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Rate control with autoregressive forecasting for high frequency communication

Published in:
2022 IEEE Military Communications Conf., MILCOM, 28 November - 2 December 2022.

Summary

This work introduces a data-driven framework for rate control and applies it to high frequency (HF) communication systems that propagate via the Earth’s ionosphere. The rate control approach uses statistical techniques to forecast channel state with an autoregressive (AR) model, which has previously been applied to different forms of wireless fading, including "medium" timescale fading at HF. The objective of rate control is to maximize the data rate while constraining the rate of packets decoded in error. We show that under ideal assumptions, the rate controller selects the rate by backing off from the forecast average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by a factor of sigmaQ^-1(Beta), where sigma^2 correlates with fading variance, Beta denotes a constraint on decoder errors, and Q(.) is the complementary cumulative distribution function of the Gaussian distribution. Simulation results on an HF channel model show that compared with naive schemes, AR forecasting provides a good balance between achieving high rate and ensuring reliability.
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Summary

This work introduces a data-driven framework for rate control and applies it to high frequency (HF) communication systems that propagate via the Earth’s ionosphere. The rate control approach uses statistical techniques to forecast channel state with an autoregressive (AR) model, which has previously been applied to different forms of wireless...

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Capacity bounds for frequency-hopped BPSK

Published in:
2021 IEEE Military Communications Conf., MILCOM, 29 November - 2 December 2021.

Summary

In some channels, such as the frequency-hop channel, the transmission may undergo abrupt transitions in phase. This can require the receiver to re-estimate the phase on each hop, or for the system to utilize modulation techniques that lend themselves to noncoherent detection. How well the receiver can estimate the phase depends on the channel signal-to-noise ratio and how long phase coherence can be assumed. Although prior work has shown that using any reference symbols to aid the phase estimation process is suboptimal with respect to capacity, their presence may be useful in practice as they can simplify the receiver processing. In this paper, the effects of per-pulse phase uncertainty are examined for systems using binary modulation. Both the fraction of the transmission that may be devoted to reference symbols without substantially reducing the overall channel capacity and the point at which it is better to forego coherent processing in favor of noncoherent demodulation are examined.
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Summary

In some channels, such as the frequency-hop channel, the transmission may undergo abrupt transitions in phase. This can require the receiver to re-estimate the phase on each hop, or for the system to utilize modulation techniques that lend themselves to noncoherent detection. How well the receiver can estimate the phase...

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Learning emergent discrete message communication for cooperative reinforcement learning

Published in:
37th Conf. on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, UAI 2021, early access, 26-30 July 2021.

Summary

Communication is a important factor that enables agents work cooperatively in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Most previous work uses continuous message communication whose high representational capacity comes at the expense of interpretability. Allowing agents to learn their own discrete message communication protocol emerged from a variety of domains can increase the interpretability for human designers and other agents. This paper proposes a method to generate discrete messages analogous to human languages, and achieve communication by a broadcast-and-listen mechanism based on self-attention. We show that discrete message communication has performance comparable to continuous message communication but with much a much smaller vocabulary size. Furthermore, we propose an approach that allows humans to interactively send discrete messages to agents.
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Summary

Communication is a important factor that enables agents work cooperatively in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Most previous work uses continuous message communication whose high representational capacity comes at the expense of interpretability. Allowing agents to learn their own discrete message communication protocol emerged from a variety of domains can increase...

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Collaborative and passive channel gain estimation in fading environments

Author:
Published in:
IEEE Trans. Cognitive Commun. and Netw., Vol. 5, No. 4, December 2019, pp. 863-72.

Summary

Dynamic spectrum access techniques are typically aided by knowledge of the wireless channel gains among participating radios, as this knowledge allows the potential interference impact of any radio's transmissions on its neighbors to be quantified. We present a technique for collaborative inference of the channel gains which relies solely on the radios monitoring their aggregate transmitted and received energies as they transmit their data packets. We demonstrate that through low data-rate exchange of these energy metrics among bursty networks, the gains can be jointly estimated within a dB and with low latency on the order of seconds. In particular, we derive the best linear unbiased estimator (BLUE) for the gains. While this estimator relies on knowledge of fading parameters not known in practice, we propose a practical variant which achieves performance comparable to the BLUE in the realistic fading setting used in our simulations.
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Summary

Dynamic spectrum access techniques are typically aided by knowledge of the wireless channel gains among participating radios, as this knowledge allows the potential interference impact of any radio's transmissions on its neighbors to be quantified. We present a technique for collaborative inference of the channel gains which relies solely on...

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Single antenna in-band full-duplex isolation-improvement techniques

Published in:
IEEE Int. Symp. Antennas and Propagation (APSURSI), 26 June - 1 July 2016.
Topic:
R&D group:

Summary

Many in-band full-duplex wireless systems transmit and receive on a single antenna to minimize redundancy and maintain compact form factors. For effective operation, all of these systems need to maximize transmit-to-receive isolation, which is limited by non-ideal antenna matching and non-zero circulator leakage. Several isolation-improvement techniques are investigated in this paper, and illustrate how RF components can be used to minimize the consequential self-interference of these systems. Two unique cancellation schemes were validated, and the isolation of a single-antenna transceiver was measured to improve by 15 and 33 dB over the 100 MHz bandwidth centered at 2.45 GHz.
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Summary

Many in-band full-duplex wireless systems transmit and receive on a single antenna to minimize redundancy and maintain compact form factors. For effective operation, all of these systems need to maximize transmit-to-receive isolation, which is limited by non-ideal antenna matching and non-zero circulator leakage. Several isolation-improvement techniques are investigated in this...

