Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 150
Description
Underwater acoustic communications face significant challenges unprecedented in radio terrestrial communications including long multipath delay spreads, strong Doppler effects, and stringent bandwidth requirements. Recently, multi-carrier communications based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) have seen significant growth in underwater acoustic (UWA) communications, thanks to their well well-known robustness against severely time-dispersive channels. However, the performance of OFDM systems over UWA channels significantly deteriorates due to severe intercarrier interference (ICI) resulting from rapid time variations of the channel. With the motivation of developing enabling techniques for OFDM over UWA channels, the major contributions of this thesis include (1) two effective frequencydomain equalizers that provide general means to counteract the ICI; (2) a family of multiple-resampling receiver designs dealing with distortions caused by user and/or path specific Doppler scaling effects; (3) proposal of using orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) as an effective multiple access scheme for UWA communications; (4) the capacity evaluation for single-resampling versus multiple-resampling receiver designs. All of the proposed receiver designs have been verified both through simulations and emulations based on data collected in real-life UWA communications experiments. Particularly, the frequency domain equalizers are shown to be effective with significantly reduced pilot overhead and offer robustness against Doppler and timing estimation errors. The multiple-resampling designs, where each branch is tasked with the Doppler distortion of different paths and/or users, overcome the disadvantages of the commonly-used single-resampling receivers and yield significant performance gains. Multiple-resampling receivers are also demonstrated to be necessary for UWA OFDMA systems. The unique design effectively mitigates interuser interference (IUI), opening up the possibility to exploit advanced user subcarrier assignment schemes. Finally, the benefits of the multiple-resampling receivers are further demonstrated through channel capacity evaluation results.
ContributorsTu, Kai (Author) / Duman, Tolga M. (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Great advances have been made in the construction of photovoltaic (PV) cells and modules, but array level management remains much the same as it has been in previous decades. Conventionally, the PV array is connected in a fixed topology which is not always appropriate in the presence of faults in the array, and varying weather conditions. With the introduction of smarter inverters and solar modules, the data obtained from the photovoltaic array can be used to dynamically modify the array topology and improve the array power output. This is beneficial especially when module mismatches such as shading, soiling and aging occur in the photovoltaic array. This research focuses on the topology optimization of PV arrays under shading conditions using measurements obtained from a PV array set-up. A scheme known as topology reconfiguration method is proposed to find the optimal array topology for a given weather condition and faulty module information. Various topologies such as the series-parallel (SP), the total cross-tied (TCT), the bridge link (BL) and their bypassed versions are considered. The topology reconfiguration method compares the efficiencies of the topologies, evaluates the percentage gain in the generated power that would be obtained by reconfiguration of the array and other factors to find the optimal topology. This method is employed for various possible shading patterns to predict the best topology. The results demonstrate the benefit of having an electrically reconfigurable array topology. The effects of irradiance and shading on the array performance are also studied. The simulations are carried out using a SPICE simulator. The simulation results are validated with the experimental data provided by the PACECO Company.
ContributorsBuddha, Santoshi Tejasri (Author) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
There are many wireless communication and networking applications that require high transmission rates and reliability with only limited resources in terms of bandwidth, power, hardware complexity etc.. Real-time video streaming, gaming and social networking are a few such examples. Over the years many problems have been addressed towards the goal of enabling such applications; however, significant challenges still remain, particularly, in the context of multi-user communications. With the motivation of addressing some of these challenges, the main focus of this dissertation is the design and analysis of capacity approaching coding schemes for several (wireless) multi-user communication scenarios. Specifically, three main themes are studied: superposition coding over broadcast channels, practical coding for binary-input binary-output broadcast channels, and signalling schemes for two-way relay channels. As the first contribution, we propose an analytical tool that allows for reliable comparison of different practical codes and decoding strategies over degraded broadcast channels, even for very low error rates for which simulations are impractical. The second contribution deals with binary-input binary-output degraded broadcast channels, for which an optimal encoding scheme that achieves the capacity boundary is found, and a practical coding scheme is given by concatenation of an outer low density parity check code and an inner (non-linear) mapper that induces desired distribution of "one" in a codeword. The third contribution considers two-way relay channels where the information exchange between two nodes takes place in two transmission phases using a coding scheme called physical-layer network coding. At the relay, a near optimal decoding strategy is derived using a list decoding algorithm, and an approximation is obtained by a joint decoding approach. For the latter scheme, an analytical approximation of the word error rate based on a union bounding technique is computed under the assumption that linear codes are employed at the two nodes exchanging data. Further, when the wireless channel is frequency selective, two decoding strategies at the relay are developed, namely, a near optimal decoding scheme implemented using list decoding, and a reduced complexity detection/decoding scheme utilizing a linear minimum mean squared error based detector followed by a network coded sequence decoder.
