Department Publications

Deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations (ABSs) has been considered to be a feasible solution to provide network coverage in scenarios where the conventional terrestrial network is overloaded or inaccessible due to an emergency situation. This article studies the problem of optimal placement of the UAVs as ABSs to enable network connectivity for the users in such a scenario. The main contributions of this work include a less complex approach to optimally position the UAVs and to assign user equipment (UE) to each ABS, such that the total spectral efficiency (TSE) of the network is maximized, while maintaining a minimum QoS requirement for the UEs. The main advantage of the proposed approach is that it only requires the knowledge of UE and ABS locations and statistical channel state information. The optimal 2-dimensional (2D) positions of the ABSs and the UE assignments are found using K-means clustering and a stable marriage approach, considering the characteristics of the air-to-ground propagation channels, the impact of co-channel interference from other ABSs, and the energy constraints of the ABSs. Two approaches are proposed to find the optimal altitudes of the ABSs, using search space constrained exhaustive search and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The numerical results show that the PSO-based approach results in higher TSE compared to the exhaustive search-based approach in dense networks, consuming similar amount of energy for ABS movements. Both approaches lead up to approximately 8-fold energy savings compared to ABS placement using naive exhaustive search.

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication plays a pivotal role in intelligent transport systems (ITS) with cellular-vehicle to everything (C-V2X) and IEEE 802.11p being the two competing enabling technologies. This paper presents multi-dimensional discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) based models to study the medium access control (MAC) layer performance of the IEEE 802.11p standard and C-V2X Mode 4, considering periodic cooperative awareness messages (CAMs) and event-driven decentralized environmental notification messages (DENMs). Closed-form solutions for the steady-state probabilities of the models are obtained, which are then utilized to derive expressions for several key performance metrics. Numerical results are provided to draw insights on the performance. In particular, a performance comparison between IEEE 802.11p and C-V2X Mode 4 in terms of the average delay, the collision …

This paper studies optimum detectors and error rate analysis for wireless systems with low-resolution quantizers in the presence of fading and noise. A universal lower bound on the average symbol error probability (SEP), correct for all M-ary modulation schemes, is obtained when the number of quantization bits is not enough to resolve M signal points. In the special case of M-ary phase shift keying (M-PSK), the maximum likelihood detector is derived. Utilizing the structure of the derived detector, a general average SEP expression for M-PSK modulation with n-bit quantization is obtained when the wireless channel is subject to fading with a circularly-symmetric distribution. For the Nakagami-m fading, it is shown that a transceiver architecture with n-bit quantization is asymptotically optimum in terms of communication reliability if n ≥ log 2 M + 1. That is, the decay exponent for the average SEP is the same and equal …

Growing concerns over privacy invasion due to video camera based monitoring systems have made way to non-invasive Wi-Fi signal sensing based alternatives. This paper introduces a novel end-to-end deep learning framework that utilizes the changes in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) sub-carrier amplitude information to simultaneously predict the identity, activity and the trajectory of a user and create a user profile that is of similar utility to a one made through a video camera based approach. The novelty of the proposed solution is that the system is fully autonomous and requires zero user intervention unlike systems that require user originated initialization, or a user held transmitting device to facilitate the prediction. Experimental results demonstrate over 95% accuracy for user identification and activity recognition, while the user localization results exhibit a ±12cm error, which is a significant …

The enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) mechanism enables IEEE 802.11p to accommodate differential quality of service (QoS) levels in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, through four access categories (ACs). This paper presents multi-dimensional discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) based model to study the effect of parallel operation of the ACs on the medium access control (MAC) layer performance of ITS-G5 IEEE 802.11p. The overall model consists of four queue models with their respective traffic generators, which are appropriately linked with the DTMCs modeling the operation of each AC. Closed-form solutions for the steady-state probabilities of the models are obtained, which are then utilized to derive expressions for key performance indicators at the MAC layer. An application for a highway scenario is presented to draw insights on the performance. The results show how the …