrence of mobility event requiring gateway relocation. The thesis presents the solution for session continuity with the help of multipath TCP by benefiting from the fact that the content servers are stationary.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 18-21, 2004 / Town & Country Resort, San Diego, California / This paper will present the results of experiments to characterize the performance of a blind, adaptive constant modulus algorithm (CMA) equalizer in simulated telemetry multipath environments. The variables included modulation method, bit rate, received signal-to-noise ratio, delay of the indirect path relative to the direct path, amplitude of the indirect path relative to the direct path, and fade rate. The main measured parameter was bit error probability (BEP). The tests showed that the equalizer usually improved the data quality in the presence of multipath.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 18-21, 2004 / Town & Country Resort, San Diego, California / The impact of frequency selective multipath fading on the bit error rate performance of ARTM Tier-1 waveforms (FQPSK and SOQPSK) is derived and analyzed. In the presence of a strong specular reflection with relative magnitude |Γ1|, the ARTM Tier-1 waveforms suffer a loss in performance of (1 - |Γ1)^(-4√(|Γ1|)) for |Γ1| < 0:5 and a relatively high error floor at approximately 10^(-2) for |Γ1| ≥ 0.5. The ARTM Tier-1 waveforms possess twice the spectral efficiency of PCM/FM, but exhibit a greater loss and higher error floors than PCM/FM for the same multipath conditions and signal-to-noise ratio.

ITC/USA 2010 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Sixth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 25-28, 2010 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / This work explores aeronautical telemetry communication performance with the SOQPSK- TG ARTM waveforms when frequency-selective multipath corrupts received information symbols. A multi-antenna equalization scheme is presented where each antenna's unique multipath channel is equalized using a pilot-aided optimal linear minimum mean-square error filter. Following independent channel equalization, a maximal ratio combining technique is used to generate a single receiver output for detection. This multi-antenna equalization process is shown to improve detection performance over maximal ratio combining alone.