Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is a powerful approach to mitigate the spectrum scarcity problem caused by rapid increase in wireless communication demands. Based on architecture design, DSA systems can be categorized as centralized and distributed. To successfully enable DSA, both centralized and distributed systems have to deal with spectrum management issues including spectrum sensing, spectrum decision, spectrum sharing and spectrum mobility. Our work starts by investigating the challenges of efficient spectrum monitoring in centralized spectrum sensing. Since central controllers usually require the presence information of incumbent users/primary users (IUs) for decision making, which is obtained during spectrum sensing, privacy issues of IUs become big concerns in some DSA systems where IUs have strong operation security needs. To aid in this, we design novel location privacy protection schemes for IUs. Considering the general drawbacks of centralized systems including high computational overhead for central controllers, single point failure and IU privacy issues, in many scenarios, a distributed DSA system is required. In this dissertation, we also cope with the spectrum sharing issues in distributed spectrum management, specifically the secondary user (SU) power control problem, by developing distributed and secure transmit power control algorithms for SUs. In centralized spectrum management, the common approach for spectrum monitoring is to build infrastructures (e.g. spectrum observatories), which cost much money and manpower yet have relatively low coverage. To aid in this, we propose a crowdsourcing based spectrum monitoring system to capture the accurate spectrum utilization at a large geographical area, which leverages the power of masses of portable mobile devices. The central controller can accurately predict future spectrum utilization and intelligently schedule the spectrum monitoring tasks among mobile SUs accordingly, so that the energy of mobile devices can be saved and more spectrum activities can be monitored. We also demonstrate our system's ability to capture not only the existing spectrum access patterns but also the unknown patterns where no historical spectrum information exists. The experiment shows that our spectrum monitoring system can obtain a high spectrum monitoring coverage with low energy consumption. Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) systems are utilized in DSA in 3.5 GHz to sense the IU activities for protecting them from SUs' interference. However, IU location information is often highly sensitive in this band and hence it is preferable to hide its true location under the detection of ESCs. As a remedy, we design novel schemes to preserve both static and moving IU's location information by adjusting IU's radiation pattern and transmit power. We first formulate IU privacy protection problems for static IU. Due to the intractable nature of this problem, we propose a heuristic approach based on sampling. We also formulate the privacy protection problem for moving IUs, in which two cases are analyzed: (1) protect IU's moving traces; (2) protect its real-time current location information. Our analysis provides insightful advice for IU to preserve its location privacy against ESCs. Simulation results show that our approach provides great protection for IU's location privacy. Centralized DSA spectrum management systems has to bear several fundamental issues, such as the heavy computational overhead for central controllers, single point failure and privacy concerns of IU caused by large amounts of information exchange between users and controllers and often untrusted operators of the central controllers. In this dissertation, we propose an alternative distributed and privacy-preserving spectrum sharing design for DSA, which relies on distributed SU power control and security mechanisms to overcome the limitations of centralized DSA spectrum management. / Doctor of Philosophy / Due to the rapid growth in wireless communication demands, the frequency spectrum is becoming increasingly crowded. Traditional spectrum allocation policy gives the unshared access of fixed bands to the licensed users, and there is little unlicensed spectrum left now to allocate to newly emerged communication demands. However, studies on spectrum occupancy show that many licensed users who own the license of certain bands are only active for a small percentage of time, which results in plenty of underutilized spectrum. Hence, a new spectrum sharing paradigm, called dynamic spectrum access (DSA), is proposed to mitigate this problem. DSA enables the spectrum sharing between different classes of users, generally, the unlicensed users in the DSA system can access the licensed spectrum opportunistically without interfering with the licensed users. Based on architecture design, DSA systems can be categorized as centralized and distributed. In centralized systems, a central controller will make decisions on spectrum usage for all unlicensed users. Whereas in distributed systems, unlicensed users can make decisions for themselves independently. To successfully enable DSA, both centralized and distributed DSA systems need to deal with spectrum management issues, such as resource allocation problems and user privacy issues, etc. The resource allocation problems include, for example, the problems to discover and allocate idle bands and the problems to control users' transmit power for successful coexistence. Privacy issues may also arise during the spectrum management process since certain information exchange is inevitable for global decision making. However, due to the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) regulation, licensed users' privacy such as their location information must be protected in any case. As a result, dynamic and efficient spectrum management techniques are necessary for DSA users. In this dissertation, we investigate the above-mentioned spectrum management issues in both types of DSA systems, specifically, the spectrum sensing challenges with licensed user location privacy issues in centralized DSA, and the spectrum sharing problems in distributed DSA systems. In doing so, we propose novel schemes for solving each related spectrum management problem and demonstrate their efficacy through the results from extensive evaluations and simulations. We believe that this dissertation provides insightful advice for DSA users to solve different spectrum management issues for enabling DSA implementation, and hence helps in a wider adoption of dynamic spectrum sharing.

