Multi-hop wireless networks or ad-hoc networks face several limiting characteristics that make it difficult to support a multitude of applications. It is in this context that we find smart antennas to find significant applications in these networks, owing to their ability to alleviate most of these limitations. The focus of my research is thus to investigate the use of smart antennas in ad-hoc networks and hence efficiently design network protocols that best leverage their capabilities in communication. There are two parts to the proposed objective of designing efficient network protocols that pertain to the nature of the smart antenna network considered, namely, homogeneous and heterogeneous smart antenna networks. Unlike heterogeneous smart antenna networks, where different devices in the network employ different antenna technologies, homogeneous smart antenna networks consist of devices employing the same antenna technology. Further, in homogeneous smart antenna networks, different antenna technologies operating in different strategies tend to perform the best in different network architectures, conditions and application requirements. This motivates the need for developing a {em unified} framework for designing efficient communication (medium access control and routing) protocols for homogeneous smart antenna networks in general. With the objective of designing such a unified framework, we start by designing efficient MAC and routing protocols for the most sophisticated of the smart antenna technologies, namely multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) links. The capabilities of MIMO links form a super-set of those possible with other antenna technologies. Hence, the insights gained from the design of communication protocols for MIMO links are then used to develop unified MAC and routing frameworks for smart antennas in general. For heterogeneous smart antenna networks, we develop theoretical performance bounds by studying the impact of increasing degree of heterogeneity on network throughput performance. Given that the antenna technologies are already unified in the network, unified solutions are not required. However, we do develop efficient MAC and routing protocols to best leverage the available heterogeneous capabilities present in the network. We also design efficient cooperation strategies that will further help the communication protocols in exploiting the available heterogeneous capabilities in the network to the best possible extent.

Driven by the ever growing consumer wireless electronics market and the need for higher speed communications, the 60-GHz technology gifted with an unlicensed 9 GHz frequency band in the millimeter-wave spectrum has emerged as the next-generation Wi-Fi for short-range wireless communications. High-performance, cost-effective, and small form-factor 60-GHz antenna systems for portable devices are key enablers of this technology. This work presents various antenna architectures built on low-cost organic packages. Planar end-fire switched beam antenna modules that can easily conform to various surfaces inside a wireless device platform are developed. The planar antenna package is realized on thin flexible LCP dielectrics. One design is based on a planar Yagi-Uda antenna element and the second on a tapered slot antenna element. A low-loss microstrip-to-slot via transition is designed to provide wide impedance matching for end-fire antenna paradigms. The novel transition utilizes the slow-wave concept to provide unbalanced to balanced mode conversion as well as impedance matching. It is demonstrated that the planar antenna packages may be even integrated with active circuits that are cavity recessed inside the thin dielectric. A compact switched-beam antenna module is demonstrated. The first-ever integrated mm-wave active antenna module on organic package capable of generating both broadside and end-fire radiation is also developed in this work. Both broadside and end-fire radiators are co-designed and integrated into a single multilayer package to achieve optimal directivity, efficiency and frequency bandwidth and yet maintain excellent isolation between the two radiators. Post-wall cavities, image theory and dielectric slab modes concepts are invoked to optimize these functions. Active circuitry are integrated into the same package to add control functions such as beam switching, and also amplify the packaged-antenna gain when operated either as a transmitter or a receiver. A significant challenge in the design of antenna systems for wireless platforms is the assessment of embedded antenna performance, that is, the proximity effects of the platform chassis on the embedded antenna. Various antennas are mounted at different locations inside a laptop computer chassis: modeling and experimental studies are carried out to characterize this problem that is apparent to an antenna behind a radome. Air traffic control radars usually require cavity filters that can handle high power and low in-band insertion loss while providing enough out-band rejection to prevent interference with neighboring channels. Such radars that operate in the S-band consist of filter banks frequency micro electromechanical systems (RF-MEMS) switches. Evanescent-mode mode cavity resonators are loaded with RF-MEMS tuning capacitance networks to control the resonant frequency of a second-order bandpass filter. The second part is the design of a novel cavity filter architecture for enhanced selectivity near the passband. It is a second-order folded cavity resonator bandpass filter with magnetic source-load cross coupling. This filter can have at least two finite transmission zeros near the passband.

