Ambient Communication Research Articles

Ergodic Capacity Analysis for Cooperative Ambient Communication System Under Sensitivity Constraint

Ergodic Capacity Analysis for Cooperative Ambient Communication System Under Sensitivity Constraint

Design and Implementation of Multi-Band Fractal Slot Antennas for Energy Harvesting Applications

This paper introduces a design and optimization procedure of multiband fractal slot antennas for RF energy harvesting applications. The antennas were simulated using CST Studio Suite. A parametric study is conducted to determine the critical structural parameters that influence the antenna performance. The parametric study included varying the size ratio of the structure, the shape of the ground plane and the length of the feeding inset. Simulation results showed that the proposed antennas in this work exhibit multiband performance and they offer the possibility of controlling the resonant frequency at any specific frequency band. The optimized antenna has seven resonant frequencies at 1.8 GHz, 2.4 GHz, 3.45 GHz, 3.6 GHz, 4 GHz, 4.6 GHz and 5.3 GHz covering several ambient communication networks (GSM, UMTS and 5G), Bluetooth and WLAN systems. Simulation results shows that Antenna 1 has achieved a gain of more than 4.5 dBi at all the resonant frequencies with a radiation efficiency ranged between 87%–95%; whereas Antenna 2 has achieved more than 3 dBi gain at lower frequencies while reaching around 7 dBi at higher frequencies with a radiation efficiency ranged between 80%–97%. Finally, two fractal slot antennas were fabricated and tested in the lab to validate the simulation results and to proof the concept of the feasibility of this type of antennas for this application. Experimental results showed a good agreement with simulations.

Information Harvesting for Far-Field Wireless Power Transfer

In today's smart world, the Internet of Things (IoT) offers a very large scale of technologies and use cases. An IoT system comprises a huge amount of low-power IoT network elements, sensors, and smart devices connected to each other. For these devices, it is important to have a sufficient level of energy resource for communication and to receive software/firmware updates periodically. In this aspect, wireless power transfer is a popular paradigm to tackle energy limitations. Therein, the battery of IoT devices can be remotely replenished by means of radio-frequency-radiated signaling, referred to as far-field wireless power transfer. Furthermore, harvesting energy from ambient communication signals available in the environment introduces simultaneous wireless information and power transfer technology. These systems face the trade-off between information capacity and energy harvesting efficiency. Accordingly, various signaling design frameworks have been proposed to comply with different system preferences between power and information. In this work, aside from existing trends, we propose a novel concept, information harvesting (IH), which introduces a novel protocol that lies in transmitting information on top of the existing wireless power transfer mechanism. Considering the diversity of IoT networks and the availability of wireless power transfer infrastructure, the proposed IH principle may turn out to be a pivotal methodology that combines physical layer security with wireless power transfer, particularly for cases where a large number of IoT devices require software/firmware updates along with periodical battery recharging needs.

Outer Bounds for a Joint Communicating Radar (Comm-Radar): The Uplink Case

Limited access to available spectrum motivates new age radio frequency (RF) systems to co-exist and cooperate. In this paper, we consider a joint communication and radar system (labeled Comm-Radar), that is capable of receiving and decoding communication signals while simultaneously enabling radar functionalities. Traditionally, systems that leverage principles of spectrum convergence, deemed each functions to be detrimental to the others. This has led to successive interference cancellations strategies that effectively isolate each of the functionalities. Here, in the context of Comm-Radar processing structure, we show that ambient communication transmissions actually assist in radar estimation. The insight is that communications multipath reflects off radar targets (we denote these comm-target paths) in the environment, and can be processed at the receiver to extract extra information. In this work we characterize the fundamental performance limits of such a joint system.To demonstrate the radar performance gain achievable via the processing of extra comm-target paths, the closed-form Cramér-Rao Bound (CRB) for the estimation of direction, range and velocity of a target is derived, for both the general case, and practical radar and communication signalling schemes. Based on the CRB, joint outer bounds are obtained to characterize the trade off between estimation performance and communication rate. Finally, numerical results verify the advantages of utilizing the target reflections from the communication signal to bolster radar performance.

