Low-power pipeline ADC for wireless LANs

In this paper, a 10-bit 40-MS/s analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is presented. A power consumption of 12 mW was achieved by using a time-interleaved and pipelined architecture with shared operational amplifiers. This circuit was fabricated in a 2.5-V 0.25-/spl mu/m technology with metal-oxide-metal capacitors. Experimental results are within design ranges and are in good agreement with simulation data. It turns out that the proposed Nyquist-rate ADC provides a potential solution for low-power high-speed applications, e.g., wireless LANs.     

A real-time video quality estimator for emerging wireless multimedia systems

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are increasingly deployed to enable thousands of users to share, create, and access live video streaming with different characteristics and content, such as video surveillance and football matches. In this context, there is a need for new mechanisms for assessing the quality level of videos because operators are seeking to control their delivery process and optimize their network resources, while increasing the user’s satisfaction. However, the development of in-service and non-intrusive Quality of Experience assessment schemes for real-time Internet videos with different complexity and motion levels, Group of Picture lengths, and characteristics, remains a significant challenge. To address this issue, this article proposes a non-intrusive parametric real-time video quality estimator, called MultiQoE that correlates wireless networks’ impairments, videos’ characteristics, and users’ perception into a predicted Mean Opinion Score. An instance of MultiQoE was implemented in WMNs and performance evaluation results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of MultiQoE in predicting the user’s perception of live video streaming services when compared to subjective, objective, and well-known parametric solutions.     

利用SRUDP的3G无线网络视频监控系统设计

为促进无线视频监控领域新技术的开发和应用,立足解决工程实际问题,提出了一种利用简单可靠用户数据报协议(SRUDP)的3G无线网络视频监控系统的新型设计方案.系统可以对H.264视频流进行分层模式的高效编码、压缩纠错和实时传输控制,并重新封装用户数据报协议(UDP)、SRUDP和IP报头.系统采用滑动窗口机制和重传机制来进行消息的收发同步和流量控制,可以实现任意用户终端对任意监控点的有效监控.系统视频QoS的控制方式运用迭代算法,发送端可以根据反馈信息通过编码器进行自适应调整速率,并参考SRUDP缓存进行参数修改,实现鲁棒控制.仿真实验表明,在3G网络环境下,基于SRUDP的视频应用在降低视频时延和包丢失率、减少网络拥塞、提高传输速率和改善视频质量等方面具有明显的优越性.     

Low-power arithmetic for the processing of video signals

In this paper, it is shown that power reduction of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor integrated circuits (CMOS IC's) is possible by exploiting statistical properties of the input signals. The statistical properties of video signals are analyzed, and it is shown that a new low-power signed-digit representation and an offset representation can reduce the number of signal changes for the input data compared to binary representation. The increased effort for data processing has been taken into account and it is shown for which types of video signals the alternative representations are advantageous. Circuit simulations have been performed to verify the theoretical results     

An optimum power management scheme for wireless video service in CDMA systems

An optimum power management scheme is proposed for intra-frame refreshed image sequences of the wireless video service in code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems. The end-to-end distortion of H.263 video data is first modeled when the error concealment schemes are employed. This distortion model takes into account the error propagation effects caused by the motion compensation. Then, based on the model, the target bit-error rates (BERs) of the image frames are optimized in such a way that the consumed power could be minimized under the constraint of maximum distortion. To satisfy the specified target BER requirement, an optimum power management scheme is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme considerably outperforms the conventional scheme in the sense of the decoded image quality. Additionally, the effects of the imperfect power control on the performance are also investigated.     

Low-power/low-voltage RF microsystems for wireless sensors networks

This paper presents radio-frequency (RF) microsystems (MSTs) composed by low-power devices for use in wireless sensors networks (WSNs). The RF CMOS transceiver is the main electronic system and its power consumption is a critical issue. Two RF CMOS transceivers with low-power and low-voltage supply were fabricated to operate in the 2.4 and 5.7 GHz ISM bands. The measurements made in the RF CMOS transceiver at 2.4 GHz, which showed a sensitivity of −60 dBm with a power consumption of 6.3 mW from 1.8 V supply. The measurements also showed that the transmitter delivers an output power of 0 dBm with a power consumption of 11.2 mW. The RF CMOS transceiver at 5.7 GHz has a total power consumption of 23 mW. The target application of these RF CMOS transceivers is for MSTs integration and for use as low-power nodes in WSNs to work during large periods of time without human operation, management and maintenance. These RF CMOS transceivers are also suitable for integration in thermoelectric energy scavenging MSTs.     