LTE heterogeneous wireless networks promise significant increase in data rates and improved coverage through (i) the deployment of relays and cell densification, (ii) carrier aggregation to enhance bandwidth usage and (iii) by enabling nodes to have dual connectivity. These emerging cellular networks are complex and large systems which are difficult to optimize with centralized control and where mobiles need to balance spectral efficiency, power consumption and fairness constraints. In this dissertation we focus on how decentralized and autonomous mobiles in multihop cellular systems can optimize their own local objectives by taking into account end-to-end or network-wide conditions. We propose several link-adaptive schemes where nodes can adjust their transmit power, aggregate carriers and select points of access to the network (relays and/or macrocell base stations) autonomously, based on both local and global conditions. Under our approach, this is achieved by disseminating the dynamic congestion level in the backhaul links of the points of access. As nodes adapt locally, the congestion levels in the backhaul links can change, which can in turn induce them to also change their adaptation objectives. We show that under our schemes, even with this dynamic congestion feedback, nodes can distributedly converge to a stable selection of transmit power levels and points of access. We also analytically derive the transmit power levels at the equilibrium points for certain cases. Moreover, through numerical results we show that the corresponding system throughput is significantly higher than when nodes adapt greedily following traditional link layer optimization objectives. Given the growing data rate demand, increasing system complexity and the difficulty of implementing centralized cross-layer optimization frameworks, our work simplifies resource allocation in heterogeneous cellular systems. Our work can be extended to any multihop wireless system where the backhaul link capacity is limited and feedback on the dynamic congestion levels at the access points is available. / Ph. D.

For the past 70 years, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been the licensing authority for wireless spectrum. Traditionally, spectrum was commercially licensed to primary users with defined uses. With the growth of personal communication systems in the 1990''s, unallocated spectrum has become a scarce commodity. However, since most primary users are active only at certain times and places, much of the allocated spectrum remains underutilized. Substantial holes exist in the spatio-temporal spectrum that could be opportunistically used by unlicensed secondary users. As a result, the FCC is considering allowing secondary users to opportunistically use frequencies that are not being used by primary users. If multiple secondary users are present in the same geographical area, the concept of Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) allows these users to share the opportunistic spectrum. If several secondary users want to use a limited set of frequency resources, they will very likely interfere with each other. Sensing is a distributed technique where each transmitter/receiver pair senses (both passively and actively) the available channels and uses the channel that provides the best performance. While sensing alone allows sharing of the spectrum, it is not the optimal method in terms of maximizing the capacity in such a shared system. If we allow the secondary users to collaborate and share information, optimal capacity might be reached. However, collaboration adds another level of complexity to the transceivers of the secondary users, since they must now be able to communicate (Note that in general, the secondary users may have completely different communication protocols, e.g., Wi-Fi and Bluetooth). Additionally, optimizing the capacity of the available spectrum could have other negative side effects such as impacting the fairness of sharing the resources. Our primary goal is to explore the benefit of this cost-benefit tradeoff by determining the capacity increase obtainable from collaboration. As a secondary goal, we also wish to determine how this increase in capacity affects fairness. To summarize, the goal of this work is to answer the question: Fundamentally, what is the benefit of collaboration in Dynamic Spectrum Sharing? / Master of Science

In recent years, game theory has emerged as a promising approach to solving the power control problem in wireless networks. This thesis extends the reach of game-theoretic analysis to embrace link adaptation, thereby constituting a generalization of the power control problem. A realistic and natural problem formulation is attempted, wherein transmitter power and a discrete-valued Adaptable Link Parameter (ALP), e.g. code rate, constitute the action set of a player in this game. The dual goals of maximizing throughput and minimizing power consumption are reflected in the utility function selection, which uses the accurate sigmoid model for approximating throughput. The discrete action space makes it difficult to verify the existence of a Nash Equilibrium (NE) in this game using standard techniques. To circumvent this limitation, a heuristic algorithm is proposed. This algorithm is analytically shown to always converge to a NE. The subsequent results probe its validity and sensitivity. Favorable comparisons are drawn between these game-theoretic results and those arising from parallel systems techniques. A linear programming system optimization that exploits properties of the dominant eigenvalue of the system gain matrix is also presented in a comparative context. / Master of Science