Sensitivity and distance based performance analysis for batteryless tags with transmit beamforming and ambient backscattering

Ambient backscatter is a new green technology for Internet of Things (IoT) that utilizes surrounding wireless signals to enable batteryless devices to communicate with other devices. The battery-free devices first harvest energy from ambient wireless signals and then backscatter the signals for communications. Clearly, sensitivity and distance are two important parameters for system performance. However, most existing studies on ambient backscatter communication systems do not consider the impact of the sensitivity of the energy-harvesting nodes and the distances between these devices. In this paper, we first provide a literature review for ambient communication technology and then take sensitivity and distance as two key parameters and investigate the sensitivity and distance based performance for ambient backscatter communication systems. Specifically, we establish the mathematical model based on distances between transceivers and backscattering nodes, extract a parameter that can differentiate the direct path and the backscattering path, evaluate the effects of transmit beamforming, design an energy detector for the reader, and analyze the outage probability of energy harvesting at the tag and the bit error rate (BER) at the reader. Simulations are then provided to corroborate the proposed studies.

Toward Agile Information and Communication Framework for the Post-COVID-19 Era

In order to satisfy new normal life styles in the post-COVID-19 era, an efficient information and communication technology (ICT) framework is required to collect, process, and utilize data for the purpose of satisfying increasing user demand in communications and computing while providing a functionality of responding quickly to pandemic. We propose an ICT framework that is capable to support diverse application requirements based on ambient communication, resilient computing, and agile control technologies. Computer simulations are conducted to evaluate the fundamental functionalities of the proposed framework by using a case study where data are exchanged and processed among different network entities in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) empowered vehicular environments. The simulation results show that the proposed approach can outperform existing baselines in various conditions.

CDMA Modulation for Communication System Environment using Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum

In this paper, an overall framework for a joint Special emphasis is placed on the communication segment of the sensing system at 85 GHz. Code division multiplexing using frequency hopping spread spectrum signals is implemented at 85 ghz to take advantage of reduced interference between ambient communication. The framework, which spans the entire chain of signal processing, mat lab is enabled, explained, and simulated using data networking. A template, able to scatter, fraud detection, including radio frequency-block and synchronization non-idealities are built up and analyzed. Also, the implementation of a channel model is into the Win Prop technology and embedded into the simulation of simu link. In the previous paper, they implemented the code division multiple access using a direct sequence spread spectrum at 77ghz for secure communication. Because of using 77ghz for the direct sequence spread spectrum, there will occur noise distortion and interference in the communication system. So that there will be poor system communication between transmitter and receiver. To overcome these problems, our paper explains the implementation of code division multiple access using frequency hopping spread spectrum for better and secure communications. By using this frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology, we can reduce the noise distortion and interference between the transmitter and the receiver. So that our system will be in proper condition to transmit the signals in the same range of frequency without any interference and distortion. FHSS systems can allow a higher aggregate bandwidth for coverage because FHSS provides more channels in the same range of frequencies. In accordance with the bit-error-rate, the module is assessed. By creating white Gaussian additive noise. The attribute is proven to reconcile the theoretical assumptions with the outcomes. By organizing a Rake-Receiver, the system is further boosted with structure configuration without any distortions.

Ambient Awareness and Knowledge Acquisition: Using Social Media to Learn "Who Knows What" and "Who Knows Whom"

The argument proffered in this paper is that use of enterprise social networking technologies can increase the accuracy of people’s metaknowledge (knowledge of “who knows what” and “who knows whom”) at work. The results of a quasi-natural field experiment in which only one of two matched-sample groups within a large financial services firm was given access to the enterprise social networking technology for six months revealed that by making people’s communications with specific partners visible to others in the organization, the technology enabled observers become aware of the communications occurring amongst their coworkers and to make inferences about what and whom those coworkers knew based on the contents of the messages they sent and to whom they were sent. Consequently only individuals in the group that used the social networking technology for six months improved the accuracy of their metaknowledge (a 31% improvement in knowledge of “who knows what” and an 88% improvement in knowledge of “who knows whom”). There were no improvements in the other group over the same time period. Based on these findings, I discuss how technologically enabled “ambient awareness” – awareness of ambient communications occurring amongst others in the organization – can be an important antecedent for knowledge acquisition.

Thoreau’s ear

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was the only nineteenth-century American writer of the very first rank who paid prolonged and intense attention to sound-worlds, particularly non-human ones. As a naturalist, Thoreau’s fieldwork not only involved botany but also sound-collecting. Relying on his Journal and other written work, I show how Thoreau understood music as sound, paying particular attention to his writings on ambient sound and animal sound communication in acoustic ecological niches; showing how he understood sound announces presence and enables co-presence; and pointing to his development of a relational epistemology and alternative economy based in sound. His responses to the vibrations of the environment through prolonged and deep listening, more than 150 years ago, make him valuable for sound studies today.

