Low-power wireless technology is a part and parcel of our daily life, shaping the way in which we behave, interact, and more generally live. The ubiquity of cheap, tiny, battery-powered devices augmented with sensing, actuation, and wireless communication capabilities has given rise to a ``smart" society, where people, machines, and objects are seamlessly interconnected, among themselves and with the environment. Behind the scenes, low-power wireless protocols are what enables and rules all interactions, organising these embedded devices into wireless networks, and orchestrating their communications. The recent years have witnessed a persistent increase in the pervasiveness and impact of low-power wireless. After having spawned a wide spectrum of powerful applications in the consumer domain, low-power wireless solutions are extending their influence over the industrial context, where their adoption as part of feedback control loops is envisioned to revolutionise the production process, paving the way for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. However, as the scale and relevance of low-power wireless systems continue to grow, so do the challenges posed to the communication substrates, required to satisfy ever more strict requirements in terms of reliability, responsiveness, and energy consumption. Harmonising these conflicting demands is far beyond what is enabled by current network stacks and control architectures; the need to timely bridge this gap has spurred a new wave of interest in low-power wireless networking, and directly motivated our work. In this thesis, we take on this challenge with a main conceptual and technical tool: concurrent transmissions (CTX), a technique that, by enforcing nodes to transmit concurrently, has been shown to unlock unprecedented fast, reliable, and energy efficient multi-hop communications in low-power wireless networks, opening new opportunities for protocol design. We first direct our research endeavour towards industrial applications, focusing on the popular IEEE 802.15.4 narrowband PHY layer, and advance the state of the art along two different directions: interference resilience and aperiodic wireless control. We tackle radio-frequency noise by extensively analysing, for the first time, the dependability of CTX under different types, intensities, and distributions of reproducible interference patterns, and by devising techniques to push it further. Specifically, we concentrate on CRYSTAL, a recently proposed communication protocol that relies on CTX to rapidly and dependably collect aperiodic traffic. By integrating channel hopping and noise detection in the protocol operation, we provide a novel communication stack capable of supporting aperiodic transmissions with near-perfect reliability and a per-mille radio duty cycle despite harsh external interference. These results lay the ground towards the exploitation of CTX for aperiodic wireless control; we explore this research direction by co-designing the Wireless Control Bus (WCB), our second contribution. WCB is a clean-slate CTX-based communication stack tailored to event-triggered control (ETC), an aperiodic control strategy holding the capability to significantly improve the efficiency of wireless control systems, but whose real-world impact has been hampered by the lack of appropriate networking support. Operating in conjunction with ETC, WCB timely and dynamically adapts the network operation to the control demands, unlocking an order-of-magnitude reduction in energy costs w.r.t. traditional periodic approaches while retaining the same control performance, therefore unleashing and concretely demonstrating the true ETC potential for the first time. Nevertheless, low-power wireless communications are rapidly evolving, and new radios striking novel trade-offs are emerging. Among these, in the second part of the thesis we focus on ultra-wideband (UWB). By providing hitherto missing networking primitives for multi-hop dissemination and collection over UWB, we shed light on the communication potentialities opened up by the high data throughput, clock precision, and noise resilience offered by this technology. Specifically, as a third contribution, we demonstrate that CTX not only can be successfully exploited for multi-hop UWB communications but, once embodied in a full-fledged system, provide reliability and energy performance akin to narrowband. Furthermore, the higher data rate and clock resolution of UWB chips unlock up to 80% latency reduction w.r.t. narrowband CTX, along with orders-of-magnitude improvements in network-wide time synchronization. These results showcase how UWB CTX could significantly benefit a multitude of applications, notably including low-power wireless control. With WEAVER, our last contribution, we make an additional step towards this direction, by supporting the key functionality of data collection with an ultra-fast convergecast stack for UWB. Challenging the internal mechanics of CTX, WEAVER interleaves data and acknowledgements flows in a single, self-terminating network-wide flood, enabling the concurrent collection of different packets from multiple senders with unprecedented latency, reliability, and energy efficiency. Overall, this thesis pushes forward the applicability and performance of low-power wireless, by contributing techniques and protocols to enhance the dependability, timeliness, energy efficiency, and interference resilience of this technology. Our research is characterized by a strong experimental slant, where the design of the systems we propose meets the reality of testbed experiments and evaluation. Via our open-source implementations, researchers and practitioners can directly use, extend, and build upon our contributions, fostering future work and research on the topic.