While the channel capacity of an isolated noise-limited wireless link is well-understood, the same is not true for the interference-limited wireless links that coexist in the same area and occupy the same frequency band(s). The performance of these wireless systems is coupled to each other due to the mutual interference. One such wireless scenario is modeled as a network of simultaneously communicating node pairs and is generally referred to as an interference channel (IC). The problem of characterizing the capacity of an IC is one of the most interesting and long-standing open problems in information theory. A popular way of characterizing the capacity of an IC is to maximize the achievable sum-rate by treating interference as Gaussian noise, which is considered optimal in low-interference scenarios. While the sum-rate of the single-band SISO IC is relatively well understood, it is not so when the users have multiple-bands and multiple-antennas for transmission. Therefore, the study of the optimal sum-rate of the multi-band MIMO IC is the main goal of this thesis. The sum-rate maximization problem for these ICs is formulated and is shown to be quite similar to the one already known for single-band MIMO ICs. This problem is reduced to the problem of finding the optimal fraction of power to be transmitted over each spatial channel in each frequency band. The underlying optimization problem, being non-linear and non-convex, is difficult to solve analytically or by employing local optimization techniques. Therefore, we develop a global optimization algorithm by extending the Reformulation and Linearization Technique (RLT) based Branch and Bound (BB) strategy to find the provably optimal solution to this problem. We further show that the spatial and spectral channels are surprisingly similar in a multi-band multi-antenna IC from a sum-rate maximization perspective. This result is especially interesting because of the dissimilarity in the way the spatial and frequency channels affect the perceived interference. As a part of this study, we also develop some rules-of-thumb regarding the optimal power allocation strategies in multi-band MIMO ICs in various interference regimes. Due to the recent popularity of Interference Alignment (IA) as a means of approaching capacity in an IC (in high-interference regime), we also compare the sum-rates achievable by our technique to the ones achievable by IA. The results indicate that the proposed power control technique performs better than IA in the low and intermediate interference regimes. Interestingly, the performance of the power control technique improves further relative to IA with an increase in the number of orthogonal spatial or frequency channels. / Master of Science

Total institutions' (which include prisons) unique context prescribes "confinement" of inmates. Coping mechanisms applied "outside" (especially the ability to create distance from stressful events) is thus ineffective. Another common feature is lack of privacy, which may result in "forced intimacy" - individuals being forced into a situation of physical and psychological "invasion" (beyond the norm) of their person/personal space. Victims lose control over intimate decisions, including who may and may not be intimate with them. Within prisons, gangs "force intimacy" by sexually victimizing inmates, taking advantage of the context to heighten their power, and to control inmates "under" them. Four (subjects) victims' experiences and means of adaptation/ empowerment were investigated phenomenologically. Results indicated that inadequately empowered victims suffer prolonged and repeated victimization - a continued "posttraumatic stress disorder" - which is more traumatizing and draining than one circumscribed traumatic event (due to its intensity, immobilization and resulting drastic change of "personality"). / Psychology / M.A. (Clinical Psychology)

Total institutions' (which include prisons) unique context prescribes "confinement" of inmates. Coping mechanisms applied "outside" (especially the ability to create distance from stressful events) is thus ineffective. Another common feature is lack of privacy, which may result in "forced intimacy" - individuals being forced into a situation of physical and psychological "invasion" (beyond the norm) of their person/personal space. Victims lose control over intimate decisions, including who may and may not be intimate with them. Within prisons, gangs "force intimacy" by sexually victimizing inmates, taking advantage of the context to heighten their power, and to control inmates "under" them. Four (subjects) victims' experiences and means of adaptation/ empowerment were investigated phenomenologically. Results indicated that inadequately empowered victims suffer prolonged and repeated victimization - a continued "posttraumatic stress disorder" - which is more traumatizing and draining than one circumscribed traumatic event (due to its intensity, immobilization and resulting drastic change of "personality"). / Psychology / M.A. (Clinical Psychology)

