Bi-Dimensional Characterization of a Wimax Radio Channel at 3.5GHz

This paper presents the characterization of an indoor Wimax radio channel using the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) [1] method complemented with the Convolutional Perfect Matched Layer (CPML) technique [2]. An indoor 2D scenario is simulated in the 3.5GHz band (IEEE 802.16d-2004 and IEEE 802.16e-2005 [3]). In this study, we used two complementary techniques in both analysis, technique A and B for fading based on delay spread and technique C and D for fading based on Doppler spread. Both techniques converge to the same result. Simulated results define the channel as flat, slow and without inter-symbolic interference (ISI), making the application of the spatial diversity the most appropriate scheme.

A 5GHz/1.8V CMOS Active Balun Integrated with LNA

The development of high performance monolithic RF front-ends requires innovative RF circuit design to make the best of a good technology. A fully differential approach is usually preferred, due to its well-known properties. Although the differential approach must be preserved inside the chip, there are cases where the input signal is single-ended such as RF image filters and IF filters in a RF receiver. In these situations, a stage able to convert single-ended into differential signals (balun) is needed. The most cited topology, which is capable of providing high gain, consists on a differential stage with one of the two inputs grounded. Unfortunately, this solution has some drawbacks when implemented monolithically. This work presents the design and simulated results of an innovative high-performance monolithic single to differential converter, which overcomes the limitations of the circuits.The integration of the monolithic active balun circuit with an LNA on a 0.18μm CMOS process is also reported. The circuits presented here are aimed at 802.11a. Section 2 describes the balun circuit and section 3 presents its performance when it is connected to a conventional single-ended LNA. Section 4 shows the simulated performance results focused at phase/amplitude balance and noise figure. Finally, the last section draws conclusions and future work.

A 5GHz1.8V Low Power CMOS Low-Noise Amplifier

Wireless local-area networks (WLANs) have been deployed as office and home communications infrastructures worldwide. The diversification of the standards, such as IEEE 802.11 series demands the design of RF front-ends. Low power consumption is one of the most important design concerns in the application of those technologies. To maintain competitive hardware costs, CMOS has been used since it is the best solution for low cost and high integration processing, allowing analog circuits to be mixed with digital ones. In the receiver chain, the low noise amplifier (LNA) is one of the most critical blocks in a transceiver design. The sensitivity is mainly determined by the LNA noise figure and gain. It interfaces with the pre-select filter and the mixer. Furthermore, since it is the first gain stage, care must be taken to provide accurate input match, low-noise figure, good linearity and a sufficient gain over a wide band of operation. Several CMOS LNAs have been reported during the last decade, showing that the most research has been done at 802.11/b and GSM standards (900-2400MHz spectrum) and more recently at 802.11/a (5GHz band). One of the more significant disadvantages of 802.11/b is that the frequency band is crowded and subject to interference from other technologies, as is 2.4GHz cordless phones and Bluetooth. As the demand for radio-frequency integrated circuits, operating at higher frequency bands, increases, the IEEE 802.11/a standard becomes a very attractive option to wireless communication system developers. This paper presents the design and implementation of a low power, low noise amplifier aimed at IEEE 802.11a for WLAN applications. It was designed to be integrated with an active balun and mixer, representing the first step toward a fully integrated monolithic WLAN receiver. All the required circuits are integrated at the same die and are powered by 1.8V supply source. Preliminary experimental results (S-parameters) are shown and promise excellent results. The LNA circuit design details are illustrated in Section 2. Spectre simulation results focused at gain, noise figure (NF) and input/output matching are presented in Section 3. Finally, conclusions and comparison with other recently reported LNAs are made in Section 4, followed by future work.

Distribuição vertical e sazonal de Anopheles (Kerteszia) em Ilha Comprida, SP

OBJETIVO: Anopheles bellator e An. cruzii são vetores da malária-bromélia, característicos de áreas preservadas. O objetivo do estudo foi analisar a distribuição sazonal e vertical desses anofelinos, visando contribuir para a avaliação do risco de transmissão desse agravo. MÉTODOS: No município de Ilha Comprida, SP, foram instaladas armadilhas luminosas tipo CDC iscadas com gelo seco, das 17 às 20h, a um, seis e 12m do solo, quinzenalmente, de setembro de 2001 a setembro de 2002. A relação da densidade desses anofelinos com o clima foi avaliada pelo coeficiente de Spearman e suas densidades entre os estratos foram comparadas pelo teste não paramétrico de Mann-Whitney. RESULTADOS: Do total de 55.226 mosquitos, 1.341 eram An. bellator (2,4% do total de Culicidae), sendo capturados 278 indivíduos próximo ao solo, 261 a seis metros e 802 na copa (12 m). Na mesma ordem, foram capturados 452, 1.032 e 4.420 adultos de An. cruzii, totalizando 5.904 mosquitos desta espécie (10,7%). Houve correlação positiva entre a densidade das duas espécies com a temperatura máxima, e entre An. bellator e amplitude térmica diária. As densidades das duas espécies foram maiores na copa. Nos três estratos, An. cruzii predominou sobre An. bellator. CONCLUSÕES: Confirmou-se o comportamento acrodendrófilo dessas espécies, principalmente An. cruzii. Após medidas drásticas de controle, esses anofelinos permaneceram na região mas, atualmente, não são alvo de vigilância entomológica. A persistência da transmissão de malária autóctone e o incremento de atividades de ecoturismo na região apontam a necessidade de monitoramento dessas espécies.

