Underlay cognitive radio (CR) permits unlicensed secondary users (SUs) to transmit their own data over the licensed spectrum unless the interference from the SUs on the licensed primary user (PU) exceeds an acceptable level. This paper proposes two generalized interference alignment (IA)-based distributed optimization designs for multiple secondary transceivers in the underlay CR case with channel uncertainty under assumption that the actual channel error norm is below a certain bound. One of the designs is an extension to an existing method and the other one is a new design. In these methods, the precoding and power allocation matrices for each SU are either independently or jointly optimized for imperfect channel knowledge to maximize the secondary rates and to hold the secondary interference on the primary receiver under an acceptable limit that is determined by the primary receiver. Numerical results prove the ability of the proposed methods to support significant secondary rates provided that the PU is protected from extra interference from SUs, even in presence of channel uncertainty.

In this paper, we propose an access control protocol method that maintains the communication quality of various applications and reduces packet loss of multicasts in wireless local area networks. Multicast transmission may facilitate effective bandwidth use because packets are simultaneously delivered to more than one mobile station by a single transmission. However, because multicast transmissions does not have a retransmission function, communication quality deteriorates because of packet collisions and interference waves from other systems. Moreover, although multicasts are not considered, the communication quality of each application is guaranteed by a priority control method known as enhanced distributed channel access in IEEE802.11e. The proposed method avoids both these issues. Specifically, because the proposed method first transmits the clear-to-send-to-self frame, the multicast packet avoids collision with the unicast packet. We validate the proposed method by computer simulation in an environment with traffic congestion and interference waves. The results show a reduction in multicast packet loss of approximately 20% and a higher multicast throughput improvement compared to conventional methods. Moreover, the proposed method can assure improve multicast communication quality without affecting other applications.

In dense femtocell networks (DFNs), one of the main issues is interference management since interference between femtocell access points (FAPs) reduces the system performance significantly. Further, FAPs serve different numbers of femtocell user equipments (FUEs), i.e., some FAPs have more than one FUE while others have one or no FUEs. Therefore, for DFNs, an intelligent channel assignment scheme is necessary considering both the number of FUEs connected to the same FAPs and interference mitigation to improve system performance. This paper proposes a two-stage dynamic channel assignment (TS-DCA) scheme for downlink DFNs based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access/frequency division duplex (OFDMA/FDD). In stage 1, using graph coloring algorithm, a femtocell gateway (FGW) first groups FUEs based on an interference graph that considers different numbers of FUEs per FAP. Then, in stage 2, the FGW dynamically assigns subchannels to FUE clusters according to the order of maximum capacity of FAP clusters. In addition, FAPs adaptively assign remaining subchannels in FUE clusters to their FUEs in other FUE clusters. Through simulations, we first find optimum parameters of the FUE clustering to maximize the system capacity and then evaluate system performance in terms of the mean FUE capacity, unsatisfied FUE probability, and mean FAP transmission energy consumption according to the different numbers of FUEs and FAPs with a given FUE traffic load.

In the digital terrestrial TV broadcasting system, it is important to evaluate both quantitative levels and sources of overreach interference, because it can degrade the TV service quality. This paper newly proposes an overreach measurement method that simultaneously monitors RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) and CNR (Carrier to Noise power Ratio) of the TV waves and RSSI of FM waves. The results of measurements conducted in Hiroshima prefecture show that our proposed method can evaluate the level of overreach interference in the TV waves and also identify the source of the interference. Total 43 overreach interference events were found in the proposed method from one-year measurement in 2012. Based on M profile data, this paper also shows that the main factor of the overreach interference in this measurement is duct propagation due to meteorological condition.

Increased inductance values and contact resistance in connector contact surfaces due to degradation of connector contact performance have been reported. In particular, inductance increases while degradation remains minimal. We focus on slight loosening in which increased inductance values are observed without increased resistance values, and investigate the effect of loose connectors on transmission line coupling noise under such circumstances. We find a proportional relation between coupled noise current and frequency. Moreover, we find a proportional relation between the increased inductance value, which depends on the change in connector contact distribution, and the coupled noise current in the transmission line.