ContributorsBhat, Uttam (Author) / Duman, Tolga M. (Thesis advisor) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Practical communication systems are subject to errors due to imperfect time alignment among the communicating nodes. Timing errors can occur in different forms depending on the underlying communication scenario. This doctoral study considers two different classes of asynchronous systems; point-to-point (P2P) communication systems with synchronization errors, and asynchronous cooperative systems. In particular, the focus is on an information theoretic analysis for P2P systems with synchronization errors and developing new signaling solutions for several asynchronous cooperative communication systems. The first part of the dissertation presents several bounds on the capacity of the P2P systems with synchronization errors. First, binary insertion and deletion channels are considered where lower bounds on the mutual information between the input and output sequences are computed for independent uniformly distributed (i.u.d.) inputs. Then, a channel suffering from both synchronization errors and additive noise is considered as a serial concatenation of a synchronization error-only channel and an additive noise channel. It is proved that the capacity of the original channel is lower bounded in terms of the synchronization error-only channel capacity and the parameters of both channels. On a different front, to better characterize the deletion channel capacity, the capacity of three independent deletion channels with different deletion probabilities are related through an inequality resulting in the tightest upper bound on the deletion channel capacity for deletion probabilities larger than 0.65. Furthermore, the first non-trivial upper bound on the 2K-ary input deletion channel capacity is provided by relating the 2K-ary input deletion channel capacity with the binary deletion channel capacity through an inequality. The second part of the dissertation develops two new relaying schemes to alleviate asynchronism issues in cooperative communications. The first one is a single carrier (SC)-based scheme providing a spectrally efficient Alamouti code structure at the receiver under flat fading channel conditions by reducing the overhead needed to overcome the asynchronism and obtain spatial diversity. The second one is an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based approach useful for asynchronous cooperative systems experiencing excessive relative delays among the relays under frequency-selective channel conditions to achieve a delay diversity structure at the receiver and extract spatial diversity.
ContributorsRahmati, Mojtaba (Author) / Duman, Tolga M. (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Reisslein, Martin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Autonomous vehicle control systems utilize real-time kinematic Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers to provide a position within two-centimeter of truth. GNSS receivers utilize the satellite signal time of arrival estimates to solve for position; and multipath corrupts the time of arrival estimates with a time-varying bias. Time of arrival estimates are based upon accurate direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) code and carrier phase tracking. Current multipath mitigating GNSS solutions include fixed radiation pattern antennas and windowed delay-lock loop code phase discriminators. A new multipath mitigating code tracking algorithm is introduced that utilizes a non-symmetric correlation kernel to reject multipath. Independent parameters provide a means to trade-off code tracking discriminant gain against multipath mitigation performance. The algorithm performance is characterized in terms of multipath phase error bias, phase error estimation variance, tracking range, tracking ambiguity and implementation complexity. The algorithm is suitable for modernized GNSS signals including Binary Phase Shift Keyed (BPSK) and a variety of Binary Offset Keyed (BOC) signals. The algorithm compensates for unbalanced code sequences to ensure a code tracking bias does not result from the use of asymmetric correlation kernels. The algorithm does not require explicit knowledge of the propagation channel model. Design recommendations for selecting the algorithm parameters to mitigate precorrelation filter distortion are also provided.
