Many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications require efficient multimedia communication capabilities. However, the existing communication protocols in the literature mainly aim to achieve energy efficiency and reliability objectives and do not address the multimedia communication challenges in WSN. In this thesis, comprehensive performance evaluation of the existing transport protocols is performed and it has been shown that the existing proposals achieve very poor performance in terms of large set of metrics such as packet delivery rate, end-to-end packet delay, bandwidth and energy efficiency, frame peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), delay-bounded frame PSNR, frame delivery probability, frame end-to-end delay and jitter. Based on these results, an energy-efficient real-time and reliable video sensor communication protocol (VSCP) is introduced for WSN. VSCP estimates video quality perceived by sink using lost segments of video frames and aims to maintain the overall reliability at a given level with minimum energy expenditure. Source data rates are adjusted in a quality adaptable manner according to the network conditions and the overall reliability computed by sink. QSC (quality scalable coding) encoding technique is used to produce a nearly constant quality video at a given maximum data rate during adjustment of source data rates. Performance evaluations show that VSCP protocol significantly outperforms the existing proposals in terms of multimedia communication performance metrics in WSN.

This thesis considers the real-time implementation phases of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication system. The parts which are related to the implementation detail the blocks realized on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) board and define the connections between these blocks and typical radio frequency front-end modules assisting the wireless communication. Two sides of the implemented communication testbed are discussed separately as the transmitter and the receiver parts. In addition to usual building blocks of the transmitter and the receiver blocks, a special type of iterative parallelized decoding architecture has also been implemented on the testbed to demonstrate its potential in low-latency communication systems. In addition to practical aspects, this thesis also presents theoretical findings for an improved version of the built system using analytical tools and simulation results for possible extensions to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM).

The dominant natural electromagnetic (EM) radiation in the extremely low frequency (ELF) range is due to global lightning activity. Radio waves of ELF band traveling along the surface of the ground are able to circle the globe and return to the starting point. Schumann Resonances (SR) are the EM phenomena which occur in the cavity formed by the conducting Earth and the ionosphere, with peak frequencies close to 8, 14, 20, 26 Hz, etc. The spectral characteristics of the SR modes are defined by their resonant mode amplitudes, center frequencies and half-widths. The characteristics of the SR became important in aerospace, marine applications, atmospheric studies, in addition to their relevance to global lightning studies due to their frequency band. The objective of this work is two fold: (i) to investigate the characteristics of SR parameters obtained at Sarkoy in Turkey / (ii) to model the nonlinear characteristics of the Near Earth Space Processes by forecasting the 1st SR mode intensities different time steps in advance using neural network modeling approach. The results show that the SR amplitudes exhibit the characteristics of Tropical African lightning activity and have maxima around 1400 UT. The neural network results show that the proposed model is able to forecast SR amplitudes from 0,5 to 36 hours in advance within reasonable error limits. Furthermore, a fuzzy neural network model with a non&ndash / linear optimization algorithm for the training phase is proposed and tested for the future work.

The Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF) has a controlling effect on the Magnetosphere and Ionosphere. The objective in this work is to investigate the probable effects of IMF on Ionospheric and Geomagnetic response. To fulfill the objective the concept of an event has been created based on the polarity reversals and rate of change of the interplanetary magnetic field components, Bz and By. Superposed Epoch Method (SPE) was employed with the three event definitions, which are based on IMF Bz southward turnings ranging from 6 to 11 nT in order to quantify the effects of IMF By and Bz. For the first event only IMF Bz turnings were taken into account while for the remaining, positive and negative polarity for IMF By were added. Results showed that the increase in the magnitude of IMF Bz turnings increased the drop of F layer critical frequency, f0F2. The drop was almost linear with the increase in magnitude of polarity reversals. Reversals with a positive IMF By has resulted in the continuation of geomagnetic activity more than 4 days, that is to say, the energy, that has penetrated as a consequence of reversal with a positive By polarity, was stored in outer Magnetosphere,whereas, with a negative IMF By the energy was consumed in a small time scale. At the second step of the work, although conclusions about geomagnetic activity could be done, as a consequence of data gaps for f0F2 in addition to having low numbers of events, characterization of f0F2 due to constant IMF By polarity could not be accomplished. Thus, a modeling attempt for the characterization of the response due to polarity reversals of IMF components with the Genetic Programming was carried out. Four models were constructed for different polarity reversal cases and they were used as the components of one general unique model. The model is designed in such a way that given 3 consecutive value of f0F2, IMF By and IMF Bz, the model can forecast one hour ahead value of f0F2. The overall model, GETY-IYON was successful at a normalized error of 7.3%.

