Rodney A. Kennedy

Relaying Protocols for Wireless Energy Harvesting and Information Processing

An emerging solution for prolonging the lifetime of energy constrained relay nodes in wireless networks is to avail the ambient radio-frequency (RF) signal and to simultaneously harvest energy and process information. In this paper, an amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying network is considered, where an energy constrained relay node harvests energy from the received RF signal and uses that harvested energy to forward the source information to the destination. Based on the time switching and power splitting receiver architectures, two relaying protocols, namely, i) time switching-based relaying (TSR) protocol and ii) power splitting-based relaying (PSR) protocol are proposed to enable energy harvesting and information processing at the relay. In order to determine the throughput, analytical expressions for the outage probability and the ergodic capacity are derived for delay-limited and delay-tolerant transmission modes, respectively. The numerical analysis provides practical insights into the effect of various system parameters, such as energy harvesting time, power splitting ratio, source transmission rate, source to relay distance, noise power, and energy harvesting efficiency, on the performance of wireless energy harvesting and information processing using AF relay nodes. In particular, the TSR protocol outperforms the PSR protocol in terms of throughput at relatively low signal-to-noise-ratios and high transmission rates.

Finite-state Markov modeling of fading channels - a survey of principles and applications

This articles goal is to provide an in-depth understanding of the principles of FSMC modeling of fading channels with its applications in wireless communication systems. While the emphasis is on frequency nonselective or flat-fading channels, this understanding will be useful for future generalizations of FSMC models for frequency-selective fading channels. The target audience of this article include both theory- and practice-oriented researchers who would like to design accurate channel models for evaluating the performance of wireless communication systems in the physical or media access control layers, or those who would like to develop more efficient and reliable transceivers that take advantage of the inherent memory in fading channels. Both FSMC models and flat-fading channels will be formally introduced. FSMC models are particulary suitable to represent and estimate the relatively fast flat-fading channel gain in each subcarrier.

Ill-convergence of Godard blind equalizers in data communication systems

The existence of stable undesirable equilibria for the Godard algorithm is demonstrated through a simple autoregressive (AR) channel model. These undesirable equilibria correspond to local but nonglobal minima of the underlying mean cost function, and thus permit the ill-convergence of the Godard algorithms which are stochastic gradient descent in nature. Simulation results confirm predicted misbehavior. For channel input of constant modulus, it is shown that attaining the global minimum of the mean cost necessarily implies correct equalization. A criterion is also presented for allowing a decision at the equalizer as to whether a global or nonglobal minimum has been reached. >

Theory and design of broadband sensor arrays with frequency invariant far‐field beam patterns

The theory and design of a broadband array of sensors with a frequency invariant far‐field beam pattern over an arbitrarily wide design bandwidth is presented. The frequency invariant beam pattern property is defined in terms of a continuously distributed sensor, and the problem of designing a practical sensor array is then treated as an approximation to this continuous sensor using a discrete set of filtered broadband omnidirectional array elements. The design methodology is suitable for one‐, two‐, and three‐dimensional sensor arrays; it imposes no restrictions on the desired aperture distribution (beam shape), and can cope with arbitrarily wide bandwidths. An important consequence of the results is that the frequency response of the filter applied to the output of each sensor can be factored into two components: One component is related to a slice of the desired aperture distribution, and the other is sensor independent. The results also indicate that the locations of the sensors are not a crucial desi...

Intrinsic Limits of Dimensionality and Richness in Random Multipath Fields

We study the dimensions or degrees of freedom of farfield multipath that is observed in a limited, source-free region of space. The multipath fields are studied as solutions to the wave equation in an infinite-dimensional vector space. We prove two universal upper bounds on the truncation error of fixed and random multipath fields. A direct consequence of the derived bounds is that both fixed and random multipath fields have an effective finite dimension. For circular and spherical spatial regions, we show that this finite dimension is proportional to the radius and area of the region, respectively. We use the Karhunen-Loegraveve (KL) expansion of random multipath fields to quantify the notion of multipath richness. The multipath richness is defined as the number of significant eigenvalues in the KL expansion that achieve 99% of the total multipath energy. We establish a lower bound on the largest eigenvalue. This lower bound quantifies, to some extent, the well-known reduction of multipath richness with reducing the angular power spread of multipath angular power spectrum

Spatial correlation for general distributions of scatterers

The well-known results of the spatial correlation function for two-dimensional and three-dimensional diffuse fields of narrowband signals are generalized to the case of general distributions of scatterers. A method is presented that allows closed-form expressions for the correlation function to be obtained for arbitrary scattering distribution functions. These closed-form expressions are derived for a variety of commonly used scattering distribution functions.

Forward-backward non-linear filtering technique for extracting small biological signals from noise

A novel and computationally efficient, non-linear signal processing technique for reducing background noise to reveal small biological signals is described. The signal estimate is formed by weighting the outputs of a set of causal (forward) and anti-causal (backward) predictors. The weights used to combine the predictors are adaptively determined at each data point to reflect the performance of the respective predictor within a short analysis window. The method is specifically designed for revealing fast transient signals dominated by noise, such as single-channel or post-synaptic currents. Markovian and exponentially decaying signals embedded in the amplifier noise were extracted using this method and compared with the original signals. The results of such simulations demonstrate the advantage of this non-linear method over low-pass filtering. Brief pulses imbedded in a broad-band amplifier noise can be reliably recovered using our non-linear filtering technique. Moreover, the kinetics of a single channel and the time constant of exponentially decaying signals can be measured with acceptable accuracy even when the signals are dominated by noise.

Wireless-Powered Relays in Cooperative Communications: Time-Switching Relaying Protocols and Throughput Analysis

We consider wireless-powered amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward relaying in cooperative communications, where an energy constrained relay node first harvests energy through the received radio-frequency signal from the source and then uses the harvested energy to forward the source information to the destination node. We propose time-switching based energy harvesting (EH) and information transmission (IT) protocols with two modes of EH at the relay. For continuous time EH, the EH time can be any percentage of the total transmission block time. For discrete time EH, the whole transmission block is either used for EH or IT. The proposed protocols are attractive because they do not require channel state information at the transmitter side and enable relay transmission with preset fixed transmission power. We derive analytical expressions of the achievable throughput for the proposed protocols. The derived expressions are verified by comparison with simulations and allow the system performance to be determined as a function of the system parameters. Finally, we show that the proposed protocols outperform the existing fixed time duration EH protocols in the literature, since they intelligently track the level of the harvested energy to switch between EH and IT in an online fashion, allowing efficient use of resources.

FIR filter design for frequency invariant beamformers

Two methods of implementing FIR filters for a frequency invariant beamformer are presented. Each of these methods uses a single underlying set of filter coefficients obtained directly from the desired beamformer response. One method uses multirate processing, and the other is based on a single sampling rate.

Block decision feedback equalization

A natural generalization of the conventional decision feedback equalizer (DFE) based on block processing and maximum a posteriori decisions is presented. This block DFE is indexed by two parameters depending on the block length p and the number of decisions q >