ContributorsMiller, Steven (Author) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Tsakalis, Konstantinos (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The processing power and storage capacity of portable devices have improved considerably over the past decade. This has motivated the implementation of sophisticated audio and other signal processing algorithms on such mobile devices. Of particular interest in this thesis is audio/speech processing based on perceptual criteria. Specifically, estimation of parameters from human auditory models, such as auditory patterns and loudness, involves computationally intensive operations which can strain device resources. Hence, strategies for implementing computationally efficient human auditory models for loudness estimation have been studied in this thesis. Existing algorithms for reducing computations in auditory pattern and loudness estimation have been examined and improved algorithms have been proposed to overcome limitations of these methods. In addition, real-time applications such as perceptual loudness estimation and loudness equalization using auditory models have also been implemented. A software implementation of loudness estimation on iOS devices is also reported in this thesis. In addition to the loudness estimation algorithms and software, in this thesis project we also created new illustrations of speech and audio processing concepts for research and education. As a result, a new suite of speech/audio DSP functions was developed and integrated as part of the award-winning educational iOS App 'iJDSP." These functions are described in detail in this thesis. Several enhancements in the architecture of the application have also been introduced for providing the supporting framework for speech/audio processing. Frame-by-frame processing and visualization functionalities have been developed to facilitate speech/audio processing. In addition, facilities for easy sound recording, processing and audio rendering have also been developed to provide students, practitioners and researchers with an enriched DSP simulation tool. Simulations and assessments have been also developed for use in classes and training of practitioners and students.
ContributorsKalyanasundaram, Girish (Author) / Spanias, Andreas S (Thesis advisor) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Asymptotic comparisons of ergodic channel capacity at high and low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) are provided for several adaptive transmission schemes over fading channels with general distributions, including optimal power and rate adaptation, rate adaptation only, channel inversion and its variants. Analysis of the high-SNR pre-log constants of the ergodic capacity reveals the existence of constant capacity difference gaps among the schemes with a pre-log constant of 1. Closed-form expressions for these high-SNR capacity difference gaps are derived, which are proportional to the SNR loss between these schemes in dB scale. The largest one of these gaps is found to be between the optimal power and rate adaptation scheme and the channel inversion scheme. Based on these expressions it is shown that the presence of space diversity or multi-user diversity makes channel inversion arbitrarily close to achieving optimal capacity at high SNR with sufficiently large number of antennas or users. A low-SNR analysis also reveals that the presence of fading provably always improves capacity at sufficiently low SNR, compared to the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) case. Numerical results are shown to corroborate our analytical results. This dissertation derives high-SNR asymptotic average error rates over fading channels by relating them to the outage probability, under mild assumptions. The analysis is based on the Tauberian theorem for Laplace-Stieltjes transforms which is grounded on the notion of regular variation, and applies to a wider range of channel distributions than existing approaches. The theory of regular variation is argued to be the proper mathematical framework for finding sufficient and necessary conditions for outage events to dominate high-SNR error rate performance. It is proved that the diversity order being d and the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the channel power gain having variation exponent d at 0 imply each other, provided that the instantaneous error rate is upper-bounded by an exponential function of the instantaneous SNR. High-SNR asymptotic average error rates are derived for specific instantaneous error rates. Compared to existing approaches in the literature, the asymptotic expressions are related to the channel distribution in a much simpler manner herein, and related with outage more intuitively. The high-SNR asymptotic error rate is also characterized under diversity combining schemes with the channel power gain of each branch having a regularly varying CDF. Numerical results are shown to corroborate our theoretical analysis. This dissertation studies several problems concerning channel inclusion, which is a partial ordering between discrete memoryless channels (DMCs) proposed by Shannon. Specifically, majorization-based conditions are derived for channel inclusion between certain DMCs. Furthermore, under general conditions, channel equivalence defined through Shannon ordering is shown to be the same as permutation of input and output symbols. The determination of channel inclusion is considered as a convex optimization problem, and the sparsity of the weights related to the representation of the worse DMC in terms of the better one is revealed when channel inclusion holds between two DMCs. For the exploitation of this sparsity, an effective iterative algorithm is established based on modifying the orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm. The extension of channel inclusion to continuous channels and its application in ordering phase noises are briefly addressed.