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M. Tech. Electrical Engineering. / Discusses MIMO systems have been hailed for the benefits of enhancing the reliability of the wireless communication link and increasing of the channel capacity, however the complexity of MIMO encoding and decoding algorithms increases considerably with the number of antennas. This research aims to suggest an optimisation approach to a reduced complexity implementation of the Alamouti 4×2 STBC. This is achieved by considering the FPGA parallelisation of the conditionally optimised ML decoding algorithm. The above problem can be divided into two subproblems. 1. The ML decoding of the Double Alamouti 4×2 STBC has a high computational cost when an exhaustive search is performed on the signal constellation for M-ary QAM. 2. Though the conditionally optimised ML decoding leads to less computational complexity compared to the full generic ML detection algorithm, the practical implementation remains unattractive for wireless systems.

M. Tech. Electrical Engineering. / Applies conditional optimisation to ML decoding of perfect STBCs, it is hypothesised that the obtained algorithms have reduced complexity and exhibit high DLP and TLP that can be exploited to map them on low-power multi-core SIMD processors, and possibly to reduce their runtimes and allow their real-time execution in a 4G wireless system.

Backscatter radio - the broad class of systems that communicate using scattered electromagnetic waves - is the driving technology behind many compelling applications such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and passive sensors. These systems can be used in many ways including article tracking, position location, passive temperature sensors, passive data storage, and in many other systems which require information exchange between an interrogator and a small, low-cost transponder with little-to-no transponder power consumption. Although backscatter radio is maturing, such systems have limited communication range and reliability caused, in part, by multipath fading. The research presented in this dissertation investigates how multipath fading can be reduced using multiple antennas at the interrogator transmitter, interrogator receiver, and on the transponder, or RF tag. First, two link budgets for backscatter radio are presented and fading effects demonstrated through a realistic, 915 MHz, RFID-portal example. Each term in the link budget is explained and used to illuminate the propagation and high-frequency effects that influence RF tag operation. Second, analytic envelope distributions for the M x L x N, dyadic backscatter channel - the general channel in which a backscatter system with M transmitter, L RF tag, and N receiver antennas operates - are derived. The distributions show that multipath fading can be reduced using multiple-antenna RF tags and by using separate transmitter and receiver antenna arrays at the interrogator. These results are verified by fading measurements of the M x L x N, dyadic backscatter channel at 5.8 GHz - the center of the 5725-5850 MHz unlicensed industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency band that offers reduced antenna size, increased antenna gain, and, in some cases, reduced object attachment losses compared to the commonly used 902-928 MHz ISM band. Measurements were taken with a custom backscatter testbed and details of its design are provided. In the end, this dissertation presents both theory and measurements that demonstrate multipath fading reductions for backscatter-radio systems that use multiple antennas.

