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Light-fidelity (LiFi) is a light-based wireless communication technology which can complement radio-frequency (RF) communication technologies for indoor applications. Although LiFi signals are spatially more contained than RF signals, the broadcasting nature of LiFi also makes it susceptible to eavesdropping. Therefore, it is important to secure the transmitted data against potential eavesdroppers. In this paper, an overview of the recent developments pertaining to LiFi physical layer security (PLS) is provided, and the main differences between LiFi PLS and RF PLS are explained. LiFi achievable secrecy rates and upper bounds are then investigated under practical channel models and transmission schemes. Beamforming and jamming, which received significant research attention recently as a means to achieve PLS in LiFi, are also investigated under indoor illumination constraints. Finally, future research directions of interest in LiFi PLS are identified and discussed. This article is part of the theme issue Optical wireless communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visible light communication (VLC) is an emerging short-range optical wireless communication technology that is driven by the widespread deployment of light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Indoor VLC users may experience noticeable interference when independent transmitters utilizing wide-beam luminaires are closely located. In this paper, a coordinated beamforming (CB) scheme is proposed for downlink interference mitigation among the coexisting VLC attocells utilizing multi-luminaire transmitters. Compared to joint transmission (JT) schemes, wherein the data and channel state information are shared among transmitters of different attocells, the proposed CB scheme places lower requirements on the network in terms of backbone traffic, and is easier to implement in a practical deployment, though at the cost of compromised performance. In this paper, we investigate the downlink transmission of coordinated VLC attocells and focus on its transmitter design. The weighted sum mean square error (WSMSE) is adopted as the performance metric to take into consideration interference, noise, and fairness among users in system optimization. The WSMSE minimization problem is considered with linear beamforming restricted by amplitude constraints. Such constraints arise from the dynamic range limitations in typical LEDs. Moreover, we extend our design method to take into account possible mismatches in channel information available to the transmitters. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed CB scheme in typical VLC scenarios. We also quantify the performance gap among several coordination schemes including JT and CB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are at the dawn of an era in information and communication technology with unprecedented demand for connected and automated everything. Both Shannon theories and industrial advances have clearly evidenced that more densely packed networks and a much wider operating bandwidth are key drivers for meeting the escalating wireless network demands. Recently, there have been substantial research efforts on the exploitation of higher frequency bands, in particular the millimetre wave and optical wireless bands. After a decade of active research and development, and along with the maturity of device technology, Visible Light Communications (VLC) has emerged as a very promising technology to enable next generation digital innovations and support wide range of applications. This special issue on VLC focuses on three core thrusts of the discipline: Localisation, Communication and Networking. The overall aim of the special issue is to inspire multi-disciplinary international communities to work together in order to achieve further research advances. Indeed, a total of 96 high quality papers were received from both academia and industry. After a careful peer-reviewing process, 17 papers were selected based on their combined novelty, rigour, and impact. Owing to the highly selective nature of JSAC, many other interesting papers were not selected for the special issue, but we hope that these papers might appear elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Visible-light communication (VLC) systems leverage solid-state illumination devices to create high-speed communication links. Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) has been considered for these intensity-modulated/direct-detection (IM/DD) optical channels, however, it suffers from high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). Moreover, the implementation of linear, power-efficient, high-current, wideband drivers is challenging. In this paper, the concept of spatial summing is developed where wideband, high PAPR OFDM signals are partitioned into many low-PAPR narrowband signals that are transmitted from multiple LEDs. The signals from different LEDs are allowed to sum in space before being detected by a conventional OFDM receiver. Spatial optical-OFDM (SO-OFDM) is proposed in which filtered subsets of carriers are emitted by each LED. In addition, low-PAPR optical single-carrier FDMA (OSC-FDMA) is developed where different collections of LEDs act as virtual users in a multiple-access scheme. The different variations of SO-OFDM and OSC-FDMA are compared to conventional DC-biased optical (DCO) OFDM and are shown to achieve lower PAPR and more robustness to LED nonlinearities leading to error rate performance gains at high signal-to-noise ratios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underwater acoustic communication networks (UWANs) have recently attracted much attention in the research community. Two properties that set UWANs apart from most radio-frequency wireless communication networks are the long propagation delay and the possible sparsity of the network topology. This in turn offers opportunities to optimize throughput through time and spatial reuse. