Anna Scaglione

Optimal designs for space-time linear precoders and decoders

We introduce a new paradigm for the design of transmitter space-time coding that we refer to as linear precoding. It leads to simple closed-form solutions for transmission over frequency-selective multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, which are scalable with respect to the number of antennas, size of the coding block, and transmit average/peak power. The scheme operates as a block transmission system in which vectors of symbols are encoded and modulated through a linear mapping operating jointly in the space and time dimension. The specific designs target minimization of the symbol mean square error and the approximate maximization of the minimum distance between symbol hypotheses, under average and peak power constraints. The solutions are shown to convert the MIMO channel with memory into a set of parallel flat fading subchannels, regardless of the design criterion, while appropriate power/bits loading on the subchannels is the specific signature of the different designs. The proposed designs are compared in terms of various performance measures such as information rate, BER, and symbol mean square error.

For the Grid and Through the Grid: The Role of Power Line Communications in the Smart Grid

Are Power Line Communications (PLC) a good candidate for Smart Grid applications? The objective of this paper is to address this important question. To do so, we provide an overview of what PLC can deliver today by surveying its history and describing the most recent technological advances in the area. We then address Smart Grid applications as instances of sensor networking and network control problems and discuss the main conclusions one can draw from the literature on these subjects. The application scenario of PLC within the Smart Grid is then analyzed in detail. Because a necessary ingredient of network planning is modeling, we also discuss two aspects of engineering modeling that relate to our question. The first aspect is modeling the PLC channel through fading models. The second aspect we review is the Smart Grid control and traffic modeling problem which allows us to achieve a better understanding of the communications requirements. Finally, this paper reports recent studies on the electrical and topological properties of a sample power distribution network. Power grid topological studies are very important for PLC networking as the power grid is not only the information source but also the information delivery system-a unique feature when PLC is used for the Smart Grid.

Redundant filterbank precoders and equalizers. I. Unification and optimal designs

Transmitter redundancy introduced using filterbank precoders generalizes existing modulations including OFDM, DMT, TDMA, and CDMA schemes encountered with single- and multiuser communications. Sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee that with FIR filterbank precoders FIR channels are equalized perfectly in the absence of noise by FIR zero-forcing equalizer filterbanks, irrespective of the channel zero locations. Multicarrier transmissions through frequency-selective channels can thus be recovered even when deep fades are present. Jointly optimal transmitter-receiver filterbank designs are also developed, based on maximum output SNR and minimum mean-square error criteria under zero-forcing and fixed transmitted power constraints. Analytical performance results are presented for the zero-forcing filterbanks and are compared with mean-square error and ideal designs using simulations.

Gossip Algorithms for Distributed Signal Processing

Gossip algorithms are attractive for in-network processing in sensor networks because they do not require any specialized routing, there is no bottleneck or single point of failure, and they are robust to unreliable wireless network conditions. Recently, there has been a surge of activity in the computer science, control, signal processing, and information theory communities, developing faster and more robust gossip algorithms and deriving theoretical performance guarantees. This paper presents an overview of recent work in the area. We describe convergence rate results, which are related to the number of transmitted messages and thus the amount of energy consumed in the network for gossiping. We discuss issues related to gossiping over wireless links, including the effects of quantization and noise, and we illustrate the use of gossip algorithms for canonical signal processing tasks including distributed estimation, source localization, and compression.

Redundant filterbank precoders and equalizers-part I

Transmitter redundancy introduced using filterbank precoders generalizes existing modulations including OFDM, DMT, TDMA, and CDMA schemes encountered with single- and multiuser communications. Sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee that with FIR filterbank precoders FIR channels are equalized perfectly in the absence of noise by FIR zero-forcing equalizer filterbanks, irrespective of the channel zero locations. Multicarrier transmissions through frequency-selective channels can thus be recovered even when deep fades are present. Jointly optimal transmitter-receiver filterbank designs are also developed, based on maximum output SNR and minimum mean-square error criteria under zero-forcing and fixed transmitted power constraints. Analytical performance results are presented for the zero-forcing filterbanks and are compared with mean-square error and ideal designs using simulations.