CNPq / Nesta tese abordamos técnicas de diversidade espacial e cooperativa em dois tipos de sistemas de comunicação sem fio: sistemas digitais e sistemas analógicos. No âmbito dos sistemas digitais, consideramos a transmissão entre nós de uma rede de sensores sem fio. Uma vez que estas redes são caracterizadas por um grande número de nós, cuja quantidade de energia disponível é restrita, focamos em esquemas eficientes sob o ponto de vista do consumo de energia. Para tanto, analisamos protocolos cooperativos e técnicas com múltiplas antenas procurando delinear a real eficiência dessas técnicas em cenários práticos de redes de sensores sem fio, onde levamos em consideração questões como condição de linha de visada entre os nós, o consumo dos circuitos de transmissão e recepção, a presença ou não do canal de retorno, restrições de perda de pacotes e atraso, além de possíveis não linearidades no consumo das baterias dos dispositivos. Nossos resultados mostram que algumas das conclusões da literatura podem se inverter quando parâmetros mais adequados são levados em conta. Além disso, detalhamos as regiões mais eficientes de operação para cada método de transmissão nas referidas redes. Por outro lado, no âmbito dos sistemas analógicos, consideramos sistemas de codificação analógica conjunta fonte-canal que realizam uma compressão da largura de banda. Tais sistemas têm apelo em cenários nos quais a complexidade e atraso podem ser fatores limitantes. Nesse caso, procuramos primeiramente aplicar o que já existe na literatura no contexto de canais sem fio, para então focar em esquemas cooperativos e de múltiplas antenas que reduzam a distorção no receptor, buscando aproximar o desempenho desses sistemas ao seu limite teórico. Nossos resultados mostram uma melhoria de desempenho quando a diversidade espacial e cooperativa são utilizadas. Além disso, a solução analógica proposta se aproxima do limitante superior de desempenho de um sistema digital prático, com a vantagem de oferecer menor complexidade e atraso, além de maior flexibilidade no projeto do sistema. / In this thesis we discuss spatial diversity and cooperative diversity techniques for two types of wireless communication systems: digital systems and analog systems. In the context of digital systems, we consider the transmission between nodes of a wireless sensor network. Since these networks are characterized by a large number of nodes, with limited amount of energy, we focus on efficient schemes from the point of view of the energy consumption. For this purpose, we analyze cooperative protocols and multiple antenna techniques trying to delineate the real effectiveness of these techniques in practical wireless sensor networks scenarios, where we consider issues such as line of sight, the energy consumption of the transmit and receive circuits, the availability or not of a feedback channel, packet loss and delay constraints, and possible nonlinearities in the battery consumption. Our results show that some of the conclusions of the literature can change if some of these parameters are taken into account. Furthermore, we detail the most efficient operation regions for each transmission method in such networks. On the other hand, in the context of analog systems, we consider analog joint source-channel coding systems performing bandwidth compression. Such systems are suitable for scenarios in which the complexity and delay can be limiting factors. In this case, we first apply some of the already existing concepts of the literature to the context of wireless channels, and then focus on cooperative schemes and multiple antenna techniques to reduce the distortion at the receiver, while trying to approximate the performance of these systems to their theoretical limit. Our results show a performance improvement when spatial and cooperative diversity are used. Moreover, the proposed analog solution approaches the upper bound performance of a practical digital system, with the advantage of lower complexity and delay, and more flexibility in the system design.

CNPq / Nesta tese abordamos técnicas de diversidade espacial e cooperativa em dois tipos de sistemas de comunicação sem fio: sistemas digitais e sistemas analógicos. No âmbito dos sistemas digitais, consideramos a transmissão entre nós de uma rede de sensores sem fio. Uma vez que estas redes são caracterizadas por um grande número de nós, cuja quantidade de energia disponível é restrita, focamos em esquemas eficientes sob o ponto de vista do consumo de energia. Para tanto, analisamos protocolos cooperativos e técnicas com múltiplas antenas procurando delinear a real eficiência dessas técnicas em cenários práticos de redes de sensores sem fio, onde levamos em consideração questões como condição de linha de visada entre os nós, o consumo dos circuitos de transmissão e recepção, a presença ou não do canal de retorno, restrições de perda de pacotes e atraso, além de possíveis não linearidades no consumo das baterias dos dispositivos. Nossos resultados mostram que algumas das conclusões da literatura podem se inverter quando parâmetros mais adequados são levados em conta. Além disso, detalhamos as regiões mais eficientes de operação para cada método de transmissão nas referidas redes. Por outro lado, no âmbito dos sistemas analógicos, consideramos