Dans cette thèse, nous étudions des réseaux sans fil dans lesquels les terminaux mobiles sont autonomes dans le choix de leurs configurations de communication. Cette autonomie de décision peut notamment concerner le choix de la technologie d'accès au réseau, le choix du point d'accès, la modulation du signal, les bandes de fréquences occupées, la puissance du signal émis, etc. Typiquement, ces choix de configuration sont réalisés dans le but de maximiser des métriques de performances propres à chaque terminal. Sous l'hypothèse que les terminaux prennent leurs décisions de manière rationnelle afin de maximiser leurs performances, la théorie des jeux s'applique naturellement pour modéliser les interactions entre les décisions des différents terminaux. Plus précisément, l'objectif principal de cette thèse est d'étudier des stratégies d'équilibre de contrôle de puissance d'émission afin de satisfaire des considérations d'efficacité énergétique. Le cadre des jeux stochastiques est particulièrement adapté à ce problème et nous permet notamment de caractériser la région de performance atteignable pour toutes les stratégies de contrôle de puissance qui mènent à un état d'équilibre. Lorsque le nombre de terminaux en jeu est grand, nous faisons appel à la théorie des jeux à champ moyen pour simplifier l'étude du système. Cette théorie nous permet d'étudier non pas les interactions individuelles entre les terminaux, mais l'interaction de chaque terminal avec un champ moyen qui représente l'état global des autres terminaux. Des stratégies de contrôle de puissance optimales du jeu à champ moyen sont étudiées. Une autre partie de la thèse a été consacrée à des problématiques d'apprentissage de points d'équilibre dans les réseaux distribués. En particulier, après avoir caractérisé les positions d'équilibre d'un jeu de positionnement de points d'accès, nous montrons comment des dynamiques de meilleures réponses et d'apprentissage permettent de converger vers un équilibre. Enfin, pour un jeu de contrôle de puissance, la convergence des dynamiques de meilleures réponses vers des points d'équilibre a été étudiée. Il est notamment proposé un algorithme d'adaptation de puissance convergeant vers un équilibre avec une faible connaissance du réseau. / In this thesis, we study wireless networks in which mobile terminals are free to choose their communication configuration. Theses configuration choices include access wireless technology, access point association, coding-modulation scheme, occupied bandwidth, power allocation, etc. Typically, these configuration choices are made to maximize some performance metrics associated to every terminals. Under the assumption that mobile terminals take their decisions in a rational manner, game theory can be applied to model the interactions between the terminals. Precisely, the main objective of this thesis is to study energy-efficient power control policies from which no terminal has an interest to deviate. The framework of stochastic games is particularly suited to this problem and allows to characterize the achievable utility region for equilibrium power control strategies. When the number of terminals in the network is large, we invoke mean field game theory to simplify the study of the system. Indeed, in a mean field game, the interactions between a player and all the other players are not considered individually. Instead, one only studies the interactions between each player and a mean field, which is the distribution of the states of all the other players. Optimal power control strategies from the mean field formulation are studied. Another part of this thesis has been focused on learning equilibria in distributed games. In particular, we show how best response dynamics and learning algorithms can converge to an equilibrium in a base station location game. For another scenario, namely a power control problem, we study the convergence of the best response dynamics. In this case, we propose a power control behavioral rule that converges to an equilibrium with very little information about the network.