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive coding method to realize the former. We consider time-slotted scheduling protocols, which are a popular solution for contention-free and interference-free access in small-scale UWANs, and exploit the surplus guard time that occurs for individual links for improving transmission reliability. In particular, using link distances as side information, transmitters utilize the available portion of the time slot to adapt their code rate and increase reliability. Since increased reliability trades off with energy consumption per transmission, we optimize the code rate for best tradeoff, considering both single and multiple packet transmission using the incremental redundancy hybrid automatic repeat request (IR–HARQ) protocol. For practical implementation of this adaptive coding scheme, we consider punctured and rateless codes. Simulation results demonstrate the gains achieved by our coding scheme over fixed-rate error-correction codes in terms of both throughput and consumption of transmitted energy per successfully delivered packet. We also report results from a sea trial conducted at the Haifa harbor, which corroborate the simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The operational lifetime of a wireless sensor network (WSN) for event detection is determined by the maximum time that the network is able to meet given detection requirements (DRs), i.e., the probabilities of detection and false alarm demanded by the application. In this paper, we address the problem of maximizing lifetime of such WSNs through optimizing quantization and routing of event measurements. In particular, we consider the task of monitoring multiple events and reporting the observations to a sink, whereby sensor nodes adapt their data generation rate and the data flow distribution in the network for the purpose of lifetime maximization. We make use of ultra-wideband (UWB) signaling at the physical layer, which is well-suited for event-detection WSNs, because of the low-energy consumption for data transmission and relative robustness to multiuser interference. Expressing the DRs as convex constraints in the optimization variables, we present a convex-optimization framework for lifetime maximization of event detection UWB-based WSNs. Furthermore, based on the dual decomposition approach, we propose a decentralized algorithm, which makes it possible to solve the lifetime-maximization problem in a distributed manner and thus shares the computational complexity among network nodes and is robust to artifacts like node failures. Numerical results show that the proposed joint adaptation of quantization and routing leads to significant improvements in network operational lifetime compared to benchmark approaches known from literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the performance of the Multiband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) system for Ultra Wideband (UWB) communication in the presence of interference from IEEE 802.16 WiMAX systems operating in the 3.5 GHz band. We present an exact analysis of the uncoded bit error rate (BER) of the MB-OFDM system, based on Laplace transform techniques. We also present a simple Gaussian approximation for the WiMAX interference, and establish its relative accuracy and usefulness by means of comparison with the exact analysis and simulations. Such a Gaussian approximation is especially useful for simplified performance analysis, as well as for the design of interference mitigation techniques. Motivated by the Gaussian approximation, we propose a simple two-stage interference mitigation technique for coded MB-OFDM transmissions, consisting of interference spectrum estimation during silent periods followed by appropriate bit metric weighting during Viterbi decoding. We compare parametric and non-parametric spectrum estimation techniques for various scenarios of interest. In the presence of WiMAX interference, the two-stage interference mitigation provides substantial gains in performance in return for modest increases in complexity and without requiring any modifications to the MB-OFDM transmitter or signal structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) observes a natural field and aims to recreate it with sufficient fidelity at a, perhaps distant, Fusion Center (FC) using a wireless communication channel of arbitrary capacity. We propose a universal and power efficient method for such data extraction, based on Digital Fountain Codes (DFCs) and joint-source channel decoding. Our method implements a distributed 'rate-less' DFC which automatically tunes the number of transmissions to the channel capacity. Furthermore, instead of directly compressing the WSN data, we achieve rate reduction by treating the spatiotemporal dependencies in the field as an outer code, and jointly decoding this concatenation at the FC using a multi-stage iterative decoder. We demonstrate that a power efficiency close to the capacity-rate-distortion limit is achieved at moderate distortion levels, irrespective of the channel capacity or field dependencies. As compared to the traditional approach of source-channel separation, the proposed data extraction scheme is particularly attractive for WSN applications due its computationally simple encoding procedure, low latency and the ability to seamlessly trade-off fidelity of reconstruction for power consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) comprise of highly power constrained nodes that observe a hidden natural field and reconstruct it at a distant data fusion center. Algorithmic strategies for extending the lifetime of such networks invariably require a knowledge of the statistical model of the underlying field. Since centralized model identification is communication intensive and eats into any potential power savings, we present a stochastic recursive identification algorithm which can be implemented in a fully distributed and scalable manner within the network. We demonstrate that it consumes modest resources relative to centralized estimation, and is stable, unbiased, and asymptotically efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel noncoherent detection algorithm for differential space-time modulation (DSTM) over flat-fading