GuideMe: service for consulting, publication and recommendation of touristic locations

Trabalho de Projeto realizado para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática e de Computadores

Estudo de viabilidade de utilização de VLC em infra-estruturas ITS baseadas em semáforos rodoviários a LEDs

Trabalho Final de Mestrado para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia de Electrónica e Telecomunicações

BANMAC: an opportunistic MAC protocol for reliable communications in body area networks

We consider reliable communications in Body Area Networks (BAN), where a set of nodes placed on human body are connected using wireless links. In order to keep the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) as low as possible for health safety reasons, these networks operate in low transmit power regime, which however, is known to be error prone. It has been observed that the fluctuations of the Received Signal Strength (RSS) at the nodes of a BAN on a moving person show certain regularities and that the magnitude of these fluctuations are significant (5 - 20 dB). In this paper, we present BANMAC, a MAC protocol that monitors and predicts the channel fluctuations and schedules transmissions opportunistically when the RSS is likely to be higher. The MAC protocol is capable of providing differentiated service and resolves co-channel interference in the event of multiple co-located BANs in a vicinity. We report the design and implementation details of BANMAC integrated with the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol stack. We present experimental data which show that the packet loss rate (PLR) of BANMAC is significantly lower as compared to that of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC. For comparable PLR, the power consumption of BANMAC is also significantly lower than that of the IEEE 802.15.4. For co-located networks, the convergence time to find a conflict-free channel allocation was approximately 1 s for the centralized coordination mechanism and was approximately 4 s for the distributed coordination mechanism.

Smart-HOP: a reliable handoff mechanism for mobile wireless sensor networks

Handoff processes, the events where mobile nodes select the best access point available to transfer data, have been well studied in cellular and WiFi networks. However, wireless sensor networks (WSN) pose a new set of challenges due to their simple low-power radio transceivers and constrained resources. This paper proposes smart-HOP, a handoff mechanism tailored for mobile WSN applications. This work provides two important contributions. First, it demonstrates the intrinsic relationship between handoffs and the transitional region. The evaluation shows that handoffs perform the best when operating in the transitional region, as opposed to operating in the more reliable connected region. Second, the results reveal that a proper fine tuning of the parameters, in the transitional region, can reduce handoff delays by two orders of magnitude, from seconds to tens of milliseconds.

Técnicas de codificação/recepção para sistemas de comunicação com espalhamento espectral

Com o advento dos sistemas de comunicação baseados em técnicas de espalhamento espectral, entre os quais se destacam o UMTS e redes sem fios baseadas nas normas 802.11b/g ou 802.16, os requisitos de qualidade vieram incrementados, com consequentes implicações nas técnicas de codificação/desmapeamento adoptadas (turbo códigos no UMTS e 802.16). No contexto dos sistemas baseados em técnicas de espalhamento espectral, são analisados os efeitos da utilização de sequências de espalhamento PN, dando ênfase a aspectos como: Adequação do comprimento face a um cenário multi-percurso e comparação com as técnicas de entrelaçamento usuais; Análise e identificação das sequências mais apropriadas na presença de múltiplos utilizadores; Impacto no desenho de estruturas de recepção apropriadas (nomeadamente estruturas baseadas no receptor RAKE); Associação de técnicas de modulação e codificação adequadas a este tipo de sistemas. Pretendeu-se avaliar o impacto de diferentes técnicas de combinação ao nível do receptor, na presença de um canal dispersivo na frequência. Neste contexto, foram utilizadas técnicas de codificação abrangendo concatenações paralelas, baseadas em códigos constituintes simples, e por sua vez associadas a sequências de espalhamento reais e complexas. No âmbito das técnicas de codificação, são analisados códigos resultantes de concatenações em paralelo, nomeadamente turbo códigos, bem como outros tipos de concatenações derivadas destas com elevada eficiência espectral, como modelações MQAM. Incluem-se resultados numéricos, obtidos por simulação, via método de Monte-Carlo

Demo: automatic personal identification system for security in critical services: a case study

The demonstration proposal moves from the capabilities of a wireless biometric badge [4], which integrates a localization and tracking service along with an automatic personal identification mechanism, to show how a full system architecture is devised to enable the control of physical accesses to restricted areas. The system leverages on the availability of a novel IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee Cluster Tree network model, on enhanced security levels and on the respect of all the users' privacy issues.

