P. C. Ching

Time-of-arrival based localization under NLOS conditions

Three or more base stations (BS) making time-of-arrival measurements of a signal from a mobile station (MS) can locate the MS. However, when some of the measurements are from non-line-of-sight (NLOS) paths, the location errors can be very large. This paper proposes a residual test (RT) that can simultaneously determine the number of line-of-sight (LOS) BS and identify them. Then, localization can proceed with only those LOS BS. The RT works on the principle that when all measurements are LOS, the normalized residuals have a central Chi-Square distribution, versus a noncentral distribution when there is NLOS. The residuals are the squared differences between the estimates and the true position. Normalization by their variances gives a unity variance to the resultant random variables. In simulation studies, for the chosen geometry and NLOS and measurement noise errors, the RT can determine the correct number of LOS-BS over 90% of the time. For four or more BS, where there are at least three LOS-BS, the estimator has variances that are near the Cramer--Rao lower bound.

Quasi-maximum-likelihood multiuser detection using semi-definite relaxation with application to synchronous CDMA

The maximum-likelihood (ML) multiuser detector is well known to exhibit better bit-error-rate (BER) performance than many other multiuser detectors. Unfortunately,ML detection (MLD) is a nondeterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard) problem, for which there is no known algorithm that can find the optimal solution with polynomial-time complexity (in the number of users). In this paper, a polynomial-time approximation method called semi-definite (SD) relaxation is applied to the MLD problem with antipodal data transmission. SD relaxation is an accurate approximation method for certain NP-hard problems. The SD relaxation ML (SDR-ML) detector is efficient in that its complexity is of the order of K3.5, where K is the number of users. We illustrate the potential of the SDR-ML detector by showing that some existing detectors, such as the decorrelator and the linear-minimum-mean-square-error detector, can be interpreted as degenerate forms of the SDR-ML detector. Simulation results indicate that the BER performance of the SDR-ML detector is better than that of these existing detectors and is close to that of the true ML detector, even when the cross-correlations between users are strong or the near-far effect is significant.

Exact and approximate maximum likelihood localization algorithms

Sensors at separate locations measuring either the time difference of arrival (TDOA) or time of arrival (TOA) of the signal from an emitter can determine its position as the intersection of hyperbolae for TDOA and of circles for TOA. Because of measurement noise, the nonlinear localization equations become inconsistent; and the hyperbolae or circles no longer intersect at a single point. It is now necessary to find an emitter position estimate that minimizes its deviations from the true position. Methods that first linearize the equations and then perform gradient searches for the minimum suffer from initial condition sensitivity and convergence difficulty. Starting from the maximum likelihood (ML) function, this paper derives a closed-form approximate solution to the ML equations. When there are three sensors on a straight line, it also gives an exact ML estimate. Simulation experiments have demonstrated that these algorithms are near optimal, attaining the theoretical lower bound for different geometries, and are superior to two other closed form linear estimators.

Cooperative Secure Beamforming for AF Relay Networks With Multiple Eavesdroppers

This letter studies cooperative secure beamforming for amplify-and-forward (AF) relay networks in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. Under both total and individual relay power constraints, we propose two schemes, namely secrecy rate maximization (SRM) beamforming and null-space beamforming. In the first scheme, our design problem is based on SRM. Using a suboptimal, but convex, technique-semidefinite relaxation (SDR), we show that this problem can be handled by performing a one-dimensional search which involves solving a sequence of semidefinite programs (SDPs). To reduce the complexity, in the second scheme, we instead maximize the information rate at the destination while completely eliminating the information leakage to all eavesdroppers. We prove that this problem can be exactly solved by SDR with one SDP only. Simulation results demonstrate the performance gains of the two proposed designs.

