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1. Wake-up radio-based data forwarding for green wireless networks

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2020.05.046  

   Koutsandria, G. ; DiValerio, V. ; Spenza, D. ; Basagni, S. ; Petrioli, C. ( April 2020 , Computer communications)

   Green wireless networks Wake-up radio Energy harvesting Routing Markov decision process Reinforcement learning 1. Introduction With 14.2 billions of connected things in 2019, over 41.6 billions expected by 2025, and a total spending on endpoints and services that will reach well over $1.1 trillion by the end of 2026, the Internet of Things (IoT) is poised to have a transformative impact on the way we live and on the way we work [1–3]. The vision of this ‘‘connected continuum’’ of objects and people, however, comes with a wide variety of challenges, especially for those IoT networks whose devices rely on some forms of depletable energy support. This has prompted research on hardware and software solutions aimed at decreasing the depen- dence of devices from ‘‘pre-packaged’’ energy provision (e.g., batteries), leading to devices capable of harvesting energy from the environment, and to networks – often called green wireless networks – whose lifetime is virtually infinite. Despite the promising advances of energy harvesting technologies, IoT devices are still doomed to run out of energy due to their inherent constraints on resources such as storage, processing and communica- tion, whose energy requirements often exceed what harvesting can provide. The communication circuitry of prevailing radio technology, especially, consumes relevant amount of energy even when in idle state, i.e., even when no transmissions or receptions occur. Even duty cycling, namely, operating with the radio in low energy consumption ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail address: koutsandria@di.uniroma1.it (G. Koutsandria). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2020.05.046 (sleep) mode for pre-set amounts of time, has been shown to only mildly alleviate the problem of making IoT devices durable [4]. An effective answer to eliminate all possible forms of energy consumption that are not directly related to communication (e.g., idle listening) is provided by ultra low power radio triggering techniques, also known as wake-up radios [5,6]. Wake-up radio-based networks allow devices to remain in sleep mode by turning off their main radio when no communication is taking place. Devices continuously listen for a trigger on their wake-up radio, namely, for a wake-up sequence, to activate their main radio and participate to communication tasks. Therefore, devices wake up and turn their main radio on only when data communication is requested by a neighboring device. Further energy savings can be obtained by restricting the number of neighboring devices that wake up when triggered. This is obtained by allowing devices to wake up only when they receive specific wake-up sequences, which correspond to particular protocol requirements, including distance from the destina- tion, current energy status, residual energy, etc. This form of selective awakenings is called semantic addressing [7]. Use of low-power wake-up radio with semantic addressing has been shown to remarkably reduce the dominating energy costs of communication and idle listening of traditional radio networking [7–12]. This paper contributes to the research on enabling green wireless networks for long lasting IoT applications. Specifically, we introduce a ABSTRACT This paper presents G-WHARP, for Green Wake-up and HARvesting-based energy-Predictive forwarding, a wake-up radio-based forwarding strategy for wireless networks equipped with energy harvesting capabilities (green wireless networks). Following a learning-based approach, G-WHARP blends energy harvesting and wake-up radio technology to maximize energy efficiency and obtain superior network performance. Nodes autonomously decide on their forwarding availability based on a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that takes into account a variety of energy-related aspects, including the currently available energy and that harvestable in the foreseeable future. Solution of the MDP is provided by a computationally light heuristic based on a simple threshold policy, thus obtaining further computational energy savings. The performance of G-WHARP is evaluated via GreenCastalia simulations, where we accurately model wake-up radios, harvestable energy, and the computational power needed to solve the MDP. Key network and system parameters are varied, including the source of harvestable energy, the network density, wake-up radio data rate and data traffic. We also compare the performance of G-WHARP to that of two state-of-the-art data forwarding strategies, namely GreenRoutes and CTP-WUR. Results show that G-WHARP limits energy expenditures while achieving low end-to-end latency and high packet delivery ratio. Particularly, it consumes up to 34% and 59% less energy than CTP-WUR and GreenRoutes, respectively. 

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2. A Single Antenna Full-Duplex Radio using a Non-Magnetic, CMOS Circulator with In-Built Isolation Tuning

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCW.2019.8756839  

   Nagulu, Aravind ; Chen, Tingjun ; Zussman, Gil ; Krishnaswamy, Harish ( July 2019 , 2019 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC Workshops))

   Wireless systems which can simultaneously transmit and receive (STAR) are gaining significant academic and commercial interest due to their wide range of applications such as full-duplex (FD) wireless communication and FMCW radar. FD radios, where the transmitter (TX) and the receiver (RX) operate simultaneously at the same frequency, can potentially double the data rate at the physical layer and can provide many other advantages in the higher layers. The antenna interface of an FD radio is typically built using a multi-antenna system, or a single antenna through a bulky magnetic circulator or a lossy reciprocal hybrid. However, recent advances in CMOS-integrated circulators through spatio-temporal conductivity modulation have shown promise and potential to replace traditional bulky magnetic circulators. However, unlike magnetic circulators, CMOS-integrated non-magnetic circulators will introduce some nonlinear distortion and spurious tones arising from their clock circuitry. In this work, we present an FD radio using a highly linear CMOS integrable circulator, a frequency-flat RF canceler, and a USRP software-defined radio (SDR). At TX power level of +15 dBm, the implemented FD radio achieves a self-interference cancellation (SIC) of +55dB from the circulator and RF canceler in the RF domain, and an overall SIC of +95dB together with SIC in the digital domain. To analyze the non-linear phenomena of the CMOS circulator, we calculated the link level data-rate gain in an FD system with imperfect SIC and then extended this calculation to count the effect of TX-RX non-linearity of the circulator. In addition, we provide a qualitative discussion on the spurious tone responses of the circulator due to the clocking imperfections and non-linearity. 

