Selected Publications
Todd Fleming and Peter Athanas, "Demodulator design for collaborative signal reinforcement in sensor networks", Proceedings of IEEE Southeast Conference 2007, SoutheastCon 2007, Richmond, VA, Mar 2007.
Abstract:
Nodes in sensor fields and in autonomous swarms of mobile robots need to communicate; this usually requires individual nodes to either consume a significant amount of energy, carefully position themselves, precisely align carrier phase, or use complex coding. We propose allowing multiple independent and mobile wireless transmitters to share the power-consumption burden by combining low-power transmissions into a unified higher-power transmission. This is not a distributed beamforming or space-time coding approach. Instead, all nodes simultaneously broadcast the same symbol on the same channel without using different code books and without aligning carriers. This paper briefly describes a modulation scheme (Random-Phase Frequency Shift Keying, RPFSK), a synchronization scheme (Ensemble), and a node selection scheme which make this possible. It then describes an RPFSK demodulator design in detail for Ensemble nodes. It also covers both baseband and over-the-air test results.
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