Low-power ultrawideband wireless telemetry transceiver for medical sensor applications

An integrated CMOS ultrawideband wireless telemetry transceiver for wearable and implantable medical sensor applications is reported in this letter. This high duty cycled, noncoherent transceiver supports scalable data rate up to 10 Mb/s with energy efficiency of 0.35 nJ/bit and 6.2 nJ/bit for transmitter and receiver, respectively. A prototype wireless capsule endoscopy using the proposed transceiver demonstrated in vivo image transmission of 640 × 480 resolution at a frame rate of 2.5 frames/s with 10 Mb/s data rate.     

Channel-adaptive wideband wireless video telephony

The fundamental advantage of burst-by-burst (BbB) adaptive intelligent multimode multimedia transceivers (IMMTs) is that-irrespective of the propagation environment encountered-when the mobile roams across different environments subject to path loss; shadow- and fast-fading; co-channel-, intersymbol-, and multiuser interference, while experiencing power control errors, the system will always be able to configure itself in the highest possible throughput mode, while maintaining the required transmission integrity. Finding a specific solution to a distributive or interactive video communications problem has to be based on a compromise in terms of the inherently contradictory constraints of video quality, bit rate, delay, robustness against channel errors, and the associated implementational complexity. Considering some of these tradeoffs and proposing a range of attractive solutions to various video communications problems is the basic aim of this overview. The article portrays a range of proprietary video codecs and compares them to some of the existing standard video codecs. A number of multimode video transceivers are also characterized. Systems employing the standard H.263 video codec in the context of wideband BbB adaptive video transceivers are examined, and the concept of BbB-adaptive video transceivers is then extended to CDMA-based systems     

Uncoordinated real-time video transmission in wireless multicode CDMA systems: An SMPT-based approach

We consider the real-time transmission of encoded video from distributed, uncoordinated wireless terminals to a central base station in a multicode CDMA system. Our approach is to employ the recently proposed simultaneous MAC packet transmission (SMPT) approach at the data link layer (in conjunction with UDP at the transport layer). We consider the real-time transmission of both video encoded in an open loop (i.e., without rate control) and video encoded in a closed loop (i.e., with rate control). We conduct extensive simulations and study quantitatively the trade-off between video quality, transmission delay (and jitter), and number of supported video streams (capacity). We find that the simple-to-deploy SMPT approach achieves significantly higher video quality and smaller delays than the conventional sequential transmission approach, while ensuring high capacity. In typical scenarios, with SMPT the probability of in-time video frame delivery is more than twice as large as with sequential transmission (for given delay bounds). Our results provide guidelines for the design and dimensioning of cellular wireless systems as well as ad hoc wireless systems.     

Low-power CMOS wireless MEMS motion sensor for physiological activity monitoring

In this paper, a short distance wireless sensor node "AccuMicroMotion" for physiological activity monitoring is proposed for detecting motions in six degrees of freedom. System architecture, relevant microstructures, and electronic circuits to implement the sensor node are presented. A three-axis microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometer and a z-axis gyroscope are designed and fabricated using a new deep-reactive ion-etch CMOS-MEMS process. The interface circuits, an analog-to-digital converter, and a wireless transmitter are designed using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company 0.35-/spl mu/m CMOS process, wherein the interface circuits adopt chopper stabilization technique and can resolve a signal (dc to 1 kHz) as low as 200 nV from the microsensors; digitized outputs from the microsensors are transmitted by a 900-MHz amplitude-shift-keying radio-frequency transmitter that delivers a 2.2-mW power to a 50-/spl Omega/ antenna. The system draws an average current of 4.8 mA from a 3-V supply when six sensors are in operation simultaneously and provides an overall 60-dB dynamic range.     