multiple-input-multiple-output channels is presented. This algorithm, which is referred to as decision-feedback subset multiple-symbol differential detection (DF-S-MSDD), combines ideas from decision-feedback differential detection (DFDD) and subset multiple-symbol differential detection (S-MSDD). More specifically, the DF-S-MSDD decision metric includes a number of previous decisions (i.e., decision feedback), and the optimization over the remaining hypothetical symbols returns decisions only on a subset of these symbols (i.e., S-MSDD). Furthermore, an implementation of DF-S-MSDD based on tree-search (TS) methods is devised. Due to the concept of subset detection, DF-S-MSDD outperforms MSDD in terms of error-rate performance. At the same time, due to the use of decision feedback, it also requires lower computational complexity than the TS-based MSDD schemes for the DSTM recently proposed in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a wireless sensor network (WSN) that monitors a physical field and communicates pertinent data to a distant fusion center (FC). We study the case of a binary valued hidden natural field observed in a significant amount of Gaussian clutter, which is relevant to applications like detection of plumes or oil slicks. The considerable spatio-temporal dependencies found in natural fields can be exploited to improve the reliability of the detection/estimation of hidden phenomena. While this problem has been previously treated using kernel-regression techniques, we formulate it as a task of delay-free filtering on a process observed by the sensors. We propose a distributed scalable implementation of the filter within the network. This is achieved by i) exploiting the localized spatio-temporal dependencies to define a hidden Markov model (HMM) in terms of an exponential family with O(N) parameters, where N is the size of the WSN, ii) using a reduced-state approximation of the propagated probability mass function, and iii) making a tractable approximation of model marginals by using iterated decoding algorithms like the Gibbs sampler (GS), mean field decoding (MFD), iterated conditional modes (ICM), and broadcast belief propagation (BBP). We compare the marginalization algorithms in terms of their information geometry, performance, complexity and communication load. Finally, we analyze the energy efficiency of the proposed distributed filter relative to brute force data fusion. It is demonstrated that when the FC is sufficiently far away from the sensor array, distributed filtering is significantly more energy efficient and can increase the lifetime of the WSN by one to two orders of magnitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bluetooth is a popular short-range low-power radio standard for wireless personal area networks. Bluetooth transmitters employ Gaussian frequency shift keying (GFSK) and simple block codes for error correction. Recently, two new receiver designs for Bluetooth devices, which are the so-called modified limiter-discriminator detector with integrate-and-dump filtering (LDI) and noncoherent sequence detection (NSD), have been pro- posed in the literature. While the modified LDI receiver is a concatenation of a conventional LDI detector with an improved error-correction decoder, the NSD receiver fully takes into account the memory introduced by the GFSK. Both receivers have been shown to improve the Bluetooth system performance in terms of physical-layer metrics such as bit-error rate and packet-error rate. In this paper, we present a comprehensive performance evaluation considering practically more relevant metrics such as throughput, delay, and delay jitter at the medium-access control layer. To this end, we develop an evaluation framework, which includes the spatial distribution of Bluetooth devices, path loss, fading, realistic data traffic models, scheduling, automatic repeat request, and baseband packet selection. Our numerical and simulation results verify that the newly introduced Bluetooth receivers, especially NSD, offer a significant performance enhancement for Bluetooth systems in terms of practically relevant measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several recent standards such as IEEE 802.11a/g, IEEE 802.16, and the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) Multiband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) for High Data-Rate Ultra-Wideband em- ploy bit-interleaved convolutionally coded multicarrier modulation over quasi-static fading channels. Motivated by the lack of appropriate error rate analysis techniques for this popular type of system and channel model, we present two novel analytical methods for bit error rate (BER) estimation of coded multicarrier systems operating over frequency-selective quasi-static channels with nonideal interleaving. In the first method, the approximate performance of the system is calculated for each realization of the channel, which is suitable for obtaining the outage BER performance (a common performance measure for, e.g., MB-OFDM systems). The second method assumes Rayleigh distributed frequency-domain subcarrier channel gains and knowledge of their correlation matrix, and can be used to directly obtain the average BER performance. Both methods are applicable to convolutionally coded interleaved multi-carrier systems employing quadrature amplitude modulation, and are also able to account for narrowband interference (modeled as a sum of tone interferers). To illustrate the application of the proposed analysis, both methods are used to study the performance of a tone-interference-impaired MB-OFDM system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Rankin, Taylor, and Martin (RTM) have proposed a simple channel-augmentation scheme for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. They have shown that the virtual receive antennas created by repeating the same transmit symbols several times can improve the outage rate of slow MIMO fading channels, especially if the number of transmit antennas is smaller than the number of receive antennas. Inspired by the RTM paper, we propose in this paper two