ContributorsZhang, Yuan (Author) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Reisslein, Martin (Committee member) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Shock loading is a complex phenomenon that can lead to failure mechanisms such as strain localization, void nucleation and growth, and eventually spall fracture. Studying incipient stages of spall damage is of paramount importance to accurately determine initiation sites in the material microstructure where damage will nucleate and grow and to formulate continuum models that account for the variability of the damage process due to microstructural heterogeneity. The length scale of damage with respect to that of the surrounding microstructure has proven to be a key aspect in determining sites of failure initiation. Correlations have been found between the damage sites and the surrounding microstructure to determine the preferred sites of spall damage, since it tends to localize at and around the regions of intrinsic defects such as grain boundaries and triple points. However, considerable amount of work still has to be done in this regard to determine the physics driving the damage at these intrinsic weak sites in the microstructure. The main focus of this research work is to understand the physical mechanisms behind the damage localization at these preferred sites. A crystal plasticity constitutive model is implemented with different damage criteria to study the effects of stress concentration and strain localization at the grain boundaries. A cohesive zone modeling technique is used to include the intrinsic strength of the grain boundaries in the simulations. The constitutive model is verified using single elements tests, calibrated using single crystal impact experiments and validated using bicrystal and multicrystal impact experiments. The results indicate that strain localization is the predominant driving force for damage initiation and evolution. The microstructural effects on theses damage sites are studied to attribute the extent of damage to microstructural features such as grain orientation, misorientation, Taylor factor and the grain boundary planes. The finite element simulations show good correlation with the experimental results and can be used as the preliminary step in developing accurate probabilistic models for damage nucleation.
ContributorsKrishnan, Kapil (Author) / Peralta, Pedro (Thesis advisor) / Mignolet, Marc (Committee member) / Sieradzki, Karl (Committee member) / Jiang, Hanqing (Committee member) / Oswald, Jay (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The focus of this investigation includes three aspects. First, the development of nonlinear reduced order modeling techniques for the prediction of the response of complex structures exhibiting "large" deformations, i.e. a geometrically nonlinear behavior, and modeled within a commercial finite element code. The present investigation builds on a general methodology, successfully validated in recent years on simpler panel structures, by developing a novel identification strategy of the reduced order model parameters, that enables the consideration of the large number of modes needed for complex structures, and by extending an automatic strategy for the selection of the basis functions used to represent accurately the displacement field. These novel developments are successfully validated on the nonlinear static and dynamic responses of a 9-bay panel structure modeled within Nastran. In addition, a multi-scale approach based on Component Mode Synthesis methods is explored. Second, an assessment of the predictive capabilities of nonlinear reduced order models for the prediction of the large displacement and stress fields of panels that have a geometric discontinuity; a flat panel with a notch was used for this assessment. It is demonstrated that the reduced order models of both virgin and notched panels provide a close match of the displacement field obtained from full finite element analyses of the notched panel for moderately large static and dynamic responses. In regards to stresses, it is found that the notched panel reduced order model leads to a close prediction of the stress distribution obtained on the notched panel as computed by the finite element model. Two enrichment techniques, based on superposition of the notch effects on the virgin panel stress field, are proposed to permit a close prediction of the stress distribution of the notched panel from the reduced order model of the virgin one. A very good prediction of the full finite element results is achieved with both enrichments for static and dynamic responses. Finally, computational challenges associated with the solution of the reduced order model equations are discussed. Two alternatives to reduce the computational time for the solution of these problems are explored.
ContributorsPerez, Ricardo Angel (Author) / Mignolet, Marc (Thesis advisor) / Oswald, Jay (Committee member) / Spottswood, Stephen (Committee member) / Peralta, Pedro (Committee member) / Jiang, Hanqing (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The rapid advances in wireless communications and networking have given rise to a number of emerging heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks along with novel networking paradigms, including wireless sensor networks, mobile crowdsourcing, and mobile social networking. While offering promising solutions to a wide range of new applications, their widespread adoption and large-scale deployment are often hindered by people's concerns about the security, user privacy, or both. In this dissertation, we aim to address a number of challenging security and privacy issues in heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks in an attempt to foster their widespread adoption. Our contributions are mainly fivefold. First, we introduce a novel secure and loss-resilient code dissemination scheme for wireless sensor networks deployed in hostile and harsh environments. Second, we devise a novel scheme to enable mobile users to detect any inauthentic or unsound location-based top-k query result returned by an untrusted location-based service providers. Third, we develop a novel verifiable privacy-preserving aggregation scheme for people-centric mobile sensing systems. Fourth, we present a suite of privacy-preserving profile matching protocols for proximity-based mobile social networking, which can support a wide range of matching metrics with different privacy levels. Last, we present a secure combination scheme for crowdsourcing-based cooperative spectrum sensing systems that can enable robust primary user detection even when malicious cognitive radio users constitute the majority.
ContributorsZhang, Rui (Author) / Zhang, Yanchao (Thesis advisor) / Duman, Tolga Mete (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013