The rapidly growing demand for UWB as high data rates wireless communications technology, since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allocated the bandwidth of UWB from 3.1GHz to 10.6 GHz. Antenna also plays an essential role in UWB system. However, there are some difficulties in designing UWB antenna as compared to narrowband antenna. The primary requirement of UWB antennas is be able to operate over frequencies released by the FCC. Moreover, the satisfaction of radiation properties and good time domain performance over the entire frequency range are also necessary. In this thesis, designing and analysing printed crescent shape monopole antenna, Planar Inverted F-L Antenna (PIFLA) and Planar Inverted FF Antenna (PIFFA) are focused. A Planar Inverted FF Antenna (PIFFA) can be created to reduce the potential for interference between a UWB system and other communications protocols by using spiral slot. The antennas exhibits broadside directional pattern. The performances such as return loss, radiation pattern and current distribution of the UWB antennas are extensively investigated and carried out. All the results have been demonstrated using simulation and experimentally whereby all results satisfy the performance under - 10dB point in the bandwidth of UWB. In addition the miniaturization of MIMO/diversity Planar Inverted-F antenna (PIFA) which is suitable for pattern diversity in UWB applications is presented. This antenna assembly is formed by two identical PIFAs, a T-shaped decoupling structure which connects the two PIFAs and a finite ground plane with a total compact envelope dimension of 50 ¿ 90 ¿ 7.5mm3. The radiation performance of the proposed MIMO antenna was quite encouraging and provided an acceptable agreement between the computed and measured envelope correlation coefficient and channel capacity loss. / General Secretariat of Education and Scientific Research Libya

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[pt] Foram desenvolvidas fontes ópticas para obtenção de imagens por tomografia de coerência óptica com alta resolução. Dois tipos de abordagens foram realizados, uma com um laser contínuo sintonizável, que neste trabalho foi instrumentado com marcadores de frequência óptica, outra com uma fonte óptica pulsada de banda larga. Mediante um processo de calibricação desenvolvido neste trabalho, a fonte contínua forneceu resoluções de 8 μm e alcances até 0,5 mm, enquanto que a fonte pulsada forneceu resoluções de 3 μm e alcances de 300 μm. A fonte pulsada permitiu ainda a obtenção de imagens em tempo real com capacidade de captura de movimento do objeto. / [en] Optical sources to obtain images through high resolution optical coherence tomography were developed. Two approaches were taken, one with a continuously tunable external cavity laser which, in this work, was modified to produce optical frequency markers, the other with an ultra-wideband pulsed source. Using a calibration process we developed in this work the continuously tunable source continued to achieve resolutions 8 μm and ranges of 0.5 mm, while the pulsed source achieved resolutions of 3.3 μm and ranges of 300 μm. The pulsed source has the capacity to capture real time images.

The dielectric antenna is an interesting alternative to a metallic antenna. This is mainlydue to its low manufacturing cost and the possibility to fabricate complex antennageometry with the aid of additive manufacturing (AM). Sophisticated AM technologyprovides new degrees of freedom in shaping the outer and inner geometry of antennas.This feature can be utilized to optimize various properties of antenna, such as itsbandwidth, radiation pattern etc, while maintaining a compact geometry.This master thesis investigates the possibility of improving the bandwidth of acompact dielectric antenna by modifying its geometry. Specifically, dielectricresonator antennas (DRAs) have been considered here. In this connection, twoembedded cylindrical DRAs operating within 8 GHz-17 GHz frequency band havebeen designed and simulated using Ansys HFSS. For the first design (Design-1), abandwidth (corresponding to reflection coefficient ≤ -10dB) of approximately 63%has been obtained and the second design (Design-2) has a bandwidth (correspondingto reflection coefficient ≤ -10dB) of about 57%. However, in terms of radiationcharacteristics, the performance of Design-2 has been found to be superior comparedto Design-1, mainly due to its symmetrical geometry. Furthermore, the two designshave been compared to an existing compact rectangular embedded DRA. It has beenfound that both Design-1 and Design-2 have comparatively wider bandwidth. Withrespect to the radiation characteristics, the performance of the reference antenna andDesign-2 are similar. While, the radiation performance of the reference antenna isfound to be better than Design-1. / Dielektriska antenner är ett intressant alternativ till metalliska diton. Detta beror delspå lägre tillverkningskostnader men också, tack vare additiva tillverkningsmetoder,på grund av möjligheten att använda komplexa geometrier. De senaste årens framsteginom additiv tillverkning har öppnat upp nya