channel-augmentation schemes having the same low complexity as the RTM scheme. In the first, the transmitted symbols are both repeated and complex conjugated leading to the conjugate virtual antenna (CVA) scheme. In the second, the transmitted symbols are constrained to be real-valued leading to the real virtual antenna (RVA) scheme. We show that the RTM, CVA, and RVA schemes can achieve a higher outage rate than the baseline scheme without augmentation for both V-BLAST and D-BLAST. The novel RVA and CVA schemes are seen to be more robust to channel correlation than the RTM scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differential space-time modulation (DSTM) using unitary-matrix signal constellations is an attractive solution for transmission over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) fading channels without requiring channel state information (CSI) at the receiver. To avoid a high error floor for DSTM in relatively fast MIMO fading channels, multiple-symbol differential detection (MSDD) has to be applied at the receiver. MSDD jointly processes blocks of several received matrix-symbols, and power efficiency improves as the blocksize increases. But since the search space of MSDD grows exponentially with the blocksize and also with the number of transmit antennas and the data rate, the complexity of MSDD quickly becomes prohibitive. In this paper, we investigate the application of tree-search algorithms to overcome the complexity limitation of MSDD. We devise a nested MSDD structure consisting of an outer and a number of inner tree-search decoders, which renders MSDD feasible for wide ranges of system parameters. Decoder designs tailored for diagonal and orthogonal DSTM codes are given, and a more power-efficient variant of MSDD, so- called subset MSDD, is proposed. Furthermore, we derive a tight symbol-error rate approximation for MSDD, which lends itself to efficient numerical evaluation. Numerical and simulation results for different DSTM constellations and fading channel scenarios show that the new tree-search MSDD achieves a significantly better performance-complexity tradeoff than benchmark decoders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Direct-sequence ultra wideband (DS-UWB) transmission is a strong contender for the physical layer of high data-rate short-range UWB systems. Since long delay spreads in UWB channels cause significant intersymbol interference, DS-UWB systems require equalization. In this second part of two papers, we investigate equalization for DS-UWB with 4-ary biorthogonal keying (4BOK), which is one of the two modulation formats that was proposed for standardization by the IEEE 802.15.3a task group. To this end, we first derive expressions for the bit error rate (BER) accord- ing to the matched-filter bound for 4BOK DS-UWB, which serve as theoretical performance limits for equalization. We then devise structures and methods for filter optimization for low-complexity linear and nonlinear equalization schemes. In this context, we develop a new equivalent multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) description of 4BOK DS-UWB, which facilitates the design of efficient equalizers using MIMO filter optimization techniques. Furthermore, we propose the application of widely linear processing to these equalizers. Simulation and semianalytical results show that MIMO equalization is greatly advantageous over more obvious non-MIMO schemes and that the proposed MIMO equalizers allow for power-efficient 4BOK DS-UWB transmission close to the theoretical limits with moderate computational complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a receiver design for Bluetooth transmission based on Laurent's decomposition of the Bluetooth transmit signal. The main features of this receiver are 1) its low complexity compared to alternative solutions; 2) its excellent performance close to the theoretical limit; and 3) its high robustness against frequency offsets, phase noise, and modulation index variations, which are characteristic for low-cost Bluetooth devices. In particular, we show that the devised noncoherent decision-feedback equalization receiver achieves a similar performance as a recently proposed two-state noncoherent sequence detector, while it is advantageous in terms of complexity. The new receiver design is therefore highly attractive for a practical implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ultra-wideband wireless transmission has attracted considerable attention both in academia and industry. For high-rate and short-range transmission, direct sequence based ultra-wideband (DS-UWB) systems are a strong contender for consumer market applications. Due to the large transmission bandwidth, the UWB channel is characterized by a long root-mean-square delay spread and the RAKE receiver cannot always overcome the resulting intersymbol interference. We therefore study equalization for DS-UWB systems. This paper is comprised of two parts. In this first part, we consider DS-UWB with binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) modulation, which is the mandatory transmission mode for DS-UWB systems promoted by the UWB Forum industry alliance. We derive matched filter bounds for optimum equalization taking into account practical constraints like receiver filtering, sampling, and the number of RAKE fingers when RAKE preprocessing is applied at the receiver. Our results show that chip-rate sampling is sufficient for close-to-optimum performance. For analysis of suboptimum equalization strategies we further study the distribution of the zeros of the channel transfer function including RAKE combining. Our findings suggest that linear equalization is well suited for the lower data rate modes of DS-UWB systems, whereas nonlinear equalization is preferable for high-data rate modes. Moreover, we devise equalization schemes with widely linear processing, which improves performance while not increasing equalizer complexity. Simulation and numerical results confirm the significance of our analysis and equalizer designs and show that low-complexity (widely) linear and nonlinear equalizers perform