A new algorithm for explicit adaptation of time delay

By using an adaptive technique similar to the one developed by Etter and Stearns (1981), a novel constrained algorithm for explicit time delay estimation (TDE) is derived. The adaptive process provides an unbiased delay estimate and its respective performance surface, learning characteristics and delay variance will be given. The mean-square error surface, though a function of the estimated delay only, is multimodal and proper initialization is required to guarantee global convergence. Simulation results are included to validate the convergence behavior of the TDE system. >

Blind ML detection of orthogonal space-time block codes: efficient high-performance implementations

Orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs) have attracted much attention owing to their simple code construction, maximal diversity gain, and low maximum-likelihood (ML) detection complexity when channel state information (CSI) is available at the receiver. This paper addresses the problem of ML OSTBC detection with unknown CSI. Focusing on the binary and quaternary PSK constellations, we show that blind ML OSTBC detection can be simplified to a Boolean quadratic program (BQP). From an optimization viewpoint the BQP is still a computationally hard problem, and we propose two alternatives for dealing with this inherent complexity. First, we consider the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) approach, which leads to a suboptimal, but accurate, blind ML detection algorithm with an affordable worst-case computational cost. We also consider the sphere decoding approach, which leads to an exact blind ML detection algorithm that remains computationally expensive in the worst case, but generally incurs a reasonable average computational cost. For the two algorithms, we study implementation methods that can significantly reduce the computational complexity. Simulation results indicate that the two blind ML detection algorithms are competitive, in that the bit error performance of the two algorithms is almost the same and is noticeably better than that of some other existing blind detectors. Moreover, numerical studies show that the SDR algorithm provides better complexity performance than the sphere decoder in the worst-case sense, and vice versa in the average sense.

High-Rate Full-Diversity Space–Time–Frequency Codes for Broadband MIMO Block-Fading Channels

A systematic design of high-rate full-diversity space-time-frequency (STF) codes is proposed for multiple-input multiple-output frequency-selective block-fading channels. It is shown that the proposed STF codes can achieve rate Mt and full-diversity MtMrMbL, i.e., the product of the number of transmit antennas Mt, receive antennas Mr, fading blocks Mb, and channel taps L. The proposed STF codes are constructed from a layered algebraic design, where each layer of algebraic coded symbols are parsed into different transmit antennas, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing tones, and fading blocks without rate loss. Simulation results show that the proposed STF codes achieve higher diversity gain in block-fading channels than some typical space-frequency codes

Semidefinite relaxation based multiuser detection for M-ary PSK multiuser systems

Because of the powerful symbol error performance of multiuser maximum-likelihood (ML) detection, recently, there has been much interest in seeking effective ways of approximating multiuser ML detection (MLD) with affordable computational costs. It has been illustrated that for the synchronous code division multiple access (CDMA) scenario, the so-called semidefinite relaxation (SDR) algorithm can accurately and efficiently approximate multiuser MLD. This SDR-MLD algorithm, however, can only handle binary and quadratic phase shift keying (PSK) symbol constellations. In this sequel, we propose an extended SDR algorithm for MLD with M-ary PSK (MPSK) constellations. For the synchronous CDMA scenario, the proposed SDR algorithm provides an attractive polynomial-time complexity order of K/sup 3.5/, where K is the number of users. Simulation results indicate that the proposed detector provides improved symbol error performance compared with several commonly used multiuser detectors.

Spoken language resources for Cantonese speech processing

This paper describes the development of CU Corpora, a series of large-scale speech corpora for Cantonese. Cantonese is the most commonly spoken Chinese dialect in Southern China and Hong Kong. CU Corpora are the first of their kind and intended to serve as an important infrastructure for the advancement of speech recognition and synthesis technologies for this widely used Chinese dialect. They contain a large amomat of speech data that cover various linguistic units of spoken Cantonese, including isolated syllables, polysyllabic words and continuous sentences. While some of the corpora are created for specific applications of common interest, the others are designed with emphasis on the coverage and distributions of different phonetic units, including the contextual ones. The speech data are annotated manually so as to provide sufficient orthographic and phonetic information for the development of different applications. Statistical analysis of the annotated data shows that CU Corpora contain rich and balanced phonetic content. The usefulness of the corpora is also demonstrated with a number of speech recognition and speech synthesis applications.

Integration of Complementary Acoustic Features for Speaker Recognition

This letter describes a speaker verification system that uses complementary acoustic features derived from the vocal source excitation and the vocal tract system. A new feature set, named the wavelet octave coefficients of residues (WOCOR), is proposed to capture the spectro-temporal source excitation characteristics embedded in the linear predictive residual signal. WOCOR is used to supplement the conventional vocal tract-related features, in this case, the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), for speaker verification. A novel confidence measure-based score fusion technique is applied to integrate WOCOR and MFCC. Speaker verification experiments are carried out on the NIST 2001 database. The equal error rate (EER) attained with the proposed method is 7.67%, in comparison to 9.30% of the conventional MFCC-based system