Wireless networks in industrial process control enable new system architectures and designs. However, wireless control systems can be severely affected by the imperfections of the communication links. This thesis proposes new methods to handle such imperfections by adding additional components in the control loop, or by adapting sampling intervals and control actions. First, the predictive outage compensator is proposed. It is a filter which is implemented at the receiver side of networked control systems. There it generates predicted samples when data are lost, based on past data. The implementation complexity of the predictive outage compensator is analyzed. Simulation and experimental results show that it can considerably improve the closed-loop control performance under communication losses. The thesis continues with presenting an algorithm for controlling multiple processes on a shared communication network, using adaptive sampling intervals. The methodology is based on model predictive control, where the controller jointly decides the optimal control signal to be applied as well as the optimal time to wait before taking the next sample. The approach guarantees conflict-free network transmissions for all controlled processes. Simulation results show that the presented control law reduces the required amount of communication, while maintaining control performance. The third contribution of the thesis is an event-triggered model predictive controller for use over a wireless link. The controller uses open-loop optimal control, re-computed and communicated only when the system behavior deviates enough from a prediction. Simulations underline the methods ability to significantly reduce computation and communication effort, while guaranteeing a desired level of system performance. The thesis is concluded by an experimental validation of wireless control for a physical lab process. A hybrid model predictive controller is used, connected to the physical system through a wireless medium. The results reflect the advantages and challenges in wireless control. / <p>QC 20140217</p>

Research Project (M.B.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2005. / Research Project (Faculty of Business Administration) / Simon Fraser University. MBA-MOT Program. Senior supervisor : Dr. Jill Shepherd.

Abstract The possibilities of teleradiology to modify the radiological service process in a regional, international and mobile setting were investigated by building new types of technical connections and then by evaluating their feasibility. First a teleradiology link based on low-end technology was built for primary care and hospital settings. On evaluation, the total diagnostic agreement between the transmitted images and the original films was 98%. Then, a work practice-oriented approach was used to gain an understanding of the relationship between the emerging teleradiology work practice and the newly implemented technology. Ethnographically informed fieldwork and cooperative workshops were utilized. According to findings, articulation work that supports the key tasks is mostly conducted at the receiving site, and radiologists have to rely on much less information in image interpretation. The decisions made at the sending site influence the outcome. To study the idea of consultations between different countries, a connection utilizing the Internet was built between university hospitals in Oulu, Reykjavik and Tromsø. After 131 images, a suitable image compression ratio was selected. Image quality and transfer time of the 80 clinical case readings were found to be adequate for teleradiology. A wireless image consultation system for radiological sub-specialist consultations based on a portable computer and a mobile phone with secure access to the hospital network was set up and tested. The transmitted images of 68 patients were acceptable for final diagnosis in 72% of the cases. The wireless link saved the senior radiologist a hospital visit in 24% of the cases. A smartphone was then used to communicate computed tomography scans in a feasibility study of 21 patient cases of brain attacks. All transmitted image series were suitable for giving a preliminary consultation to the clinic, and in one case even a final report could be made. In a real life clinical setting of the study with neuroradiological and neurosurgical emergencies, two different smartphone platforms with electronic patient record integration were built in European research projects and evaluated with sets of 115 and 150 patient cases. They were good for final diagnosis in 38% and 40% of the cases, respectively. The concept was found to be ready for clinical use. Finally a survey was made showing the status and trends of the usage of eHealth applications in Finland. The results from all the public health care providers and a representative sample of private providers showed that in 2005, teleradiology services were used by 18/21 hospital districts and the usage of all eHealth applications has progressed throughout the entire health care delivery system. Teleradiology services have become an integrated part of eHealth.

There is a strong uptake of femtocell deployment as small cell application platforms in the upcoming LTE networks. In such two-tier networks of LTE-femtocell base stations, a large portion of the assigned spectrum is used sporadically leading to underutilisation of valuable frequency resources. Novel spectrum access techniques are necessary to solve these current spectrum inefficiency problems. Therefore, spectrum management solutions should have the features to improve spectrum access in both temporal and spatial manner. Cognitive Radio (CR) with the Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) is considered to be the key technology in this research in order to increase the spectrum efficiency. This is an effective solution to allow a group of Secondary Users (SUs) to share the radio spectrum initially allocated to the Primary User (PUs) at no interference. The core aim of this thesis is to develop new cognitive LTE-femtocell systems that offer a 4G vision, to facilitate the radio network management in order to increase the network capacity and further improve spectrum access probabilities. In this thesis, a new spectrum management model for cognitive radio networks is considered to enable a seamless integration of multi-access technology with existing networks. This involves the design of efficient resource allocation algorithms that are able to respond to the rapid changes in the dynamic wireless environment and primary users activities. Throughout this thesis a variety of network upgraded functions are developed using application simulation scenarios. Therefore, the proposed algorithms, mechanisms, methods, and system models are not restricted in the considered networks, but rather have a wider applicability to be used in other technologies. This thesis mainly investigates three aspects of research issues relating to the efficient management of cognitive networks: First, novel spectrum resource management modules are proposed to maximise the spectrum access by rapidly detecting the available transmission opportunities. Secondly, a developed pilot power controlling algorithm is introduced to minimise the power consumption by considering mobile position and application requirements. Also, there is investigation on the impact of deploying different numbers of femtocell base stations in LTE domain to identify the optimum cell size for future networks. Finally, a novel call admission control mechanism for mobility management is proposed to support seamless handover between LTE and femtocell domains. This is performed by assigning high speed mobile users to the LTE system to avoid unnecessary handovers. The proposed solutions were examined by simulation and numerical analysis to show the strength of cognitive femtocell deployment for the required applications. The results show that the new system design based on cognitive radio configuration enable an efficient resource management in terms of spectrum allocation, adaptive pilot power control, and mobile handover. The proposed framework and algorithms offer a novel spectrum management for self organised LTE-femtocell architecture. Eventually, this research shows that certain architectures fulfilling spectrum management requirements are implementable in practice and display good performance in dynamic wireless environments which recommends the consideration of CR systems in LTE and femtocell networks.