The research offers an elaboration of genealogy as an approach to knowledge from Friedrich Nietzsche's original work on method (1887) processed by Michel Foucault (1971). It provides an interdisciplinary version that integrates theoretical and analytical contributions from the philosophy of knowledge, from exact and social sciences to artistic research. This work also takes into account those who have most explicitly enhanced the potentialities of geneaalogy such as Gilles Deleuze (1962) and, more recently, Carlo Sini (2007) and Giorgio Agamben (2010), but also embraces the reflections of researchers, from the past or present, whom I dare associate with the genealogy approach such as Max Weber (1922), Bruno Latour (2013), Fritjof Capra (2014), Diego Velázquez (1656) and the newer holistic and immersive approaches in digital art (Roy Ascott 2007). The result will be a "grid of intelligibility", an instrument of knowledge of the emerging phenomena that can be used for mappings and interdisciplinary networks and that, as in the original version (by Nietzsche and Foucault), intends to overcome the epistemological limits and disciplinary segmentation inherited by modernity. Such limits and segmentation are transferred in a special way in modern universities. For this reason, universities are not only the privileged object of this genealogical analysis, but also the field where its application is posed not only as a research practice or pedagogical tool, but also as a self-reflexive method on an organizational level. The genealogy of universities, therefore, is not just a speculative analysis, but a strategic and experimental choice, rather unusual, despite the vast literature available from a well-known text of Immanuel Kant (1798). Universities embody an intersection node among cultural, economic, political and technological trends, since their inception in the Middle Ages. They are the institutional entities that delegate big apparatus paradigm shifts that influence the approaches to knowledge of the people who live in a given social context in vehicular, transversal and vertical ways. Universities have always been the legitimised place to disclose knowledge approaches socially recognised. Their historical centrality and legitimacy has been renewed for more than five hundred years . In the contemporary world, their role is being compromised by global processes , neoliberalism and digitization in particular. This research will investigate the latter genealogically by focusing on the manifestations of resistance namely audit university and its development until the automation phase. In addition to contemporary authors such as Michael Power (1994), Laura Maran (2009), and Giovanni Leghissa (2012) - the theoretical framework will refer to Ivan Illich (1971), Edgar Morin (1999), but also Marshall McLuhan (1964) and those researchers that are currently involved in the analysis of the impact of media on the education system (Ben Fry, 2007, I. and M. Toru S. Vijay Kumar, 2008). It is an attempt to genealogically answer the question -What will the current audit universities become? This research has gone up to a drift that is more than a narrative exercise. It has pushed up to a prophecy that is only partly a fiction experiment namely automation in academia, which is the main research hypothesis. In an apocalyptic scenario automated universities represent an audit university involution, a result of hybridization among economic, technological, cultural and organizational phenomena. It is only by addressing this hybridization process that we can develop an alternative narrative. By following Antonio Caronia's (2008) approach, this research will use science-fiction language as a distortion of reality that allows creating, in Foucault's words, a doomsday scenario (a case of 'fiction historique') or an alternative perspective avoiding ideological risks. Along with contemporaries Derrick de Kerckhove (1998), Roy Ascott (2007), Marcello Giacomantonio (2007), Valeria Pinto (2012), Federico Butera (2007), I will summarize the works of Franz Kafka, Philip K. Dick and James Ballard, but also recent contributions from artistic and pedagogical research. Keywords: Genealogy, Grid of Intelligibility, Knowledge, Power, Control, Subjectivation, EHEA, Audit, Automation.

In this thesis, focusing on the quality of service (QoS) improvement using per-packet power control algorithm in Ad Hoc Cognitive Packet Networks (AHCPN). A power control mechanism creates as a network-assisted function of ad hoc cognitive packet-based routing and aims at reducing both energy consumption in nodes and QoS requirements. The suggested models facilitate transmission power adjustments while also taking into account the effects on network performance. The thesis concentrate on three main contributions. Firstly, a power control algorithm, namely the adaptive Distributed Power management algorithm (DISPOW) was adopted. Performance of DISPOW was compared to existing mechanisms and the results showed 27, 13, 9, and 40 percent improvements in terms of Delay, Throughput, Packet Loss, and Energy Consumption respectively. Secondly, the DISPOW algorithm was enhanced, namely a Link Expiration Time Aware Distributed Power management algorithm (LETPOW). This approach periodically checks connectivity, transmission power, interference level, routing overhead and Node Mobility in AHCPN. The results show that LETPOW algorithm improves the performance of system. Results show further improvement from DISPOW by 30,25,30,42 percent in terms of delay, packet loss ratio , path lengths and energy consumption respectively. Finally,Hybrid Power Control Algorithm (HLPCA) has presented is a combination of Link Expiration Time Aware Distributed Power management algorithm (LETPOW) and Load Power Control Algorithm (LOADPOW); deal with cross-layer power control applied for transmitting information across the various intermediate layers. LOADPOW emphasis on the concept of transmission Power, Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI), and the suitable distance between the receiver and the sender. The proposed algorithm outperforms DISPOW and LETPOW by 31,15,35,34,44 percent in terms of Delay, Throughput, Packet Loss,path length and Energy Consumption respectively. From this work, it can be concluded that optimized power control algorithm applied to Ad-hoc cognitive packet network results in significant improvement in terms of energy consumption and QoS.