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In the last 30 years, communication became one of the most important pillars of our civilization. Every day terabytes of information are moved wired and wireless between computers. In order to transport this amount of data, researchers and industry increase the data rates of the underlying communication networks with impressive speed. However, such ultra-high data rates are unavailable at the communication endpoints.
One reason why ultra-high data rates are still not available for the communication endpoints is their inability to handle the protocol processing at this data rate. In order to enable communication endpoints to process high-volume data streams, the protocol processing has to be parallelized and optimized on all processing levels. However, parallelization and optimization are cumbersome tasks, which are further complicated as the protocol processing is traditionally carried out by the operating system.
This thesis aims at circumventing these problems by moving the protocol processing into external processing hardware and interpreting communication protocols as stream processing problems. In order to achieve ultra-high data rates at the communication endpoints, a protocol stream processing design approach was developed and evaluated. The design process is separated into implementation, soft real-time analysis, parallelization, and mapping steps, which allow a scalable protocol implementation without paradigm changes. Furthermore, a data link protocol for 100 Gbit/s wireless was developed and implemented with the new stream processing design concept, in order to show its feasibility. The data link protocol is configurable for different communication conditions and easy to parallelize by providing different granularities of packets. The proposed design-process has shown to be suitable for uncovering bottlenecks and helping with debugging the individual stages of the protocol.
This work addresses tough challenges of sensor network applications with Quality of Service requirements. That is, nodes must work with batteries for a long time, support short end-to-end delays and robust communication in multi-hop networks. It starts with presenting previous research efforts that address such challenges. For instance, many Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols keep nodes mostly sleeping to save energy and synchronize wake-up times for communication. Although such protocols offer short end-to-end delays, they still suffer from long idle listening and shortened lifetimes. The main reasons are the long time needed to detect an idle channel and inefficient ways of dealing with clock drift. This work introduces novel solutions to these problems, mainly at Layer 2 of the OSI model, that significantly reduce idle listening. First, nodes predict future drift and reduce the time needed to compensate clock uncertainty among neighbors. Second, they quickly detect an idle channel and power down the transceiver. In some scenarios, nodes work 30% longer owing to these solutions. To tackle problems with unreliable wireless links, sensor nodes may apply various solutions at Layer 2. For example, with Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) protocol they send retries on frame losses, resulting in extra energy consumption. This work examines the impact of ARQ on the lifetime and on the reception rate. Several indoor and outdoor experiments showed that with only 1-2 retries nodes can handle many communication problems. Besides, owing to the idle-listening reduction, mentioned previously, ARQ shortens the lifetime by 10% only. Although this work addresses particular applications, the solutions presented here can be used in other scenarios and with different protocols. For instance, the energy-efficient drift compensation approach can be directly used in any schedule-based MAC protocols, like the one based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Besides, any protocol can benefit from the solution to the idle-listening reduction based on the early detection of idle channel. Finally, owing to the analytical model that estimates the lifetime of nodes, researches and developers can early evaluate MAC protocols running on various hardware platforms.
This thesis describes the complete design of a low cost 60 GHz front end in SiGe BiCMOS technology. It covers the topics of a system plan, designs of building blocks, designs of application boards and real environment tests. Different LNA and mixer topologies have been investigated and fabricated. Good agreements between measurements and simulations have been achieved by using the self-developed component models. A transceiver front end system is built based on these blocks. A heterodyne architecture with a 5 GHz IF is adopted because it is compatible with the standard IEEE 802.11a, which allows the reuse of some existing building blocks of the 5 GHz transceiver. The transceiver chips are assembled onto application boards and connected by bond-wires. Bond-wire inductances have been minimized by using a cavity and compensated by an on board structure. The front end has been tested by both QPSK and OFDM signals in an indoor environment. Clear constellations have been measured. This was the first silicon based 60 GHz demonstrator in Europe and the second in the world.