Improving quality-of-service in wireless sensor networks by mitigating “Hidden-Node Collisions”

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) emerge as underlying infrastructures for new classes of large-scale networked embedded systems. However, WSNs system designers must fulfill the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements imposed by the applications (and users). Very harsh and dynamic physical environments and extremely limited energy/computing/memory/communication node resources are major obstacles for satisfying QoS metrics such as reliability, timeliness, and system lifetime. The limited communication range of WSN nodes, link asymmetry, and the characteristics of the physical environment lead to a major source of QoS degradation in WSNs-the ldquohidden node problem.rdquo In wireless contention-based medium access control (MAC) protocols, when two nodes that are not visible to each other transmit to a third node that is visible to the former, there will be a collision-called hidden-node or blind collision. This problem greatly impacts network throughput, energy-efficiency and message transfer delays, and the problem dramatically increases with the number of nodes. This paper proposes H-NAMe, a very simple yet extremely efficient hidden-node avoidance mechanism for WSNs. H-NAMe relies on a grouping strategy that splits each cluster of a WSN into disjoint groups of non-hidden nodes that scales to multiple clusters via a cluster grouping strategy that guarantees no interference between overlapping clusters. Importantly, H-NAMe is instantiated in IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee, which currently are the most widespread communication technologies for WSNs, with only minor add-ons and ensuring backward compatibility with their protocols standards. H-NAMe was implemented and exhaustively tested using an experimental test-bed based on ldquooff-the-shelfrdquo technology, showing that it increases network throughput and transmission success probability up to twice the values obtained without H-NAMe. H-NAMe effectiveness was also demonstrated in a target tracking application with mobile robots - over a WSN deployment.

Dimensioning and worst-case analysis of cluster-tree sensor networks

Modeling the fundamental performance limits of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is of paramount importance to understand their behavior under the worst-case conditions and to make the appropriate design choices. This is particular relevant for time-sensitive WSN applications, where the timing behavior of the network protocols (message transmission must respect deadlines) impacts on the correct operation of these applications. In that direction this paper contributes with a methodology based on Network Calculus, which enables quick and efficient worst-case dimensioning of static or even dynamically changing cluster-tree WSNs where the data sink can either be static or mobile. We propose closed-form recurrent expressions for computing the worst-case end-to-end delays, buffering and bandwidth requirements across any source-destination path in a cluster-tree WSN. We show how to apply our methodology to the case of IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee cluster-tree WSNs. Finally, we demonstrate the validity and analyze the accuracy of our methodology through a comprehensive experimental study using commercially available technology, namely TelosB motes running TinyOS.

On the capacity of cluster-tree ZigBee networks

Modeling the fundamental performance limits of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is of paramount importance to understand their behavior under worst-case conditions and to make the appropriate design choices. In that direction this paper contributes with an analytical methodology for modeling cluster-tree WSNs where the data sink can either be static or mobile. We assess the validity and pessimism of analytical model by comparing the worst-case results with the values measured through an experimental test-bed based on Commercial-Off- The-Shelf (COTS) technologies, namely TelosB motes running TinyOS.

TDBS: a time division beacon scheduling mechanism for ZigBee cluster-tree wireless sensor networks

Synchronization is a challenging and important issue for time-sensitive Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) since it requires a mutual spatiotemporal coordination between the nodes. In that concern, the IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee protocols embody promising technologies for WSNs, but are still ambiguous on how to efficiently build synchronized multiple-cluster networks, specifically for the case of cluster-tree topologies. In fact, the current IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee specifications restrict the synchronization to beacon-enabled (by the generation of periodic beacon frames) star networks, while they support multi-hop networking in mesh topologies, but with no synchronization. Even though both specifications mention the possible use of cluster-tree topologies, which combine multi-hop and synchronization features, the description on how to effectively construct such a network topology is missing. This paper tackles this issue by unveiling the ambiguities regarding the use of the cluster-tree topology and proposing a synchronization mechanism based on Time Division Beacon Scheduling (TDBS) to build cluster-tree WSNs. In addition, we propose a methodology for efficiently managing duty-cycles in every cluster, ensuring the fairest use of bandwidth resources. The feasibility of the TDBS mechanism is clearly demonstrated through an experimental test-bed based on our open-source implementation of the IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee protocols.