The Internet of Things (IoT) could enable the development of cloud multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems where internet-enabled devices can work as distributed transmission/reception entities. We expect that spatial multiplexing with distributed reception using cloud MIMO would be a key factor of future wireless communication systems. In this paper, we first review practical receivers for distributed reception of spatially multiplexed transmit data where the fusion center relies on quantized received signals conveyed from geographically separated receive nodes. Using the structures of these receivers, we propose practical channel estimation techniques for the block-fading scenario. The proposed channel estimation techniques rely on very simple operations at the received nodes while achieving near-optimal channel estimation performance as the training length becomes large.
The Internet of things (IoT) holds much commercial potential and could facilitate distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication in future systems. We study a distributed reception scenario in which a transmitter equipped with multiple antennas sends multiple streams via spatial multiplexing to a large number of geographically separated single antenna receive nodes. The receive nodes then quantize their received signals and forward the quantized received signals to a receive fusion center. With global channel knowledge and forwarded quantized information from the receive nodes, the fusion center attempts to decode the transmitted symbols. We assume the transmit vector consists of phase shift keying (PSK) constellation points, and each receive node quantizes its received signal with one bit for each of the real and imaginary parts of the signal to minimize the transmission overhead between the receive nodes and the fusion center. Fusing this data is a non-trivial problem because the receive nodes cannot decode the transmitted symbols before quantization. Instead, each receive node processes a single quantity, i.e., the received signal, regardless of the number of transmitted symbols. We develop an optimal maximum likelihood (ML) receiver and a low-complexity zero-forcing (ZF)-type receiver at the fusion center. Despite its suboptimality, the ZF-type receiver is simple to implement and shows comparable performance with the ML receiver in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime but experiences an error rate floor at high SNR. It is shown that this error floor can be overcome by increasing the number of receive nodes. Hence, the ZF-type receiver would be a practical solution for distributed reception with spatial multiplexing in the era of the IoT where we can easily have a large number of receive nodes.
Time synchronization is important for a variety of applications in wireless sensor networks including scheduling communication resources, coordinating sensor wake/sleep cycles, and aligning signals for distributed transmission/reception. This paper describes a non-hierarchical approach to time synchronization in wireless sensor networks that has low overhead and can be implemented at the physical and/or MAC layers. Unlike most of the prior approaches, the approach described in this paper allows all nodes to use exactly the same distributed algorithm and does not require local averaging of measurements from other nodes. Analytical results show that the non-hierarchical approach can provide monotonic expected convergence of both drifts and offsets under broad conditions on the network topology and local clock update stepsize. Numerical results are also presented verifying the analysis under two particular network topologies.
Secure communication with feedback is studied. An achievability scheme in which the backward channel is used to generate a shared secret key is proposed. The scenario of binary symmetric forward and backward channels is considered, and a combination of the proposed scheme and Maurers coding scheme is shown to achieve improved secrecy rates. The scenario of a Gaussian channel with perfect output feedback is also analyzed and the Schalkwijk-Kailath coding scheme is shown to achieve the secrecy capacity for this channel.
An energy-efficient opportunistic collaborative beamformer with one-bit feedback is proposed for ad hoc sensor networks over Rayleigh fading channels. In contrast to conventional collaborative beamforming schemes in which each source node uses channel state information to correct its local carrier offset and channel phase, the proposed beamforming scheme opportunistically selects a subset of source nodes whose received signals combine in a quasi-coherent manner at the intended receiver. No local phase-precompensation is performed by the nodes in the opportunistic collaborative beamformer. As a result, each node requires only one-bit of feedback from the destination in order to determine if it should or shouldnt participate in the collaborative beamformer. Theoretical analysis shows that the received signal power obtained with the proposed beamforming scheme scales linearly with the number of available source nodes. Since the the optimal node selection rule requires an exhaustive search over all possible subsets of source nodes, two low-complexity selection algorithms are developed. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of opportunistic collaborative beamforming with the low-complexity selection algorithms.