This diploma thesis deals with the study and measurement of coexistence scenarios that can occur between the LTE and LoRa systems in the unlicensed ISM band 2.4 GHz. A common radio frequency band in which LTE and LoRa systems can coexist is defined. An appropriate laboratory measurement is proposed and realized, allowing automatized measurement of the defined coexistence scenarios. For this purpose, a personal computer, professional measurement equipment and software MATLAB are utilized. Functionality of the proposed concept is verified by extensive measurements. The obtained results are graphically shown and discussed in detail.

In this paper, we introduce a framework for the adaptive control of universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) networks in order to improve bandwidth utilization of the radio channels. The key contribution of the paper constitutes the introduction of a performance management information base for dynamically adjusting the packet scheduler and admission controller. Thus, the adaptive control framework closes the loop between network operation and network control. Furthermore, the adaptive control framework can effectively deal with the different time scales of packet scheduling and admission control. Moreover, we present a traffic model for non-real-time UMTS traffic based on measured trace data. The analysis and scaling process of the measured trace data with respect to different UMTS bandwidth classes constitutes the basic concept of this traffic characterization. Using this traffic model and simulation on the IP level, the gain of employing the adaptive control framework is illustrated by performance curves for various quality of service measures.

This dissertation focuses on three major advances on multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The first studies and compares decoding algorithms for multi-layered space time coded (MLSTC) systems. These are single user systems that combine spatial multiplexing and transmit diversity. Each layer consists of a space time code. The detection algorithms are based on multi-user detection theory. We consider joint, interference nulling and cancellation, and spatial sequence estimation algorithms. As part of joint detection algorithms, the sphere decoder is studied and its complexity is evaluated over MIMO channels. The second part contributes to the field of space frequency time (SFT) coding for MIMO-OFDM systems. It proposes a full spatial and frequency diversity codes at much lower number of trellis states. The third part proposes and compares uplink scheduling algorithms for multiuser systems with spatial multiplexing. Several scheduling criteria are examined and compared. The capacity and error rate study of MLSTBC reveals the performance of the detection algorithms and their advantage over other open loop MIMO schemes. The results show that the nulling and cancellation operations limit the diversity of the system to the first detected layer in serial algorithms. For parallel algorithms, the diversity of the system is dominated by the performance after parallel nulling. Theoretically, parallel cancellation should provide full receive diversity per layer but error propagations as a result of cancellation prevent the system from reaching this goal. However, parallel cancellation provides some gains but it doesn't increase the diversity. On the other hand, joint detection provides full receive diversity per layer. It could be practically implemented with sphere decoding which has a cubic complexity at high SNR. The results of the SFT coding show the superiority of the IQ-SFT codes over other codes at the same number of sates. The IQ-SFT codes achieve full spatial and frequency diversity at much lower number of trellis states compared to conventional codes. For V-BLAST scheduling, we propose V-BLAST capacity maximizing scheduler and we show that scheduling based on optimal MIMO capacity doesn't work well for V-BLAST. The results also show that maximum minimum singularvalue (MaxMinSV) scheduling performs very close to the V-BLAST capacity maximizing scheduler since it takes into account both the channel power and the orthogonality of the channel. / Ph. D.

