Radio broadcasting | EPFL Graph Search

Radio broadcasting is the broadcasting of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based radio station, while in satellite radio the radio waves are broadcast by a satellite in Earth orbit. To receive the content the listener must have a broadcast radio receiver (radio). Stations are often affiliated with a radio network that provides content in a common radio format, either in broadcast syndication or simulcast, or both. Radio stations broadcast with several different types of modulation: AM radio stations transmit in AM (amplitude modulation), FM radio stations transmit in FM (frequency modulation), which are older analog audio standards, while newer digital radio stations transmit in several digital audio standards: DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting), HD radio, DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale). Television broadcasting is a separate serv

Advanced OFDM systems for terrestrial multimedia links

Renzo Posega

Recently, there has been considerable discussion about new wireless technologies and standards able to achieve high data rates. Due to the recent advances of digital signal processing and Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) technologies, the initial obstacles encountered for the implementation of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation schemes, such as massive complex multiplications and high speed memory accesses, do not exist anymore. OFDM offers strong multipath protection due to the insertion of the guard interval; in particular, the OFDM-based DVB-T standard had proved to offer excellent performance for the broadcasting of multimedia streams with bitrates over ten megabits per second in difficult terrestrial propagation channels, for fixed and portable applications. Nevertheless, for mobile scenarios, improving the receiver design is not enough to achieve error-free transmission especially in presence of deep shadow and multipath fading and some modifications of the standard can be envisaged. To address long and medium range applications like live mobile wireless television production, some further modifications are required to adapt the modulated bandwidth and fully exploit channels up to 24MHz wide. For these reasons, an extended OFDM system is proposed that offers variable bandwidth, improved protection to shadow and multipath fading and enhanced robustness thanks to the insertion of deep time-interleaving coupled with a powerful turbo codes concatenated error correction scheme. The system parameters and the receiver architecture have been described in C++ and verified with extensive simulations. In particular, the study of the receiver algorithms was aimed to achieve the optimal tradeoff between performances and complexity. Moreover, the modulation/demodulation chain has been implemented in VHDL and a prototype system has been manufactured. Ongoing field trials are demonstrating the ability of the proposed system to successfully overcome the impairments due to mobile terrestrial channels, like multipath and shadow fading. For short range applications, Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) is an efficient way to share the radio resource between multiple terminals. The main modulation parameters for a TDM system are discussed and it is shown that the 802.16a TDM OFDM physical layer fulfills the application requirements; some practical examples are given. A pre-distortion method is proposed that exploit the reciprocity of the radio channel to perform a partial channel inversion achieving improved performances with no modifications of existing receivers.

EPFL2005

Parallel computation of radio listening rates

Monica Marcela Gomez Leon, Roger Hersch, Marc Mazzariol

Obtaining the listening rates of radio stations in a function of time is an important instrument for determining the impact of publicity. In order to significantly improve the determination of radio listening rates, special watches have been developed which incorporate a custom integrated circuit sampling the ambient sound during a few seconds every minutes. Each watch accumulates these compressed sound samples during one full week. Watches are then sent to an evaluation center, where the sound samples are matched with the sound samples recorded from candidate radio stations. This paper describes the processing steps necessary for computing the radio listening rates, and shows how this application was parallelized on a cluster of PCs using the computer-aided parallelization framework. The paper describes also the support provided for graceful degradation in a case of transient or permanent failure of one of the system's components. The parallel sound matching server offers a linear speedup up to a large number of processing nodes due to the fact that disk access operations across the network are done in pipeline with computations

SPIE-Int. Soc. Opt. Eng2000

Lily: A Miniature Floating Robotic Platform for Programmable Stochastic Self-Assembly

Emmanuel Droz, Bahar Haghighat, Alcherio Martinoli

Fluid-mediated programmable stochastic self-assembly offers promising means to formation of target structures capable of a variety of functionalities. While miniaturized building blocks allow for finer resolutions in such structures, as well as access to unconventional environments, they can only be endowed with very limited on-board resources. In this paper we present the design, fabrication, and experimental results validating the key functionalities of the Lily robot as the building block in a programmable stochastic fluidic self-assembly system, capable of forming 2D structures. In particular, we aim at driving a system including an arbitrary number of Lilies to form target structures through parallel selfassembly, using exclusively local information and communication. While capable of wireless communication to a base station, Lilies are endowed with custom-designed electropermanent magnets to latch and also to communicate locally with their neighbors. Several experiments validate the reliability of the radio channel as well as the robustness of the local induction-based communication which allows for data transfer at 9600 bps with a success rate of 92.8% without repetition. The latches are shown to hold four times the weight of a single robot and to drag in another Lily from a distance of 4 mm in water.

2015

Advanced OFDM systems for terrestrial multimedia links

Renzo Posega

EPFL2005