sistemas de codificação analógica conjunta fonte-canal que realizam uma compressão da largura de banda. Tais sistemas têm apelo em cenários nos quais a complexidade e atraso podem ser fatores limitantes. Nesse caso, procuramos primeiramente aplicar o que já existe na literatura no contexto de canais sem fio, para então focar em esquemas cooperativos e de múltiplas antenas que reduzam a distorção no receptor, buscando aproximar o desempenho desses sistemas ao seu limite teórico. Nossos resultados mostram uma melhoria de desempenho quando a diversidade espacial e cooperativa são utilizadas. Além disso, a solução analógica proposta se aproxima do limitante superior de desempenho de um sistema digital prático, com a vantagem de oferecer menor complexidade e atraso, além de maior flexibilidade no projeto do sistema. / In this thesis we discuss spatial diversity and cooperative diversity techniques for two types of wireless communication systems: digital systems and analog systems. In the context of digital systems, we consider the transmission between nodes of a wireless sensor network. Since these networks are characterized by a large number of nodes, with limited amount of energy, we focus on efficient schemes from the point of view of the energy consumption. For this purpose, we analyze cooperative protocols and multiple antenna techniques trying to delineate the real effectiveness of these techniques in practical wireless sensor networks scenarios, where we consider issues such as line of sight, the energy consumption of the transmit and receive circuits, the availability or not of a feedback channel, packet loss and delay constraints, and possible nonlinearities in the battery consumption. Our results show that some of the conclusions of the literature can change if some of these parameters are taken into account. Furthermore, we detail the most efficient operation regions for each transmission method in such networks. On the other hand, in the context of analog systems, we consider analog joint source-channel coding systems performing bandwidth compression. Such systems are suitable for scenarios in which the complexity and delay can be limiting factors. In this case, we first apply some of the already existing concepts of the literature to the context of wireless channels, and then focus on cooperative schemes and multiple antenna techniques to reduce the distortion at the receiver, while trying to approximate the performance of these systems to their theoretical limit. Our results show a performance improvement when spatial and cooperative diversity are used. Moreover, the proposed analog solution approaches the upper bound performance of a practical digital system, with the advantage of lower complexity and delay, and more flexibility in the system design.

Le cadre général de cette thèse porte sur les communications véhicule à véhicule (V2V). L'objectif principal de ce type de communication est d'améliorer la sécurité routière et d'optimiser la fluidité du trafic. Les performances de systèmes de communication embarqués dépendent principalement de la configuration des antennes, du type de récepteurs utilisés (modem) et du canal de propagation. Le sujet de la thèse se concentre précisément sur l'élaboration d'un outil de simulation robuste et fiable pour optimiser les choix technologiques d'antennes et leurs implantations à bord. Il permettra de limiter ainsi le recours aux prototypes et aux essais de roulage. Dans un premier temps, nous avons proposé une méthode de type géométrique-stochastique pour modéliser des canaux de propagation d'un système de communication V2V. Cette méthode permet de définir des scénarios dynamiques et sa flexibilité nous offre l'opportunité de paramétrer les caractéristiques d'un canal de propagation. Nous montrons pour l'essentiel de quelle manière l'agencement et le nombre de diffuseurs de forme simple peuvent contribuer à influencer les statistiques de l'étalement des retards, la distribution des angles d'arrivée et les spectres Doppler. Dans la deuxième partie de ces travaux, nous nous focalisons sur la problématique d'intégration d'antenne. Il a été constaté qu'il est particulièrement utile de simplifier la maquette numérique du véhicule complet lors d'une simulation électromagnétique de l'antenne intégrée à bord de ce véhicule. De plus, dans cette section, nous avons étudié la limite de la validité de substitution d'une antenne intégrée à bord par son seul diagramme de rayonnement dans les modèles de canaux de propagation. A partir de cette étude, nous en avons déduit, que les interactions électromagnétiques avec les éléments se situant dans le champ-proche n'étaient plus valides. Ainsi, une stratégie de correction a été trouvée en considérant l'élément en champ proche dans la simulation initiale de l'antenne intégrée sur le véhicule. L'évaluation des performances d'antennes, en termes de taux d'erreurs paquet, après l'implémentation de la couche physique du standard 802. 