Low-power video encoder/decoder chip set for digital VCRs

This paper describes the realization of a video encoder/decoder chip set for the consumer use digital video cassette recorder (VCR). The two chips with a 5 Mb external DRAM either encode the CCIR601 digital component video signal into the standard-definition digital VCR (DV) format or decode the DV format signal into a component video signal. The compression rate of the intraframe compression is about 1/6. The total power dissipation of the two LSI's is 142 mW at 2 V internal supply voltage, which is more than one order of magnitude smaller than the recently reported MPIEG2 (MP@ML) encoder systems. Low power was achieved primarily due to the compression scheme which is optimized for large-scale integration (LSI) implementation. The 0.5-μm 2-V CMOS standard cell library was also effective in reducing the power consumption. Each chip, fabricated in two-layer metal 0.5-μm CMOS technology, contains about 500 k transistors on 71 mm² and 79 mm² die, respectively     

Low-power systolic array processor architecture for FSBM video motion estimation

A novel power-efficient systolic array architecture is proposed for full search block matching (FSBM) motion estimation, where the partial distortion elimination algorithm is used to dynamically switch off the computation of eliminated partial candidate blocks. The RTL-level simulation shows that the proposed architecture can reduce the power consumption of the computation part of the algorithm to about 60% of that of the conventional 2D systolic arrays     

Low-power wireless micromanometer system for acute and chronic bladder-pressure monitoring

This letter describes the design, fabrication, and testing of a wireless bladder-pressure-sensing system for chronic, point-of-care applications, such as urodynamics or closed-loop neuromodulation. The system consists of a miniature implantable device and an external RF receiver and wireless battery charger. The implant is small enough to be cystoscopically implanted within the bladder wall, where it is securely held and shielded from the urine stream. The implant consists of a custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), a pressure transducer, a rechargeable battery, and wireless telemetry and recharging antennas. The ASIC includes instrumentation, wireless transmission, and power-management circuitry, and on an average draws less than 9 μA from the 3.6-V battery. The battery charge can be wirelessly replenished with daily 6-h recharge periods that can occur during the periods of sleep. Acute in vivo evaluation of the pressure-sensing system in canine models has demonstrated that the system can accurately capture lumen pressure from a submucosal implant location.     

TCP传输模式下高并发无线流媒体的控制与播放服务器的研究

针对流媒体服务高并发的要求,以及无线网络高误码率的特点,设计了一个采用TCP传输的"集中-分布式"无线流媒体服务器系统,并对设计进行了理论分析和实践检验,测试结果证明,该设计架构合理,可扩展性好,并发性能高,传输质量较为可靠,能够很好满足一类无线流媒体应用的需求.     

Rate-distortion based real-time wireless video streaming

This paper presents wireless video streaming techniques that exploit the characteristics of video content, transmission history, and physical layer channels to enable real-time efficient video streaming over wireless networks to a wireless client. The key contribution of the proposed video streaming techniques is the use of rate-distortion based, but simplified, low complexity packet scheduling as well as forward error correction (FEC) rate selection. To this end, we develop an optimization framework that jointly schedules the packets and selects the FEC rates. The rate-distortion optimized packet scheduling and FEC rate selection provides the optimum quality video on the receiver side albeit at a high computational cost. By some intelligent approximations, rate distortion optimized packet scheduling and FEC rate selection technique is transformed into two sub-optimal but low complexity video streaming techniques that can provide high video quality. We perform extensive simulations to understand the performance of our proposed techniques under different scenarios. Results show that, the proposed techniques improve video quality on the average by 4 dB. We conclude that significant benefits to end-user experience can be obtained by using such video streaming methods.     

Energy-efficient wireless video coding and delivery

Transmitting video over wireless channels from mobile devices has gained increased popularity in a wide range of applications. A major obstacle in these types of applications is the limited energy supply in mobile device batteries. For this reason, efficiently utilizing energy is a critical issue in designing wireless video communication systems. This article highlights recent advances in joint source coding and optimal energy allocation. We present a general framework that takes into account multiple factors, including source coding, channel resource allocation, and error concealment, for the design of energy-efficient wireless video communication systems. This framework can take various forms and be applied to achieve the optimal trade-off between energy consumption and video delivery quality during wireless video transmission.