An ultra-wide bandwidth (UWB) remote-powered positioning system for potential use in tracking floating objects inside space stations is presented. It makes use of battery-less tags that are powered-up and addressed through wireless power transfer in the UHF band and embed an energy efficient pulse generator in the 3-5 GHz UWB band. The system has been mounted on the ESA Mars Rover prototype to demonstrate its functionality and performance. Experimental results show the feasibility of centimeter-level localization accuracy at distances larger than 10 meters, with the capability of determining the position of multiple tags using a 2W-ERP power source in the UHF RFID frequency band.
With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), Indoor Positioning System (IPS) has attracted significant interest in academic research. Ultra-Wideband (UWB) is an emerging technology that can be employed for IPS as it offers centimetre-level accuracy. However, the UWB system still faces several technical challenges in practice, one of which is Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) signal propagation. Several machine learning approaches have been applied for the NLoS component identification. However, when the data contains a very small amount of NLoS components it becomes very difficult for existing algorithms to classify them. This paper focuses on employing an anomaly detection approach based on Gaussian Distribution (GD) and Generalized Gaussian Distribution (GGD) algorithms to detect and identify the NLoS components. The simulation results indicate that the proposed approach can provide a robust NLoS component identification which improves the NLoS signal classification accuracy which results in significant improvement in the UWB positioning system.
Free-space optical (FSO) communications has the potential to revolutionize wireless communications due to its advantages of inherent security, high-directionality, high available bandwidth and small physical footprint. The effects of atmospheric turbulence currently limit the performance of FSO communications. In this letter, we demonstrate a system capable of indiscriminately suppressing the atmospheric phase noise encountered by independent optical signals spread over a range of 7.2 THz (encompassing the full optical C-Band), by actively phase stabilizing a primary optical signal at 193.1 THz (1552 nm). We show ~30 dB of indiscriminate phase stabilization over the full range, down to average phase noise at 10 Hz of -39.6 dBc/Hz when using an acousto-optic modulator (AOM) as a Doppler actuator, and -39.9 dBc/Hz when using a fiber-stretcher as group-delay actuator to provide the phase-stabilization systems feedback. We demonstrate that this suppression is limited by the noise of the independent optical signals, and that the expected achievable suppression is more than 40 dB greater, reaching around -90 dB/Hz at 10 Hz. We conclude that 40 Tbps ground-to-space FSO transmission would be made possible with the combination of our stabilization system and other demonstrated technologies.
This paper reports a detailed experimental characterization of optical performances of Visible Light Communication (VLC) system using a real traffic light for ultra-low latency, infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) communications for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) protocols. Despite the implementation of long sought ITS protocols poses the crucial need to detail how the features of optical stages influence the overall performances of a VLC system in realistic configurations, such characterization has rarely been addressed at present. We carried out an experimental investigation in a realistic configuration where a regular traffic light (TX), enabled for VLC transmission, sends digital information towards a receiving stage (RX), composed by an optical condenser and a dedicated amplified photodiode stage. We performed a detailed measurements campaign of VLC performances encompassing a broad set of optical condensers, and for TX-RX distances in the range 3 - 50 m, in terms of both effective field of view (EFOV) and packet error rate (PER). The results show several nontrivial behaviors for different lens sets as a function of position on the measurement grid, highlighting critical aspects as well as identifying most suitable optical configurations depending on the specific application and on the required EFOV. In this paper we also provide a theoretical model for both the signal intensity and the EFOV as a function of several parameters, such as distance, RX orientation and focal length of the specific condenser. Our results could be very relevant in the near future to assess a most suited solution in terms of acceptance angle when designing a VLC system for real applications, where angle-dependent misalignment effects play a non-negligible role, and we argue that it could have more general implications with respect to the pristine I2V case mentioned here.
Emerging applications such as wireless sensing, position location, robotics, and many more are driven by the ultra-wide bandwidths available at millimeter-wave (mmWave) and Terahertz (THz) frequencies. The characterization and efficient utilization of wireless channels at these extremely high frequencies require detailed knowledge of the radio propagation characteristics of the channels. Such knowledge is developed through empirical observations of operating conditions using wireless transceivers that measure the impulse response through channel sounding. Today, cutting-edge channel sounders rely on several bulky RF hardware components with complicated interconnections, large parasitics, and sub-GHz RF bandwidth. This paper presents a compact sliding correlation-based channel sounder baseband built on a monolithic integrated circuit (IC) using 65 nm CMOS, implemented as an evaluation board achieving a 2 GHz RF bandwidth. The IC is the worlds first gigabit-per-second channel sounder baseband implemented in low-cost CMOS. The presented single-board system can be employed at both the transmit and receive baseband to study multipath characteristics and path loss. Thus, the singleboard implementation provides an inexpensive and compact solution for sliding correlation-based channel sounding with 1 ns multipath delay resolution.
This paper addresses the design and implementation of a real time temperature monitoring system with applications in telemedicine. The system consists of a number of precision wireless thermometers which are conceived and realized to measure the patients body temperature in hospitals and the intensive care units. Each wireless thermometer incorporates an accurate semiconductor temperature sensor, a transceiver operating at 2.4 GHz and a microcontroller that controls the thermometer functionalities. An array of two thermometers are implemented and successfully evaluated in different scenarios, including free space and in vivo tests. Also, an in house developed computer software is used in order to visualize the measurements in addition to detecting rapid increase and alerting high body temperature. The agreement between the experimental data and reference temperature values is significant.