The data rate of VLSI interconnections has been increasing according to the demand for high-speed operation of semiconductors such as CPUs. To realize high performance VLSI systems, high-speed data communication has become an important factor. However, at high-speed data rates, it is difficult to achieve accurate communication without bit errors because of inter-symbol interference (ISI). This paper presents high-speed data communication techniques for VLSI systems using Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding (THP). Since THP can eliminate the ISI with limiting average and peak power of transmitter signaling, THP is suitable for implementing advanced low-voltage VLSI systems. In this paper, 4-PAM (Pulse amplitude modulation) with THP has been employed to achieve high-speed data communication in VLSI systems. Simulation results show that THP can remove the ISI without increasing peak and average power of a transmitter. Moreover, simulation results clarify that multiple-valued data communication is very effective to reduce implementation costs for realizing high-speed serial links.

We discuss the division of radio resources in the time and frequency domains for wireless local area network (WLAN) devices powered with microwave energy. In general, there are two ways to avoid microwave power transmission (MPT) from influencing data communications: adjacent channel operation of continuous MPT and WLAN data transmission and co-channel operation of intermittent MPT and WLAN data transmission. Experimental results reveal that, even when we implement these methods, several problems arise because WLAN devices have been developed without supposing the existence of MPT. One problem clarified in our experiment is that adjacent channel operation at 2.4GHz does not necessarily perform well owing to the interference from MPT. This interference occurs regardless of the frequency separation at 2.4GHz. The other problem is that intermittent MPT could result in throughput degradation owing to the data rate control algorithm and the association scheme of the WLAN. In addition, the experimental results imply that a microwave energy source and a WLAN device should share information on the timings of intermittent MPT and data transmission to avoid buffer overflow.

In LTE (Long Term Evolution)-Advanced system, a transparent MU-MIMO (Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple Output) scheduling is basically considered, so the performance degradation in channel estimation may occur due to the unpredictable interference from co-scheduled layers. In order to detect and mitigate the interference, traditional binary hypothesis testing based interference detection method and iterative channel estimation method can be applied. However, there are two major problems. First, the binary hypothesis testing based interference detection is not suitable solution for LTE-Advanced system which has four dynamically changing interference hypotheses. Second, the conventional iterative operation does not guarantee sufficient performance gain with limited iteration time due to the estimation error in initial estimation stage. To overcome these problems, we introduce an enhanced iterative channel estimation method which considers simple matrix operation-based partial interference estimation. Based on the outcomes of the partial interference estimation, we can not only detect interference layers individually, but also partially eliminate the interference in initial channel estimation stage. Consequently, the proposed method can effectively mitigate the interference adaptively to the dynamically changing interference condition.

The effect of transceiver impairments (consisting of frequency offset, phase noise and doubly-selective channel) is a key factor for determining performance of an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system since the transceiver impairments trigger intercarrier interference (ICI). These impairments are well known and have been investigated separately in the past. However, these impairments usually arise concurrently and should be jointly considered from the perspectives of both receiver design and system evaluation. In this research, impact of these impairments on an OFDM system is jointly analyzed and the result degenerates to the special case where only a specific impairment is present. A mitigation method aided by segment-by-segment time-domain interpolation (STI) is then proposed following the analysis. STI is general, and its weights can be specified according to the interpolation method and system requirements. Computer simulation is used to validate the analysis and to compare the performance of the proposed method with those of other proposals.

Single Carrier — Frequency Domain Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) is a multiple access technique employed in LTE uplink transmission. SC-FDMA can improve system throughput by frequency selective scheduling (FSS). In cellular systems using SC-FDMA in the uplink, interference arising from user equipments (UEs) in neighboring cells degrades the system throughput, especially the throughput of cell-edge UEs. In order to overcome this drawback, many papers have considered fractional frequency reuse (FFR) techniques and analyzed their effectiveness. However, these studies have come to different conclusions regarding the effectiveness of FFR because the throughput gain of FFR depends on the frequency reuse design and evaluation conditions. Previous papers have focused on the frequency reuse design. Few papers have examined the conditions where FFR is effective, and only the UE traffic conditions have been evaluated. This paper reveals other conditions where FFR is effective by demonstrating the throughput gain of FFR. In order to analyze the throughput gain of FFR, we focus on the throughput relationship between FFR and FSS. System level simulation results demonstrate that FFR is effective when the following conditions are met: (i) the number of UEs is small and (ii) the multipath delay spread is large or close to 0.

