A survey of Physical-Layer Transmission in Wireless Networks

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A survey of Physical-Layer Transmission in Wireless Networks"

Mr. Kaishun Wu


Abstract:

Unlike the wired counterpart, a wireless link is easily affected by
environment changes and surrounding wireless activities. Determining the
instant link conditions (or qualities) is essential for most protocol
designs and application developments in wireless communications. In
previous studies, link-level metrics are utilized to reflect the link
conditions such as Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI),
Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and Signal-to-Interference plus Noise-Ratio
(SINR). In practice, however, these metrics exhibit many limitations and
could be misleading. As they are often the statistic measurements over the
packet transmission while the link conditions may vary dramatically, the
packet-level metrics are unable to indicate the instant link condition.

Motivated by this, we propose to use more fine-grained information
from the lower layer of the network protocol stack. While the PHY can
be frequently be ignored in wired networks, in wireless networks the
PHY fundamentally affects operation at all layers of the protocol
stack in complex ways. In this survey, first we will introduce the
basic knowledge of physical layer in digital communication, and make a
comparative study of some recent related work down to the physical
layer. Some research problems and challenges are also pointed out in
our future work.


Date:     		Wednesday, 16 December 2009

Time:                   3:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:                  Room 3311
 			lifts 17/18

Committee Members:      Prof. Lionel Ni (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Qian Zhang (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lei Chen
 			Dr. Lin Gu


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