Opportunistic selection is a practically appealing technique that is often used in multi-node wireless systems such as scheduling and rate adaptation in cellular systems and opportunistic wireless local area networks, wireless sensor networks, cooperative communications, and vehicular networks. In it, each node maintains a local preference number called metric that is function of its channel gains, and the best node with the highest metric is selected. Identifying the best node is challenging as the information about a node's metric is available only locally at each node. In our work, we focus on the popular, simple, and low feedback timer scheme for selection. In it, each node sets a timer as a function of its metric and transmits a packet when the timer expires. The metric-to-timer mapping maps larger metric values to smaller timer values, which ensures that the best node's timer expires first. However, it can fail to select the best node if another node transmits a packet within D s of the transmission by the best node. In this thesis, we make three contributions to the design and understanding of the timer-based selection scheme. Firstly, we introduce feedback overhead-aware contention resolution in the timer-based selection scheme. The outcome is a novel selection scheme that is faster than the splitting scheme and more reliable than the timer-based selection scheme. We analyze and minimize the average time required by the scheme to select the best node. Secondly, we characterize the optimal metric-to-timer mapping when the number of nodes in the system is not known, as is the case in several practical deployments. When the prior distribution of the nodes is known, we propose an optimal mapping that maximizes the success probability averaged over the distribution on the number of nodes. When even the prior distribution is not known, we propose a robust mapping that maximizes the worst case average success probability over all possible probability distributions on the number of nodes. In both cases, we show that the timers can expire only at 0, D, 2D, ... in the optimal timer mapping. For the known prior case, we develop recursive techniques to effectively compute the optimal timer mapping for binomial and Poisson priors. Lastly, we consider a discrete rate adaptive system and design an optimal timer scheme to maximize the end-to-end performance measure of system throughput. We derive several novel, insightful results about the optimal mapping that culminate in an iterative algorithm to compute it. We show that the design of the selection scheme is intimately related to the rate adaptation rule and the selection policy used. In all cases, extensive benchmarking with several ad hoc schemes proposed in the literature shows the significant gains that the proposed designs can deliver.

This dissertation considers the design, evaluation and optimization of algorithms/ techniques/ system parameters for distributed wireless networks specifically ad-hoc and cognitive wireless networks. In the first part of the dissertation, we consider ad-hoc networks using opportunistic carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) protocols. The key challenge in optimizing the performance of such systems is to find a good compromise among three interdependent quantities: the density and channel quality of the scheduled transmitters, and the resulting interference seen at receivers. We propose two new channel-aware slotted CSMA protocols and study the tradeoffs they achieve amongst these quantities. In particular, we show that when properly optimized these protocols offer substantial improvements relative to regular CSMA -- particularly when the density of nodes is moderate to high. Moreover, we show that a simple quantile based opportunistic CSMA protocol can achieve robust performance gains without requiring careful parameter optimization. In the second part of the dissertation, we study a cognitive wireless network where licensed (primary) users and unlicensed 'cognitive' (secondary) users coexist on shared spectrum. In this context, many system design parameters affect the joint performance, e.g., outage and capacity, seen by the two user types. We explore the performance dependencies between primary and secondary users from a spatial reuse perspective, in particular, in terms of the outage probability, node density and joint network capacity. From the design perspective the key system parameters determining the joint transmission capacity, and tradeoffs, are the detection radius (detection signal to interference and noise power ratio (SINR) threshold) and decoding SINR threshold. We show how the joint network capacity region can be optimized by varying these parameters. In the third part of the dissertation, we consider a cognitive network in a heterogeneous environment, including indoor and outdoor transmissions. We characterize the joint network capacity region under three different spectrum (white space) detection techniques which have different degrees of radio frequency (RF) - environment awareness. We show that cognitive devices relying only on the classical signal energy detection method perform poorly due to limitations on detecting primary transmitters in environments with indoor shadowing. This can be circumvented through direct use (e.g., database access) of location information on primary transmitters, or better yet, on that of primary receivers. We also show that if cognitive devices have positioning information, then the secondary network's capacity increases monotonically with increased indoor shadowing in the environment. This dissertation extends the recent efforts in using stochastic geometric models to capture large scale performance characteristics of wireless systems. It demonstrates the usefulness of these models towards understanding the impact of physical /medium access (MAC) layer parameters and how they might be optimized. / text

In this thesis, we present a space-time coded system which achieves high through- put and good performance with low processing delay using low-complexity detection and decoding. Initially, Hamming codes are used in a simple interleaved bit-mapped coded modulation structure (BMCM). This is concatenated with Alamouti's or- thogonal space-time block codes. The good performance achieved by this system indicates that higher throughput is possible while maintaining performance. An analytical bound for the performance of this system is presented. We also develop a class of low density parity check codes which allows flexible "throughput versus performance" tradeoffs. We then focus on a Rate 2 quasi-orthogonal space-time block code structure which enables us to achieve an overall throughput of 5.6 bits/symbol period with good performance and relatively simple decoding using iterative parallel interference cancellation. We show that this can be achieved through the use of a bit-mapped coded modulation structure using parallel short low density parity check codes. The absence of interleavers here reduces processing delay significantly. The proposed system is shown to perform well on flat Rayleigh fading channels with a wide range of normalized fade rates, and to be robust to channel estimation errors. A comparison with bit-interleaved coded modulation is also provided (BICM).