Wireless Propagation Mentor: David Browne Valerie Bick Eric

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Wireless Propagation
Mentor David Browne

• Valerie Bick Eric Seidler
• Katherine Kuan Haleh Tabrizi

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UnWiReD Lab

• Located in the Engineering IV Building, 5th Floor
• Research physical layer wireless communications
• coded modulation demodulation
• synchronization channel characterization
• equalization
• - Grad students Jared Dulmage, Daniel Liu,
  Heechoon Lee, Michael Samuel

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Background

• Omni-directional antennas are NOT energy
  efficient in sparsely connected networks
• Attempting new network design using directional
  antennas for wilderness deployment

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Background

• Challenges associated with directional antennas
• Assembling network (need alignment)
• Nodes dont know where their neighbors are
  located
• Alternative pathways other than line of sight may
  exist
• Find algorithm to allow quick and efficient
  assembly of the network

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Wireless Propagation Project
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Wireless Propagation Project
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Individual Projects

• Automatic Gain Control
• Wideband Radio Synthesizer Programming
• Signal Processing
• Antenna Characterization and Robotics
• Local and Remote Interface

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System Overview
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Automatic Gain Control

• Eric and Kat

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Automatic Gain Control
ex signal too weak
Boost Gain
Gain or Attenuation
Boost Gain
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Automatic Gain Control
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Automatic Gain Control

• Used PC to communicate to MaxStream radio modem
• Communicated b/t 2 radio modems
• Used MaxStream radios to send commands to
  NovaSource radio
• Worked with Acqiris Digitizer and Function
  Generator
• Setup simplified feedback loop

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Wideband Radio Synthesizer Programming

• Kat

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Wideband Radio Synthesizer
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Wideband Radio Synthesizer

• Adapt parallel port interface to allow node to
  program synthesizers on the fly
• Rewire parallel port
• Learn synthesizer programming from Linux
• Integrate power sensing into Matlab

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Signal Processing

• Haleh

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Signal Processing

• Fourier processing technique
• Develop a data archival format that is efficient
• Implement in Matlab

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Signal Processing
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Signal Processing

• Communicate with the Nova Source
• Write Matlab code to generate signals with
  certain frequencies
• See the results in a spectrum analyzer

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Signal Processing
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Signal Processing

• Generate a sample signal of 70MHz
• Generate White Gaussian Noise
• Add the two signals (Time Domain)

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Signal Processing

• Transform the signal with AWGN to the frequency
  domain to obtain the original signal.
• Calculate the original signal and noise powers
• Calculate the SNR

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Antenna Characterization and Robotics

• Eric

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Antenna Characterization and Robotics

• Install new antennas and characterize antennas
• Mechanics
• Mount new antennas on robots
• Secure robots for transport

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Antenna Characterization and Robotics

• Update robot control software in Matlab
• Electrical
• Standardize wiring
• Provide power to WB Radio via Node
• Enable battery power of pelican node
• Mount battery charge indicators on batteries

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Local and Remote Interface

• Valerie

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Local and Remote Interface
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Local and Remote Interface

• Develop graphical user interface
• GPS interface with Google Earth
• Real time plots
• Experimental control
• Remote interface

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GPS
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GPS

• Collect GPS data outside Ackerman Student Union
• Begin writing code to process GPS data

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The End!
WP