11 p, est au cœur de la troisième partie de cette thèse. Des résultats de simulation, pour chaque configuration d'antenne, ont été donnés pour plusieurs combinaisons de paramètres de couche PHY tels que le débit et la longueur de paquet. La dernière partie de ce manuscrit traite de la présentation d'une campagne de mesure qui a été réalisée principalement dans un environnement de type rural. Les essais de roulage avaient pour but de démontrer la capacité des méthodes de simulation à faire un choix approprié d'installation d'antenne. Nous avons constaté que les tendances attendues des performances de communication en termes de PER sont globalement prévisibles à partir de notre modèle bien que nous ayons obtenu des résultats surprenants dans certains cas. Ce qui nécessitera une enquête plus approfondie. / The general framework of this Ph.D. thesis deals with Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communications. This communication is principally dedicated to reinforce security through exchange of information between vehicles in case of unexpected events. The development of V2V solutions requires the understanding and merging of a number of techniques from several communication technology areas. Indeed, the performance of these systems are related to three main blocks: the implementation of the modems, the antenna configuration and the fast varying electromagnetic environment surrounding the transmitter and the receiver. The purpose of this PhD thesis is precisely to elaborate a design strategy to investigate all the different blocks constituting the communication chain. The ultimate goal is to optimize antenna selection and location on board the vehicle. In the first place, we proposed a geometry-based stochastic channel modelling approach to develop virtual dynamic scenarios. It was shown that the most common propagation environments such as rural, highway or urban-like propagation channels are reached through adjustment or numbers and location of simple metallic plates. Using this method, we are able to emulate the characteristics, such as the delay spread, angles of arrival distribution and the Doppler spectrum, of these typical driving scenarios. Moreover, we dealt with antenna integration problems in the second part of this work. A study on the simplification of numerical models of vehicles was carried out. Furthermore in this section, we investigated the limit of validity of representing the integrated antenna on board vehicle solely by its radiation pattern. We deduced from this study that the interactions with the elements present in the near-field is no longer valid. Thus, a strategy to alleviate the degree of error was found upon consideration of the near-field scatter in the a-priori simulation of the antenna integrated on the vehicle. In the third part of this thesis, we evaluated the performance of different antenna configurations in terms of packet error rate after the embodiment of the PHY layer of the LEEE 802.11p standard. Simulation results, for each antenna configurations, was given for several combinations of PHY layer parameters such as data rate and packet length. The last part of this manuscript is dedicated to the presentation of a measurement campaign that was carried out in a rural driving environment. Results obtained from these functional tests were confronted with simulation results to demonstrate the strength of the latter. We found that the expected trends in communication performance in terms of PER are globally predictable from our model though we obtained surprising results in some cases, needing further investigation.

Orientador: Hugo Enrique Hernandez Figueroa / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-22T03:58:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Moraes_MuriloOliveirade_M.pdf: 26552033 bytes, checksum: 9a9022f8aa6d5e4e72047f0798ad57da (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Resumo: A complexidade dos sistemas eletrônicos atuais cria a demanda por mais componentes num mesmo sistema, ao mesmo tempo em que exige sistemas mais compactos. Esta dissertação apresenta o desenvolvimento, fabricação e testes de uma antena GSM quadribanda, integrada a um módulo rastreador automotivo produzido no mercado nacional. A antena opera dentro das faixas de freqüências correspondentes _as bandas GSM 850/900/1800/1900, com desempenho adequado para uso no sistema de comunicação GSM, estando em conformidade com testes de TRP, sendo o produto final homologado pela ANATEL e agências reguladoras de outros países. A antena é um monopolo com dobras especiais para ajuste de ressonância. O casamento da antena com o sistema _e realizado via um toco em curto dobrado, não trivial, otimizado para um casamento banda-larga ao longo do espectro GSM ocupado / Abstract: The complexity of today's electronic systems creates demand for more quantity and less cost of components in a system, at the same time that the system must be made smaller. This dissertation presents the design and tests of a quadband GSM antenna, embedded into an existing automotive tracking module produced in Brazil. The antenna operates within the GSM 850/900/1800/1900 bands, with performance suitable for its use in the GSM system, being in conformance with TRP tests. The final product is approved by Brazil's regulatory agency ANATEL and by other countries' agencies. The antenna is a monopole with special bandings for resonance adjustment. The antenna matching is achieved with a shorted bent stub, non-trivial, optimized for a broadband matching over the occupied GSM spectrum / Mestrado / Telecomunicações e Telemática / Mestre em Engenharia Elétrica