möjligheter vid designen av den externaoch den inre geometrin hos dielektriska antenner. Detta kan utnyttjas till att optimeraolika aspekter hos antennen, exempelvis bandbredd och strålningsmönster, utan attpåverka de yttre måtten.Denna avhandling studerar möjligheten att förbättra bandbredden hos dielektriskaresonansantenner (DRA) genom att modifiera deras inre. Två cylindriska DRA:er,verksamma inom 8-17 GHz, har designats och simulerats i Ansys HFSS. Bandbredderom 63 % för Design-1, samt 57 % för Design-2, erhölls. Trots den första designensstörre bandbredd uppvisar Design-2 bättre strålningsegenskaper, främst avseendeantennens strålningsmönster. De simulerade antennerna har också visat sig hastörre bandbredd jämfört med en redan existerande kompakt, inbäddad DRA. Sett tillstrålningsegenskaper är prestandan hos Design-2 jämförbar med referensantennen,medan design ett uppvisar sämre prestanda.

Due to the increasing demand of broadband capability and reconfigurability for mobile applications, there is an enormous interest to develop appropriate analog receiver front-ends. In this respect, one promising candidate group is the Six-Port-based direct conversion receiver. The presented work focuses on the investigation of Six-Port-based mobile receiver front-ends with their specific systematical signal processing. Thereby, issues of spurious interfering signals which are generated within the down conversion process of such receivers are of special interest. Based on a comprehensive description of the analog signal processing within additive frequency conversion, a reason could be identified why existing Six-Port receivers have not found any practical application in mobile communication yet – the dynamic DC-offset. With this insight compensation techniques were developed to overcome the negative influences of the dynamic DC-offset. Furthermore, this work presents novel Six-Port-based receiver architectures which, on the one hand, keep the advantages of additive mixing systems like: low power consumption, broadband capability and simplicity of implementation especially for mm-wave transmissions. On the other hand, these novel architectures comprise compensation techniques such that systematically generated spurious signals are inherently compensated in the analog part of the receiver. Moreover, the influence of impairments of phase and amplitude within the IQ-branches of a receiver was investigated. The resulting, unwanted IQ-imbalance was shown to be a mixing method (multiplicative or additive) independent spurious effect. It is suggested to compensate for IQ-imbalance in the digital part of the receiver system. This can be realized with the use of adaptive algorithms. The comparison with conventional analog receiver architectures (especially homodyne receivers) with respect to the reception of today’s and future digitally modulated transmission signals indicate the proposed Six-Port-based receiver architectures to be suitable candidates to fulfill the difficult tasks of modern mobile communication.

Due to the increasing demand of broadband capability and reconfigurability for mobile applications, there is an enormous interest to develop appropriate analog receiver front-ends. In this respect, one promising candidate group is the Six-Port-based direct conversion receiver. The presented work focuses on the investigation of Six-Port-based mobile receiver front-ends with their specific systematical signal processing. Thereby, issues of spurious interfering signals which are generated within the down conversion process of such receivers are of special interest. Based on a comprehensive description of the analog signal processing within additive frequency conversion, a reason could be identified why existing Six-Port receivers have not found any practical application in mobile communication yet – the dynamic DC-offset. With this insight compensation techniques were developed to overcome the negative influences of the dynamic DC-offset. Furthermore, this work presents novel Six-Port-based receiver architectures which, on the one hand, keep the advantages of additive mixing systems like: low power consumption, broadband capability and simplicity of implementation especially for mm-wave transmissions. On the other hand, these novel architectures comprise compensation techniques such that systematically generated spurious signals are inherently compensated in the analog part of the receiver. Moreover, the influence of impairments of phase and amplitude within the IQ-branches of a receiver was investigated. The resulting, unwanted IQ-imbalance was shown to be a mixing method (multiplicative or additive) independent spurious effect. It is suggested to compensate for IQ-imbalance in the digital part of the receiver system. This can be realized with the use of adaptive algorithms. The comparison with conventional analog receiver architectures (especially homodyne receivers) with respect to the reception of today’s and future digitally modulated transmission signals indicate the proposed Six-Port-based receiver architectures to be suitable candidates to fulfill the difficult tasks of modern mobile communication.

