There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

http://www.eecs.ucf.edu/~dcm/Teaching/COT4810-Spring2011/Literature/SensorNetworksSurvey.pdf

Wireless sensor networks: a survey

We develop and analyze low-complexity cooperative diversity protocols that combat fading induced by multipath propagation in wireless networks. The underlying techniques exploit space diversity available through cooperating terminals' relaying signals for one another. We outline several strategies employed by the cooperating radios, including fixed relaying schemes such as amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward, selection relaying schemes that adapt based upon channel measurements between the cooperating terminals, and incremental relaying schemes that adapt based upon limited feedback from the destination terminal. We develop performance characterizations in terms of outage events and associated outage probabilities, which measure robustness of the transmissions to fading, focusing on the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Except for fixed decode-and-forward, all of our cooperative diversity protocols are efficient in the sense that they achieve full diversity (i.e., second-order diversity in the case of two terminals), and, moreover, are close to optimum (within 1.5 dB) in certain regimes. Thus, using distributed antennas, we can provide the powerful benefits of space diversity without need for physical arrays, though at a loss of spectral efficiency due to half-duplex operation and possibly at the cost of additional receive hardware. Applicable to any wireless setting, including cellular or ad hoc networks-wherever space constraints preclude the use of physical arrays-the performance characterizations reveal that large power or energy savings result from the use of these protocols.

Cooperative diversity in wireless networks: Efficient protocols and outage behavior

Cognitive radio is viewed as a novel approach for improving the utilization of a precious natural resource: the radio electromagnetic spectrum. The cognitive radio, built on a software-defined radio, is defined as an intelligent wireless communication system that is aware of its environment and uses the methodology of understanding-by-building to learn from the environment and adapt to statistical variations in the input stimuli, with two primary objectives in mind: /spl middot/ highly reliable communication whenever and wherever needed; /spl middot/ efficient utilization of the radio spectrum. Following the discussion of interference temperature as a new metric for the quantification and management of interference, the paper addresses three fundamental cognitive tasks. 1) Radio-scene analysis. 2) Channel-state estimation and predictive modeling. 3) Transmit-power control and dynamic spectrum management. This work also discusses the emergent behavior of cognitive radio.

/pdf/cognitive-radio-brain-empowered-wireless-communications-9m6gu0vz1z.pdf

Cognitive radio: brain-empowered wireless communications

Networking together hundreds or thousands of cheap microsensor nodes allows users to accurately monitor a remote environment by intelligently combining the data from the individual nodes. These networks require robust wireless communication protocols that are energy efficient and provide low latency. We develop and analyze low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH), a protocol architecture for microsensor networks that combines the ideas of energy-efficient cluster-based routing and media access together with application-specific data aggregation to achieve good performance in terms of system lifetime, latency, and application-perceived quality. LEACH includes a new, distributed cluster formation technique that enables self-organization of large numbers of nodes, algorithms for adapting clusters and rotating cluster head positions to evenly distribute the energy load among all the nodes, and techniques to enable distributed signal processing to save communication resources. Our results show that LEACH can improve system lifetime by an order of magnitude compared with general-purpose multihop approaches.

/pdf/an-application-specific-protocol-architecture-for-wireless-1s7y9fiv40.pdf

An application-specific protocol architecture for wireless microsensor networks

An antenna pattern measurement technique using wideband channel profiles to resolve multipath signal components

The DIRECT (DIviding RECTangles) algorithm [23], a variant of Lipschitzian methods for bound constrained global optimization, has been applied to the optimal transmitter placement for indoor wireless systems. Power coverage and BER (bit error rate) are considered as two criteria for optimizing locations of a specified number of transmitters across the feasible region of the design space. The performance of a DIRECT implementation in such applications depends on the characteristics of the objective function, the problem dimension, and the desired solution accuracy. Implementations with static data structures often fail in practice because of unpredictable memory requirements. This is especially critical in S 4 W (Site-Specific System Simulator for Wireless communication systems), where the DIRECT optimization is just one small component connected to a parallel 3D propagation ray tracing modeler running on a 200-node Beowulf cluster of Linux workstations, and surrogate functions for a WCDMA (wideband code division multiple access) simulator are also used to estimate the channel performance. Any component failure of this large computation would abort the entire design process. To make the DIRECT global optimization algorithm efficient and robust, a set of dynamic data structures is proposed here to balance the memory requirements with execution time, while simultaneously adapting to arbitrary problem size. The focus is on design issues of the dynamic data structures, related memory management strategies, and application issues of the DIRECT algorithm to the transmitter placement optimization for wireless communication systems. Results for two indoor systems are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the present work. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my appreciation for the support and guidance that I received from my advisor Dr. Layne T. Watson in the past two years. Also, I want to thank the other two members of my advisory committee, Dr. Calvin J. Ribbens and Dr. Eunice Santos, for their sincere support and advice. for their work on WCDMA (wideband code division multiple access) simulations and the corresponding surrogate MARS (multivariate adaptive regression splines) modeling (documented in Chapter 5.2). I would also thank S. Rappaport for their effort in organizing research meetings to help students collaborate with each other. In this project, many practical optimization applications were provided for exploring this global search algorithm—DIRECT. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan for his administration on the 200 node AMD Athlon Beowulf cluster at the Laboratory for Advanced Scientific Computing and Applications (LASCA). Without such computing power, …

Global Optimization of Transmitter Placement for Indoor Wireless Communication Systems

In this paper, we consider a sensor network with an average of n nodes randomly placed over a region of unit area. We assume that each node is equipped with a wireless transceiver, and are interested in the minimum transmit power required for maintaining connectivity of the network when power control is employed (i.e., each node can choose a power level for transmission independent of any other node). We show that the average power gain per node (the ratio of the transmit power required without and with power control) increases with the (average) number of nodes n as (logn)/sup /spl alpha//2/, where /spl alpha/ is the path loss exponent.

http://faculty.poly.edu/~tsr/wp-content/uploads/CV/ICP/2003-11-Connectivity%20of%20Sensor%20Networks%20with%20Power%20Control.pdf

Connectivity of sensor networks with power control

This paper shows the remarkable distances that can be achieved using millimeter wave communications, and presents a new rural macrocell (RMa) path loss model for millimeter wave frequencies, based on measurements at 73 GHz in rural Virginia. Path loss models are needed to estimate signal coverage and interference for wireless network design, yet little is known about rural propagation at millimeter waves. This work identifies problems with the RMa model used by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) TR 38.900 Release 14, and offers a close-in (CI) reference distance model that has improved accuracy, fewer parameters, and better stability as compared with the existing 3GPP RMa path loss model. The measurements and models presented here are the first to validate rural millimeter wave path loss models.

Theodore S. Rappaport

Papers

An antenna pattern measurement technique using wideband channel profiles to resolve multipath signal components

Global Optimization of Transmitter Placement for Indoor Wireless Communication Systems

Connectivity of sensor networks with power control

Millimeter Wave Wireless Communications: New Results for Rural Connectivity

Cellular radio and personal communications: Advanced selected readings