The parallel interference cancellation (PIC) multiple input multiple output (MIMO) detection algorithm has bit error ratio (BER) performance comparable to the maximum likelihood (ML) algorithm but with complexity close to the simple linear detection algorithm such as zero forcing (ZF), minimum mean squared error (MMSE), and successive interference cancellation (SIC), etc. However, the throughput of PIC MIMO detector on central processing unit (CPU) cannot meet the requirement of wireless protocols. In order to reach the throughput required by the standards, the graphics processing unit (GPU) is exploited in this paper as the modem processor to accelerate the processing procedure of PIC MIMO detector. The parallelism of PIC algorithm is analyzed and the two-stage PIC detection is carefully developed to efficiently match the multi-core architecture. Several optimization methods are employed to enhance the throughput, such as the memory optimization and asynchronous data transfer. The experiment shows that our MIMO detector has excellent BER performance and the peak throughput is 337.84 Mega bits per second (Mbps), about 7x to 16x faster than that of CPU implementation with SSE2 optimization methods. The implemented MIMO detector has better computing throughput than recent GPU-based implementations.

Substrate noise coupling in RF receiver front-end circuitry for LTE wireless communication was examined by full-chip level simulation and on-chip measurements, with a demonstrator built in a 65nm CMOS technology. A CMOS digital noise emulator injects high-order harmonic noises in a silicon substrate and induces in-band spurious tones in an RF receiver on the same chip through substrate noise interference. A complete simulation flow of full-chip level substrate noise coupling uses a decoupled modeling approach, where substrate noise waveforms drawn with a unified package-chip model of noise source circuits are given to mixed-level simulation of RF chains as noise sensitive circuits. The distribution of substrate noise in a chip and the attenuation with distance are simulated and compared with the measurements. The interference of substrate noise at the 17th harmonics of 124.8MHz — the operating frequency of the CMOS noise emulator creates spurious tones in the communication bandwidth at 2.1GHz.

With the development of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), the interference among global navigation satellite systems, known as the radio frequency compatibility problem, has become a matter of great concern to system providers and user communities. The acceptable compatibility threshold should be determined in the radio frequency compatibility assessment process. However, there is no common standard for the acceptable threshold in the radio frequency compatibility assessment. This paper firstly introduces the comprehensive radio frequency compatibility methodology combining the spectral separation coefficient (SSC) and code tracking spectral sensitivity coefficient (CT_SSC). Then, a method for determination of the acceptable compatibility threshold is proposed. The proposed method considers the receiver processing phase including acquisition, code and carrier tracking and data demodulation. Simulations accounting for the interference effects are carried out at each time step and every place on earth. The simulations mainly consider the signals of GPS, Galileo and BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) in the L1 band. Results show that all of the sole systems are compatible with other GNSS systems with respect to a special receiver configuration used in the simulations.

This paper investigates a signal detection method with a RAKE combiner for the case wherein the receiving signals use the same spreading code. In the case where multiple user interference with the same spreading code (MUI-SC) occurs, blind channel estimation is difficult and as far as we know has not been investigated. To tackle the issue of MUI-SC, we propose two blind channel estimation methods based on the multimodulus algorithm (MMA), i.e., MMA-IQ and MMA-I methods. When a one dimensional modulation scheme, such as differential binary phase-shift keying (DBPSK), is used, the output of the MMA-IQ channel estimation method can, under MUI-SC, have two states. The first state is that the channel estimate corresponds to a channel response for one of the received signals, and the second state is that the channel estimate corresponds to combined channel responses for two of the received signals. This is because the MMA-IQ uses two degrees of freedom (both axes in the IQ-plane), however one DBPSK signal uses only one degree of freedom. In the case of the second state, it is possible to detect two signals/packets at once. However, in the MMA-IQ, the receiver has to recognize the state of the channel estimate before the signal detection, thus we also propose a state recognition method. In the MMA-I channel estimation method, only the I-axis is used thus the channel estimate always corresponds the case with one signal. Numerical results show that the average number of detected packets of the MMA-IQ is more than that of the MMA-I in high signal-to-noise power ratio case. In addition, several aspects of the MMA-I and MMA-IQ based RAKE signal detection methods are shown.

Cognitive radio (CR) systems aim for more efficient spectrum utilization by having so called secondary users (SUs) transmit on a frequency band reserved for licensed primary users (PUs). The secondary transmissions are allowed provided that no harmful interference will be caused to the PUs. SU terminals with multiple antennas can employ transmit power control with transmit precoding in order to control the interference levels. In most of the existing works, perfect channel state information (CSI) is assumed to be available for the SUs. However, in practical systems where perfect CSI is not available, the SUs are not able to guarantee that the interference constraints are sufficiently satisfied. In this paper, we investigate the problem of spectrum sharing for multiantenna CR systems using estimated CSI. Due to the random nature of the estimation error, we set a probabilistic interference constraint and, in order to satisfy it, provide a density function for the interference power. In addition, we present a power control framework for the SU to meet the probabilistic interference constraint.