Wireless operation, near-field or far-field, is a core functionality of any mobile or autonomous system. These systems are battery operated or most often utilize energy scavenging as a means of power generation. Limited access to power, expected long and uninterrupted operation, and constrained physical parameters (e.g. weight and size), which limit overall power harvesting capabilities, are factors that outline the importance for innovative low-power approaches and designs in advanced low-power wireless applications. Low-power approaches become especially important for the wireless transceiver, the block in charge of wireless/remote functionality of the system, as this block is usually the most power hungry component in an integrated system-on-chip (SoC). Three such advanced applications with stringent power requirements are examined including space-based exploratory remote sensing probes and their associated radiation effects, millimeter-wave phased-array radar for high-altitude tactical and geological imaging, and implantable biomedical devices (IMDs), leading to the proposal and implementation of low-power wireless solutions for these applications in SiGe BiCMOS and CMOS and platforms.

Worldwide regulations for short range communication devices allow the unlicensed use of several Gigahertz of bandwidth in the frequency band around 60 GHz. This 60GHz band is ideally suited for applications like very high data rate, energy-autonomous wireless sensor networks or Gbit/s multimedia links with low power constraints. Not long ago, radio interfaces that operate in the millimeter-wave frequency range could only be realized using expensive compound semiconductor technologies. Today, the latest sub-micron CMOS technologies can be used to design 60GHz radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) at very low cost in mass production. This thesis is part of an effort to realize a low power System in Package (SiP) including both the radio interface (with baseband and RF circuitry) and an antenna array to directly transmit and receive a 60GHz signal. The first part of this thesis deals with the design of the low power RF transceiver front-end for the radio interface. The key building blocks of this RF front-end (amplifiers, mixers and a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO)) are designed, realized and measured using the 65nm CMOS technology of ST Microelectronics. Full custom active and passive devices are developed and characterized for the use within these building blocks. An important step towards the full integration of the RF transceiver front-end is the assembly of these building blocks to form a basic receiver chip. Circuits with small chip size and low power consumption compared to the state of the art have been accomplished. The second part of this thesis concerns the development of behavioral models for the designed building blocks. These system level models are necessary to simulate the behavior of the entire SiP, which becomes too complex when using detailed circuit level models. In particular, a novel technique to model the transient, steady state and phase noise behavior of the VCO in the hardware description language VHDL-AMS is proposed and implemente d. The model uses a state space description to describe the dynamic behavior of the VCO. Its nonlinearity is approximated by artificial neural networks. A drastic reduction of simulation time with respect to the circuit level model has been achieved, while at the same time maintaining a very high level of accuracy.

Η υλοποίηση πρακτικών ασύρματων συστημάτων επικοινωνίας δεδομένων στην τεχνολογία UWB παρουσιάζει ιδιαίτερες προκλήσεις, κυρίως λόγω της χαμηλής ισχύος εκπομπής και της πολύ σύντομης διάρκειας των παλμών που χρησιμοποιούνται, οι οποίοι θα πρέπει να στέλνονται με πολύ μεγάλες ταχύτητες για την επίτευξη των επιθυμητών ρυθμών μετάδοσης. Το κανάλι μετάδοσης είναι ιδιαίτερα επιλεκτικό ως προς την συχνότητα και εξαιρετικά πυκνό και πλούσιο σε πολυοδικές συνιστώσες με αρκετά μεγάλες καθυστερήσεις. Αυτές οι συνιστώσες μπορούν να ανιχνευθούν και να συλλεχθούν χρησιμοποιώντας κατάλληλες δομές δεκτών RAKE, οι οποίοι τις συνθέτουν ώστε να μεγιστοποιηθεί η ενέργεια του ωφέλιμου σήματος, αυξάνοντας την απόδοση του