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3. A Single Antenna Full-Duplex Radio Using a Non-Magnetic, CMOS Circulator with In-built Isolation Tuning

   Aravind Nagulu, Tingjun Chen ( January 2019 , IEEE ICC'19 Workshop on Full-Duplex Communications for Future Wireless Networks)

   Wireless systems which can simultaneously transmit and receive (STAR) are gaining significant academic and commercial interest due to their wide range of applications such as full-duplex (FD) wireless communication and FMCW radar. FD radios, where the transmitter (TX) and the receiver (RX) operate simultaneously at the same frequency, can potentially double the data rate at the physical layer and can provide many other advantages in the higher layers. The antenna interface of an FD radio is typically built using a multi-antenna system, or a single antenna through a bulky magnetic circulator or a lossy reciprocal hybrid. However, recent advances in CMOS-integrated circulators through spatio-temporal conductivity modulation have shown promise and potential to replace traditional bulky magnetic circulators. However, unlike magnetic circulators, CMOS-integrated non-magnetic circulators will introduce some nonlinear distortion and spurious tones arising from their clock circuitry. In this work, we present an FD radio using a highly linear CMOS integrable circulator, a frequency-flat RF canceler, and a USRP software-defined radio (SDR). At TX power level of +15 dBm, the implemented FD radio achieves a self-interference cancellation (SIC) of +55 dB from the circulator and RF canceler in the RF domain, and an overall SIC of +95 dB together with SIC in the digital domain. To analyze the non-linear phenomena of the CMOS circulator, we calculated the link level data-rate gain in an FD system with imperfect SIC and then extended this calculation to count the effect of TX-RX non-linearity of the circulator. In addition, we provide a qualitative discussion on the spurious tone responses of the circulator due to the clocking imperfections and non-linearity. Index Terms—Circulator, CMOS, conductivity modulation, full-duplex, non-reciprocity, self-interference cancellation. 

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4. LTE PHY layer vulnerability analysis and testing using open-source SDR tools

   https://doi.org/10.1109/MILCOM.2017.8170787  

   Rao, Raghunandan M. ; Ha, Sean ; Marojevic, Vuk ; Reed, Jeffrey H. ( October 2017 , Military Communications Conference (MILCOM), MILCOM 2017 - 2017 IEEE)

   This paper provides a methodology to study the PHY layer vulnerability of wireless protocols in hostile radio environments. Our approach is based on testing the vulnerabilities of a system by analyzing the individual subsystems. By targeting an individual subsystem or a combination of subsystems at a time, we can infer the weakest part and revise it to improve the overall system performance. We apply our methodology to 4G LTE downlink by considering each control channel as a subsystem. We also develop open-source software enabling research and education using software-defined radios. We present experimental results with open-source LTE systems and shows how the different subsystems behave under targeted interference. The analysis for the LTE downlink shows that the synchronization signals (PSS/SSS) are very resilient to interference, whereas the downlink pilots or Cell-Specific Reference signals (CRS) are the most susceptible to a synchronized protocol-aware interferer. We also analyze the severity of control channel attacks for different LTE configurations. Our methodology and tools allow rapid evaluation of the PHY layer reliability in harsh signaling environments, which is an asset to improve current standards and develop new and robust wireless protocols. 

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5. COSMOS: Optical Architecture and Prototyping

   Gutterman, Craig ; Minakhmetov, Artur ; Yu, Jiakai ; Chen, Tingjun ; Zhu, Shengxiang ; Zussman, Gil ; Seskar, Ivan ; Raychaudhuri, Dipankar ; Kilper, Dan ( January 2019 , ACM SIGCOMM 2019 Workshop on Optical Systems Design)

   ABSTRACT The Cloud Enhanced Open Software Defined Mobile Wireless Testbed for City-Scale Deployment (COSMOS) platform is a programmable city-scale shared multiuser advanced wireless testbed that is being deployed in New York City [1]. Open APIs and programmability across all the technology components and protocol layers in COSMOS will enable researchers to explore 5G technologies in a real world environment. A key feature of COSMOS is its dark fiber based optical x-haul network that enables both highly flexible, user defined network topologies as well as experimentation directly in the optical physical layer. A paper on the COSMOS optical architecture was previously presented in [2]. In this talk, we briefly introduce COSMOS’ optical x-haul network with SDN control, and its integration with the software-defined radio (SDR) and mobile edge cloud. 

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