The value of ambient communication from a consumer perspective

Ambient communication, in which nontraditional media are creatively employed to implicitly communicate a target message, is increasingly popular. Advertising on eggs, elevator panels, and public fountains are all real-life examples of this. In the present study we investigate the value of ambient communication from a consumer perspective. More specifically, we argue that advertising communicated through congruent nontraditional (ambient) media enhance consumer perception of advertising value compared to advertising placed in traditional or incongruent nontraditional (non-ambient) media. We also argue that ambient ad placements are seen as a sign that the brand cares about consumers. The results of an experimental study support our logic; to fulfill its potential advertising in nontraditional media needs to be aligned with the message being communicated. When this is the case, ambient communications help create equitable exchanges between consumers and brands as indicated by positive effects on perceptions of advertising value and consumer care.

An ecological definition of ambient communication: A discursive conceptualization

Ambient communication (AC) is currently a widespread consolidated brand practice at the international level. However, a clear understanding of its conceptual boundaries is still missing, which may better orient branding strategies. Our study is aimed at providing a comprehensive picture of AC, attempting to cast light on its distinctive conceptual dimensions. The study is designed according to a focused ethnography approach based on 15 in-depth interviews with a purposive sample of agency professionals. Transcripts were analysed following a discursive technique that systematically explores the ways in which the interviewees conceived of and articulated the concept of AC. Findings show that, although explicitly recognized as a central element in branding strategies, AC is ambivalently represented by advertising professionals, which uncovered a fragile perception of its implicit value. This reveals a limited unfolding of its potential, which is due to a lack of adequate conceptualization that has thwarted the development of strategic guidelines on how to conceive of, approach, and appraise this type of communication. Moreover, this shows a lack of maturity on the part of agency professionals who are still in need of proving themselves in the eyes of their clients as strategic partners. This proves to be detrimental to the potential expression of AC. Based on our evidence, we put forth a conceptualization that views AC as a relational hub, which can trigger multiple patterns of interaction dynamics according to a fuzzy network-based logic. This conception points to AC as a media-neutral communication form, which is inherently and practically lived and experienced by consumers, encapsulating and activating different interaction modes.

A Trust Management System Through Ambient Communication for VANET

In a VANET, the network topology is constantly changing. In fact, it requires distributed self-organizing security systems. In this article, we propose a distributed self-organizing trust management system for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), given the disastrous consequences of acting on false information sent by the malicious peers in this context. Our application can verify the correctness of alert messages sent by other vehicles about road accident. We opted to apply ambient communication technology to provide a self-organized network. We introduce the concept of “ambient intelligent vehicle” that consists in integrating ambient intelligence features in VANET. Vehicles are considered as intelligent agents that communicate in an ambient environment. Such vehicles are able to control and to detect false warning based on trust management system depicted in this article. Vehicles are arranged into clusters in order to facilitate communication and to reduce overhead. We model how vehicle operate using UML state diagram. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ij-ict.v2i2.2980

Using ambient communication to reduce drink-driving: Public health andshocking images in public spaces

Brand communication specialists are paying increasing attention to new unconventional methods of communicating messages. One such method is ambient communication; a complex form of communication that uses elements of public spaces to convey messages designed to increase customer engagement in corporate objectives. Health communication experts agree that these methods are potentially capable of increasing both an individual's engagement with health communication and the chances that preventive information become part of peers’ discourses. However little research has been done to assess the condition under which these new, alternative methods can effectively communicate health promotion messages. This article is based on the preliminary results of a qualitative study aimed at assessing the effectiveness conditions of ambient communication to prevent unsafe practices. The study considers an ambient initiative recently promoted in Brescia (Italy) by the public institutions to reduce drink-driving by young people. It is important to study the influence of the actual risk context on the effectiveness of a health preventive message. Although the findings of the study indicate the potential ability of ambient communication to sensitise young people towards safe conducts. However, the communication actually had little impact on perceptions of the dangers of drink-driving. To be more effective preventive ambient communication needs to be both part of a more complex and articulated communication mix and designed according to a deep and ecological understanding of real social contexts especially the ways in which young people use public spaces.

