Scalability is a major issue for Internet of Things (IoT) as the total amount of traffic data collected and or the number of sensors deployed grow. In some IoT applications such as healthcare, power consumption is also a key design factor for the IoT devices. In this paper, a multi-signal compression and encoding method based on Analog Joint Source Channel Coding (AJSCC) is proposed that works fully in the analog domain without the need for power-hungry Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs). Compression is achieved by quantizing all the input signals but one. While saving power, this method can also reduce the number of devices by combining one or more sensing functionalities into a single device (called 'AJSCC device'). Apart from analog encoding, AJSCC devices communicate to an aggregator node (FPMM receiver) using a novel Frequency Position Modulation and Multiplexing (FPMM) technique. Such joint modulation and multiplexing technique presents three mayor advantages&#x2014;it is robust to interference at particular frequency bands, it protects against eavesdropping, and it consumes low power due to a very low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) operating region at the receiver. Performance of the proposed multi-signal compression method and FPMM technique is evaluated via simulations in terms of Mean Square Error (MSE) and Miss Detection Rate (MDR), respectively.
This paper is the first work to propose this structure for multiplexing data of AJSCC sensors. Table compares the power numbers of our circuit @cite_7 with state-of-the-art wireless sensor motes (all of which are digital). We can notice that @math is possible with our circuit, which is essential in low-power applications. The existing circuit realizations of spiral-type mapping also are all based on digital circuits and systems @cite_6 . In this scenario, it is worth noting that the Hybrid Digital Analog (HDA) coding can also perform signal compression @cite_26 @cite_17 . However, the digital part still needs digitization of the signals. Contrary to all these approaches, we propose signal compression and encoding in the analog domain with no need for ADCs DACs Microprocessors. To show the feasibility of our vision (analog compression and encoding), we previously developed a novel circuit to compress two signals @cite_7 and verified its applicability to two pathological signals (molecular biomarkers and physiological signal) @cite_21 . In this paper, we extend the theory for N-dimensional signal compression and propose novel multiplexing techniques that address the above mentioned challenges of scalability and power in the context of healthcare IoT as one of the key applications.
@cite_26 @cite_7 @cite_21 @cite_6 @cite_17
2509630996 2759591066 2098725264 2141058125
A low-complexity and low-power all-analog circuit is proposed to perform efficiently Analog Joint Source Channel Coding (AJSCC). The proposed idea is to adopt Voltage Controlled Voltage Source (VCVS) to realize the rectangular-type mapping in AJSCC. The proposal is verified by Spice simulations as well as via breadboard and Printed Circuit Board (PCB) implementations. Field testing results indicate that the design is feasible for low-complexity and low-power systems such as wireless sensor networks for environmental monitoring. A low-power wearable wireless sensor measuring both molecular biomarkers and physiological signals is proposed, where the former are measured by a microfluidic biosensing system while the latter are measured electrically. The low-power consumption of the sensor is achieved by an all-analog circuit implementing Analog Joint Source-Channel Coding (AJSCC) compression. The sensor is applicable to a wide range of biomedical applications that require real-time concurrent molecular biomarker and physiological signal monitoring. As communication systems scale up in speed and bandwidth, the cost and power consumption of high-precision (e.g., 8-12 bits) analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) becomes the limiting factor in modern transceiver architectures based on digital signal processing. In this work, we explore the impact of lowering the precision of the ADC on the performance of the communication link. Specifically, we evaluate the communication limits imposed by low-precision ADC (e.g., 1-3 bits) for transmission over the real discrete-time additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, under an average power constraint on the input. For an ADC with K quantization bins (i.e., a precision of log2 K bits), we show that the input distribution need not have any more than K+1 mass points to achieve the channel capacity. For 2-bin (1-bit) symmetric quantization, this result is tightened to show that binary antipodal signaling is optimum for any signal-to- noise ratio (SNR). For multi-bit quantization, a dual formulation of the channel capacity problem is used to obtain tight upper bounds on the capacity. The cutting-plane algorithm is employed to compute the capacity numerically, and the results obtained are used to make the following encouraging observations : (a) up to a moderately high SNR of 20 dB, 2-3 bit quantization results in only 10-20 reduction of spectral efficiency compared to unquantized observations, (b) standard equiprobable pulse amplitude modulated input with quantizer thresholds set to implement maximum likelihood hard decisions is asymptotically optimum at high SNR, and works well at low to moderate SNRs as well. We study the performance of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) channels with coarsely quantized outputs in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, where the channel is perfectly known at the receiver. This analysis is of interest in the context of ultra-wideband (UWB) communications from two aspects. First the available power is spread over such a large frequency band, that the power spectral density is extremely low and thus the SNR is low. Second the analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) for such high bandwidth signals should be low-resolution, in order to reduce their cost and power consumption. In this paper we consider the extreme case of only 1-bit ADC for each receive signal component. We compute the mutual information up to second order in the SNR and study the impact of quantization. We show that, up to first order in SNR, the mutual information of the 1-bit quantized system degrades only by a factor of 2 pi compared to the system with infinite resolution independent of the actual MIMO channel realization. With channel state information (CSI) only at receiver, we show that QPSK is, up to the second order, the best among all distributions with independent components. We also elaborate on the ergodic capacity under this scheme in a Rayleigh flat-fading environment.