In this thesis, the problem of Angle of Arrival estimation of radar signals with Time Difference of Arrival method in an outdoor land multipath environment with limited line of sight is analyzed. A system model is proposed. Effects of system, channel and radar parameters on the Angle of Arrival estimation performance are investigated through Monte Carlo simulations. Improving effect of utilization of diversity on the estimation performance is observed. Performances of the space diversity with noncoherent and selective combining are compared. Finally a realistic scenario is studied and performance of the proposed system is investigated.

The feasibility of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) through the wall surveillance system is studied in this thesis. The transmitter and receiver architectures are discussed and an experimental set-up is constructed to verify the theory of UWB sensing. The constructed system has 80 mW peak, 6 uW average transmit power and 500 kHz PRF and a range resolution better than 1 cm. Using the experimental set-up, two problems are examined. The first problem is the respiration rate detection problem. It has been shown that the respiration rate can be accurately estimated and the signs of vital activity can be determined behind the wall. The second problem studied in this thesis is the through the wall imaging problem. The imaging system is based on the construction of a synthetic aperture by sliding the transmit-receive antenna pair along the cross range direction. The cross range resolution is improved by applying a migration algorithm to the collected data. It has been shown that imaging of a scene 8 meters in range, behind a wall of 20 cm thickness is possible with the available power.

In this study, various jamming techniques and their effects on detection and tracking performance have been investigated through a radar receiver simulation that models a search radar for target acquisition and single-target tracking radar during track operation. The radar is modeled as looking at airborne targets, and hence clutter is not considered. Customized algorithms have been developed for the detection of target azimuth angle, range and Doppler velocity within the modeled geometry and chosen radar parameters. The effects of varying parameters like jamming-to-signal ratio (JSR) and jamming signal`s Doppler shift have been examined in the analysis of jamming effectiveness.

In this thesis, we investigate the basics of Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes over binary and non-binary alphabets. We especially focus on the message passing decoding algorithms, which have different message definitions such as a posteriori probabilities, log-likelihood ratios and Fourier transforms of probabilities. We present the simulation results that compare the performances of small block length binary and non-binary LDPC codes, which have regular and irregular structures over GF(2),GF(4) and GF(8) alphabets. We observe that choosing non-binary alphabets improve the performance with careful selection of mean column weight by comparing LDPC codes with variable node degrees of 3, 2.8 and 2.6, since it is effective in the order of GF(2), GF(4) and GF(8) performances.

Security and quality of service (QoS) issues in cluster-based wireless sensor networks are investigated. The QoS perspective is mostly at application level consisting of four attributes, which are spatial resolution, coverage, system lifetime and packet loss due to collisions. The addressed security aspects are message integrity and authentication. Under this scope, the interactions between security and service quality are analyzed with particular emphasis on the tradeoff between security and spatial resolution for channel capacity. The optimal security and spatial resolution levels which yield the best tradeoff are determined. In addition, a control strategy is proposed to achieve the desired quality of service and security levels during the entire operation of a cluster-based sensor network. Compared to the existing studies, the proposed method is simpler and has superior performance.

With the enhancement of the Radio signal communication systems, Wi-Fi technology become a &ldquo / de facto&rdquo / standard used in Campus areas such as hospitals and universities. Besides being used as a data communication method, Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is also used as a location tracking method. There are lots of studies enhancing the RSSI based location tracking. In this thesis we tried to generate a test environment as close to a real Wi-Fi network scenario as possible. Our aim is to implement a simple moving client among different wireless local area networks, which is tracked across the internet by a stationary client. We also assumed that there is a Network Address Translation (NAT) at both LAN internet edges.