Mobility load balancing (MLB) is a key technology for self-organization networks (SONs). In this paper, we explore the mobility load balancing problem and propose a unified cell specific offset adjusting algorithm (UCSOA) which more accurately adjusts the largely uneven load between neighboring cells and is easily implemented in practice with low computing complexity and signal overhead. Moreover, we evaluate the UCSOA algorithm in two different traffic conditions and prove that the UCSOA algorithm can get the lower call blocking rates and handover failure rates. Furthermore, the interdependency of the proposed UCSOA algorithm's performance and that of the inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) algorithm is explored. A self-organization soft frequency reuse scheme is proposed. It demonstrates UCSOA algorithm and ICIC algorithm can obtain a positive effect for each other and improve the network performance in LTE system.

Blind source separation is a technique that can separate sound sources without such information as source location, the number of sources, and the utterance content. Multi-channel source separation using many microphones separates signals with high accuracy, even if there are many sources. However, these methods have extremely high computational complexity, which must be reduced. In this paper, we propose a computational complexity reduction method for blind source separation based on frequency domain independent component analysis (FDICA) and examine temporal data that are effective for source separation. A frame with many sound sources is effective for FDICA source separation. We assume that a frame with a low kurtosis has many sound sources and preferentially select such frames. In our proposed method, we used the log power spectrum and the kurtosis of the magnitude distribution of the observed data as selection criteria and conducted source separation experiments using speech signals from twelve speakers. We evaluated the separation performances by the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) improvement score. From our results, the SIR improvement score was 24.3dB when all the frames were used, and 23.3dB when the 300 frames selected by our criteria were used. These results clarified that our proposed selection criteria based on kurtosis and magnitude is effective. Furthermore, we significantly reduced the computational complexity because it is proportional to the number of selected frames.

A D2D (Device-to-Device) communication system needs to cope with inter-cell interference and other types of interferences between cellular network and D2D links. As a result, macro user equipments, particularly those located near a cell edge, will suffer from serious link performance degradation. We propose a novel interference avoidance mechanism assisted by the SRN (Shared Relay Node) in this letter. The SRN not only performs data re-transmission as a typical type-II relay, but has several newly defined features to avoid interference between cellular network and D2D links. The superb performance by the proposed scheme is evaluated through extensive system level simulations.

Television white spaces (TVWS) are locally and/or temporally unused portions of TV bands. After TVWS regulations were passed in the USA, more and more regulators have been considering efficient use of TVWS. Under the condition that the primary user, i.e., terrestrial TV broadcasting system, is not interfered, various secondary users (SUs) may be deployed in TVWS. In Japan, the TVWS regulations started with broadcast-type SUs and small-area broadcasting systems, followed by voice radio. This paper aims to provide useful insights for more efficient utilization of TVWS as one of the options to meet the continuously increasing demand for wireless bandwidth. TVWS availability in Japan is analyzed using graphs and maps. As per the regulations in Japan, for TV broadcasting service, a protection contour is defined to be 51dBµV/m, while the interference contour for SU is defined to be 12.3dBµV/m. We estimate TVWS availability using these two regulation parameters and the minimum separation distances calculated on the basis of the ITU-R P.1546 propagation models. Moreover, we investigate and explain the effect of two important factors on TVWS availability. One is the measures to avoid adjacent channel interference, while the other is whether the SU has client devices with interference ranges beyond the interference area of the master device. Furthermore, possible options to increase available TVWS channels are discussed.

We present the concept of an on-line electric vehicle (OLEV) and its wireless power transfer mechanism and analyze the electromagnetic compatibility characteristics. As magnetic fields transfer 100kW of power to the vehicle, reduction of electromagnetic field (EMF) noise is a critical issue for protection of the human body. Also, with respect to electromagnetic interference (EMI) noise, a proper measurement method has not yet been established for this low frequency high power system. In this paper, low frequency magnetic field shielding methods and application of the shields to the OLEV system are presented. Furthermore, a standard low frequency magnetic field measurement is suggested as an EMI test.