συστήματος. Οι δομές αυτές παρουσιάζουν την καλύτερη απόδοση σε τέτοια συστήματα, αλλά έχουν μεγάλη υπολογιστική πολυπλοκότητα, καθώς για την ικανοποιητική απόδοση του συστήματος πρέπει να συνδυάσουν πολλές συνιστώσες, δεδομένης και της χαμηλής ισχύος εκπομπής της τεχνολογίας. Συνεπώς, για την υλοποίηση ενός πρακτικού και αποδοτικού συστήματος, σημαντικό ζήτημα αποτελεί ο τρόπος επιλογής και συνδυασμού των συνιστωσών μέσω ενός αλγορίθμου που θα χρησιμοποιεί τον μικρότερο δυνατό αριθμό δακτύλων. Στόχοι της διατριβής ήταν η μελέτη της τεχνολογίας UWB, η διερεύνηση των παραμέτρων των παλμικών UWB συστημάτων, η μελέτη και εξομοίωση μοντέλων του καναλιού, η κατανόηση των οποίων είναι απαραίτητη για την αποτελεσματική ανίχνευση του σήματος και τον σχεδιασμό των αλγορίθμων ψηφιακής επεξεργασίας του σήματος, η διερεύνηση δεκτών RAKE καθώς και εναλλακτικών δομών, οι εξομοιώσεις πομποδέκτη παλμικού UWB σε επίπεδο συστήματος με έμφαση στον RAKE και τον εκτιμητή καναλιού, η διερεύνηση παραμέτρων και τεχνικών για την υλοποίηση σε υλικό και τέλος η ανάπτυξη, ο σχεδιασμός και υλοποίηση μιας πρακτικής δομής δέκτη με RAKE αποδιαμορφωτή και εκτιμητή καναλιού που συνδυάζει χαμηλή πολυπλοκότητα και ικανοποιητική απόδοση. Παρουσιάζονται και συγκρίνονται τρεις νέες διαφορετικές προσεγγίσεις σχεδίασης, οι οποίες βασίζονται σε προτεινόμενο υβριδικό αλγόριθμο (HPS) για την μείωση της πολυπλοκότητας του RAKE και δίνονται αποτελέσματα που αφορούν στην αξιοποίηση του υλικού και στις επιδόσεις του συστήματος. Tα αποτελέσματα παρουσιάζουν το trade-off ανάμεσα στην συλλογή ενέργειας, την απόδοση του δέκτη και την πολυπλοκότητά του. Η αποτελεσματικότητα των προτεινόμενων αρχιτεκτονικών επαληθεύεται μέσω ειδικής πλατφόρμας αναδιατασσόμενου υλικού στην οποία υλοποιήθηκε η σχεδίαση. / Τhe implementation of practical wireless data communications systems for the UWB technology is very challenging due to the use of low-power ns-duration pulses which have to be sent in a high-frequency in order to achieve the desirable data rates. The UWB channel is highly frequency selective and it is characterized by dense and rich multipath propagation and large multipath delay spreads in some cases. A RAKE receiver can be employed in order to exploit multipath diversity and effectively capture the desired signal energy which is dispersed over the various multipath components, helping to mitigate fading. However, the particular nature of UWB results in very low-energy paths which, in conjunction with high multipath diversity, leads to a RAKE receiver that must exploit a large number of MPCs in order to optimize the received SNR. Thus, for the implementation of a low-complexity system it is important to define a novel method for the selection and combining of MPCs and develop an algorithm that is able to utilize a minimum number of fingers in the RAKE structure. Our work was focused in the study of UWB technology, the investigation of the parameters of IR-UWB systems, the study and understanding of the channel models which is necessary for the design of practical and efficient DSP algorithms, the investigation of RAKE type receivers as well as other alternative structures, the system-level simulations of the IR-UWB transceiver with emphasis given to the algorithms for the RAKE demodulator and channel estimator, the investigation of the parameters and techniques for the implementation of the system in hardware and finally, the development, design, and implementation of a practical receiver structure that includes a RAKE demodulator and a channel estimator and combines low complexity and satisfactory performance. The ultimate goal of this work is the presentation and investigation of the proposed channel estimator and (MRC)-RAKE receiver architecture which is based on a proposed novel hybrid algorithm called HPS. Three different design approaches aiming to a practical system implementation in an FPGA are proposed and compared and system/algorithm performance, hardware utilization results are provided. The obtained results demonstrate the trade-off between energy capture, performance and receiver complexity. The effectiveness of the proposed architectures is verified on a special FPGA platform which was used for the implementation of the receiver structure.