close to the pertinent matched filter bound limit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new class of distributed space-time block codes (DSTBCs) is introduced. These DSTBCs are designed for wireless networks which have a large set of single-antenna relay nodes N, but at any given time only a small, a priori unknown subset of nodes S ⊂ N can be active. In the proposed scheme, the signal transmitted by an active relay node is the product of an information-carrying code matrix and a unique node signature vector of length Nc. It is shown that existing STBCs designed for Nc ≥ 2 co-located antennas are favorable choices for the code matrix, guaranteeing a diversity order of d = min{NS, Nc} if NS nodes are active. For the most interesting case, NS ≥ Nc, the performance loss entailed by the distributed implementation is analytically characterized. Furthermore, efficient methods for the optimization of the set of signature vectors are provided. Depending on the chosen design, the proposed DSTBCs allow for low-complexity coherent, differential, and noncoherent detection, respectively. Possible applications include ad hoc and sensor networks employing decode-and-forward relaying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In multiple-symbol differential detection (MSDD) for power-efficient transmission over Rayleigh fading channels without channel state information, blocks of N received symbols are jointly processed to decide on N - 1 data symbols. The search space for the maximum-likelihood (ML) estimate is therefore (complex) (N - 1)-dimensional, and maximum-likelihood MSDD (ML-MSDD) quickly becomes computationally intractable as N grows. Mackenthun's low-complexity MSDD algorithm finds the ML estimate only for Rayleigh fading channels that are time-invariant over an N symbol period. For the general time-varying fading case, however, low-complexity ML-MSDD is an unsolved problem. In this letter, we solve this problem by applying sphere decoding (SD) to ML-MSDD for time-varying Rayleigh fading channels. The resulting technique is referred to as multiple-symbol differential sphere decoding (MSDSD). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of power efficient receivers for Bluetooth systems is a challenging task due to stringent complexity constraints. In this paper, we tackle this problem and present a receiver design consisting of a single filter and a subsequent noncoherent sequence detector. This receiver outperforms the conventional discriminator detector by more than 4 dB for typical Bluetooth channels. Thereby, the proposed noncoherent sequence detection (NSD) algorithm is both favorably low complex as it operates on a two-state trellis and highly robust against channel phase variations caused by low-cost local oscillators. The particular filter design accomplishes effective out-of-band interference suppression. Different from previous work on sequence detector receivers published in the literature, we take possible variations of the Bluetooth modulation parameters into account, and we also devise efficient methods for combined NSD and forward error correction decoding. Hence, the presented receiver design is an attractive solution for practical Bluetooth devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This letter presents an improved error-correction decoder for Bluetooth systems, employing the limiter-discriminator detector with integrate and dump filter (LDI detector) and the expurgated (15,10) binary Hamming code, which is used to protect the payload of data medium-rate packets. The proposed decoder exploits the error statistic of the LDI detector output and makes use of the single-error-correcting double-adjacent-error-correcting (SEC-DAEC) capability of the expurgated (15,10) code. As a result, notable improvements in data throughput and/or transmission range are achieved. Since the performance gains come at no additional cost in implementation, the proposed decoder is highly attractive for application in low-cost Bluetooth devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which considered power-efficient and bandwidth-efficient encoded transmission over fading channels with reception and without channel state formation. Basis for variation in frequency-selective channels of transmission systems for wireless communications; Results; Conclusion.

We consider the design of ultra-wideband (UWB) systems that enable high data rate communications for short-range wireless applications. In particular, we consider the downlink of a direct sequence UWB (DS-UWB) system in which the base station is equipped with multiple antennas and employs pre-rake combining, while each user employs a simple single antenna receiver. We propose the use of multiuser filters for the purpose of pre-equalization at the transmitter in order to mitigate the combined effects of intersymbol interference (ISI) and multiuser interference (MUI) that are generated at the receivers as a result of the wideband nature of the users' channels. For this system, we study the joint design of the transmitter's pre-equalization filters and each receiver's scalar gain under two design criteria. The first design minimizes the total transmitted power from the base station subject to achieving physical layer quality of service requirements of different users. For this design, we show that the calculation of the pre-equalization filters and the receiver gains can be formulated as an efficiently solvable convex optimization problem. In the second design, we consider the minimization of a weighted sum of each user's mean-square error. In order to obtain a computationally tractable solution for this design criterion, we exploit the dual DS-UWB uplink that employs rake combining and post-equalization filters at a central receiver. The numerical studies for each design criterion under realistic models of UWB channel propagation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed multiuser pre-equalization filter designs in mitigating ISI and MUI, and thus their ability to enable reliable pre-rake DS-UWB downlink transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]