Broadcast Gossip Algorithms for Consensus

Motivated by applications to wireless sensor, peer-to-peer, and ad hoc networks, we study distributed broadcasting algorithms for exchanging information and computing in an arbitrarily connected network of nodes. Specifically, we study a broadcasting-based gossiping algorithm to compute the (possibly weighted) average of the initial measurements of the nodes at every node in the network. We show that the broadcast gossip algorithm converges almost surely to a consensus. We prove that the random consensus value is, in expectation, the average of initial node measurements and that it can be made arbitrarily close to this value in mean squared error sense, under a balanced connectivity model and by trading off convergence speed with accuracy of the computation. We provide theoretical and numerical results on the mean square error performance, on the convergence rate and study the effect of the ldquomixing parameterrdquo on the convergence rate of the broadcast gossip algorithm. The results indicate that the mean squared error strictly decreases through iterations until the consensus is achieved. Finally, we assess and compare the communication cost of the broadcast gossip algorithm to achieve a given distance to consensus through theoretical and numerical results.

Product high-order ambiguity function for multicomponent polynomial-phase signal modeling

Parameter estimation and performance analysis issues are studied for multicomponent polynomial-phase signals (PPSs) embedded in white Gaussian noise. Identifiability issues arising with existing approaches are described first when dealing with multicomponent PPS having the same highest order phase coefficients. This situation is encountered in applications such as synthetic aperture radar imaging or propagation of polynomial phase signals through channels affected by multipath and is thus worthy of a careful analysis. A new approach is proposed based on a transformation called product high-order ambiguity function (PHAF). The use of the PHAF offers a number of advantages with respect to the high-order ambiguity function (HAF). More specifically, it removes the identifiability problem and improves noise rejection capabilities. Performance analysis is carried out using the perturbation method and verified by simulation results.

Cooperative communications in mobile ad hoc networks

he motivation of this article is to clarify and help resolve the gap between the link abstraction used in traditional wireless networking and its much broader definition used in the context of cooperative communications, which has received significant interest as an untapped means for improving performance of relay transmission systems operating over the ever-challenging wireless medium. The common theme of most research in this area is to optimize physical layer performance measures without considering in much detail how cooperation interacts with higher layers and improves network performance measures. Because these issues are important for enabling cooperative communications to practice in real-world networks, especially for the increasingly important class of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), the goals of this article are to survey basic cooperative communications and outline two potential architectures for cooperative MANETs. The first architecture relies on an existing clustered infrastructure: cooperative relays are centrally controlled by cluster heads. In another architecture without explicit clustering, cooperative links are formed by request of a source node in an ad hoc, decentralized fashion. In either case, cooperative communication considerably improves the network connectivity. Although far from a complete study, these architectures provide modified wireless link abstractions and suggest tradeoffs in complexity at the physical and higher layers. Many opportunities and challenges remain, including distributed synchronization, coding, and signal processing among multiple radios; modeling of new link abstractions at higher layers; and multiaccess and routing protocols for networks of cooperative links.

Opportunistic large arrays: cooperative transmission in wireless multihop ad hoc networks to reach far distances

The technique we propose in this paper allows efficient flooding of a wireless network with information from a source, which we refer to as the leader. At the same time, it permits us to transmit reliably to far destinations that the individual nodes are not able to reach without consuming rapidly their own battery resources, even when using multihop links (the reach-back problem). The synchronization constraints are extremely loose and can be fulfilled in a distributed manner. The key idea is to have the nodes simply echo the leaders transmission operating as active scatterers while using adaptive receivers that acquire the equivalent network signatures corresponding to the echoed symbols. The active nodes in the network operate either as regenerative or nonregenerative relays. The intuition is that each of the waveforms will be enhanced by the accumulation of power due to the aggregate transmission of all the nodes while, if kept properly under control, the random errors or the receiver noise that propagate together with the useful signals will cause limited deterioration in the performance. The avalanche of signals triggered by the network leaders form the so-called opportunistic large array (OLA). The main advantages of the OLA are its great flexibility and scalability.

On the interdependence of routing and data compression in multi-hop sensor networks

Abstract We consider a problem of broadcast communication in sensor networks, in which samples of a random field are collected at each node, and the goal is for all nodes to obtain an estimate of the entire field within a prescribed distortion value. The main idea we explore in this paper is that of jointly compressing the data generated by different nodes as this information travels over multiple hops, to eliminate correlations in the representation of the sampled field. Our main contributions are: (a) we obtain, using simple network flow concepts, conditions on the rate/distortion function of the random field, so as to guarantee that any node can obtain the measurements collected at every other node in the network, quantized to within any prescribed distortion value; and (b) we construct a large class of physically-motivated stochastic models for sensor data, for which we are able to prove that the joint rate/distortion function of all the data generated by the whole network grows slower than the bounds found in (a). A truly novel aspect of our work is the tight coupling between routing and source coding, explicitly formulated in a simple and analytically tractable model – to the best of our knowledge, this connection had not been studied before.