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Multitap RF canceller for in-band full-duplex wireless communications

Published in:
IEEE Wirel. Commun., Vol. 15, No. 6, June 2016, pp. 4321-34.
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R&D group:

Summary

In-band full-duplex wireless communications are challenging because they require the mitigation of self-interference caused by the co-located transmitter to operate effectively. This paper presents a novel tapped delay line RF canceller architecture with multiple non-uniform pre-weighted taps to improve system isolation by cancelling both the direct antenna coupling as well as multipath effects that comprise a typical interference channel. A four-tap canceller prototype was measured over several different operating conditions, and was found to provide an average of 30 dB signal cancellation over a 30 MHz bandwidth centered at 2.45 GHz in isolated scenarios. When combined with an omni-directional high-isolation antenna, the canceller improved the overall analog isolation to 90 dB for these cases. In an indoor setting, the canceller suppressed a +30 dBm OFDM signal by 22 dB over a 20 MHz bandwidth centered at 2.45 GHz, and produced 78 dB of total analog isolation. This complete evaluation demonstrates not only the performance limitations of an optimized multitap RF canceller, but also establishes the amount of analog interference suppression that can be expected for the different environments considered.
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Summary

In-band full-duplex wireless communications are challenging because they require the mitigation of self-interference caused by the co-located transmitter to operate effectively. This paper presents a novel tapped delay line RF canceller architecture with multiple non-uniform pre-weighted taps to improve system isolation by cancelling both the direct antenna coupling as well...

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Simultaneous Transmit and Receive (STAR) mobile testbed

Published in:
2016 IEEE Radio and Wireless Symp., RWS 2016, 24-27 January 2016.
Topic:
R&D group:

Summary

Simultaneous Transmit and Receive (STAR) systems typically utilize multiple cancellation layers to improve system isolation and avoid self-interference. The design of these different layers must be evaluated both individually and as a whole to determine their effectiveness in various environments. A flexible and reusable mobile testbed was constructed to aid in the development and assessment of these different STAR technologies for both stationary and non-stationary applications. The usefulness of this platform was confirmed during the integration of an example STAR system that measured greater than 100 dB of total system isolation over a 30 MHz bandwidth centered at 2.45 GHz.
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Summary

Simultaneous Transmit and Receive (STAR) systems typically utilize multiple cancellation layers to improve system isolation and avoid self-interference. The design of these different layers must be evaluated both individually and as a whole to determine their effectiveness in various environments. A flexible and reusable mobile testbed was constructed to aid...

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Fast online learning of antijamming and jamming strategies

Summary

Competing Cognitive Radio Network (CCRN) coalesces communicator (comm) nodes and jammers to achieve maximal networking efficiency in the presence of adversarial threats. We have previously developed two contrasting approaches for CCRN based on multi-armed bandit (MAB) and Qlearning. Despite their differences, both approaches have shown to achieve optimal throughput performance. This paper addresses a harder class of problems where channel rewards are time-varying such that learning based on stochastic assumptions cannot guarantee the optimal performance. This new problem is important because an intelligent adversary will likely introduce dynamic changepoints, which can make our previous approaches ineffective. We propose a new, faster learning algorithm using online convex programming that is computationally simpler and stateless. According to our empirical results, the new algorithm can almost instantly find an optimal strategy that achieves the best steady-state channel rewards.
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Summary

Competing Cognitive Radio Network (CCRN) coalesces communicator (comm) nodes and jammers to achieve maximal networking efficiency in the presence of adversarial threats. We have previously developed two contrasting approaches for CCRN based on multi-armed bandit (MAB) and Qlearning. Despite their differences, both approaches have shown to achieve optimal throughput performance...

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Vehicle-mounted STAR antenna isolation performance

Published in:
IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Int. Symp. 2015, 19-25 July 2015.
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Summary

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems promise enhanced safety for passengers, but require access to a crowded wireless spectrum to enable their data links. Simultaneous Transmit and Receive (STAR) systems can facilitate this spectrum access by increasing the number of users within a given frequency band. Since high isolation is needed for STAR system operation, the effect of mounting a STAR antenna on a vehicle is investigated in this paper. The omni-directional antennas isolation performance was measured to be 53 dB at 2.45 GHz across a 60 MHz bandwidth, which confirms that the vehicle does not significantly degrade isolation performance.
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Summary

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems promise enhanced safety for passengers, but require access to a crowded wireless spectrum to enable their data links. Simultaneous Transmit and Receive (STAR) systems can facilitate this spectrum access by increasing the number of users within a given frequency band. Since high isolation is needed for STAR...

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Simultaneous transmit and receive (STAR) system architecture using multiple analog cancellation layers

Published in:
2015 IEEE MTT-S Int. Microwave Symp. (IMS 2015) 17-22 May 2015.
Topic:
R&D group:

Summary

Simultaneous Transmit and Receive operation requires a high amount of transmit-to-receive isolation in order to avoid self-interference. This isolation is best achieved by utilizing multiple cancellation techniques. The combination of adaptive multiple-input multiple-output spatial cancellation with a high-isolation antenna and RF canceller produces a novel system architecture that focuses on cancellation in the analog domain before the receiver's low-noise amplifier. A prototype of this system has been implemented on a moving vehicle, and measurements have proven that this design is capable of providing more than 90 dB of total isolation in realistic multi path environments over a 30 MHz bandwidth centered at 2.45 GHz. Index Terms-Adaptive systems, full-duplex wireless communication, interference cancellation, multiaccess communication, simultaneous transmit and receive, STAR.
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Summary

Simultaneous Transmit and Receive operation requires a high amount of transmit-to-receive isolation in order to avoid self-interference. This isolation is best achieved by utilizing multiple cancellation techniques. The combination of adaptive multiple-input multiple-output spatial cancellation with a high-isolation antenna and RF canceller produces a novel system architecture that focuses on...

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