Foreword of Special Issue on “Nomadic Services and Applications”

Foreword of Special Issue on “Nomadic Services and Applications”

Research of Place-based 3D Augmented Community-Taking The 3D Virtual Campus as an Example

Place-based virtual community is the trend of recent researches on pervasive computing. The purpose is to enable users in a physical place to receive ubiquitous services from the environment while they communicate with each other unwittingly. The paper further promotes this idea by allowing remote users to join such a virtual community as well as to interact with members on site and calls this type of community as the place-based 3D augmented (PDA) community. With the help of the augmented reality technique, on-the-spot member can visually sense the remote users by their representing avatars. To achieve this goal, the ambient communication environment is required to support message flow among the remote users and people on site. Besides, this environment should be able to discover context passing among members of this community to provide proper services. The context issues and context-awareness approaches of PDA community are fully discussed in the paper. Finally, the infrastructure of this PDA community is also presented along with preliminary result of the prototyping environment.

Towards ambient communication support for power grid maintenance and repair

Abstract In the power industry various companies have a crucial responsibility of sustaining infrastructure for electricity service. Maintenance and repair of electrical devices out in the field is potentially dangerous and sometimes complicated in nature. Effective and safe fieldwork requires clear and accurate communication between fieldworkers repairing and maintaining devices outdoors and operators monitoring and controlling the power grid in a control room. Operators and fieldworkers have to synchronize their activities for maintaining steady electricity service. Current Information and Communication Technology (ICT) support for fieldwork consist of mobile phones, mobile software applications and workforce management systems, but much of the necessary communication is still conducted orally over the phone. We propose ambient communication support that improves communication between operators and fieldworkers by digitalizing and automating trivial messaging. The concept is based on mobile navigation and work order management application, image-processing techniques for wearable sensor based activity recognition methods. In theory we can eliminate three of eight logical steps in a typical work scenario. We present work-in-progress in form of preliminary prototypes and discuss the technological advances needed to make the concept real.

Ambient Intelligence: Awareness Context Application in Industrial Storage

WSNs are designed to efficiently collect data and monitor environments, among other applications. This article describes the concept and realization of an Active Security System for security management of warehousing of chemical substances using WSNs. We present an approach to modeling and simulating cooperation between intelligent products that are equipped with a platform of sensor networks and ambient communication capabilities to increase their security, in a context of ambient intelligence of a deposit for chemical substances. Behavior evolution of every intelligent product is modeled by hierarchical Petri Nets. The simulation of the model is implemented in the Castalia-OMNET++ Tools language.

Online Diarization of Streaming Audio-Visual Data for Smart Environments

For an environment to be perceived as being smart, contextual information has to be gathered to adapt the system's behavior and its interface towards the user. Being a rich source of context information speech can be acquired unobtrusively by microphone arrays and then processed to extract information about the user and his environment. In this paper, a system for joint temporal segmentation, speaker localization, and identification is presented, which is supported by face identification from video data obtained from a steerable camera. Special attention is paid to latency aspects and online processing capabilities, as they are important for the application under investigation, namely ambient communication. It describes the vision of terminal-less, session-less and multi-modal telecommunication with remote partners, where the user can move freely within his home while the communication follows him. The speaker diarization serves as a context source, which has been integrated in a service-oriented middleware architecture and provided to the application to select the most appropriate I/O device and to steer the camera towards the speaker during ambient communication.

Ambient Communication: How to Engage Consumers in Urban Touch-Points

This article examines the concept of ambient communication, its evolution, basic categories, and experiential marketing principles. It explores the variety of heterogeneous out-of-home communication tools, whose diversity and innovativeness have so far resulted in a lack of clear understanding and a failure to exploit their full marketing potential. By taking the urban landscape as the core feature of all conventional and unconventional outdoor communication tools, marketers can develop a comprehensive approach to improving ambient communication's effectiveness by focusing on its impact on consumer brand engagement.

Active product modeling based on smart object concept. Application to chemical security management

Security control and management of goods and persons is a stake mattering in industries and principally in storage and handling of hazardous products. According to a product driven system control strategy this paper presents an efficient security and risk management system based on a distributed security monitoring model supported by each individual product. Ambient intelligence and communication technologies bring new visions in creating reliable systems for security management where dangerous products can be turned into smart products to control, prevent and react to security threats in the ambient process. Each product plays the role of an active node of the overall security system by means of an embedded reactive model for the security assurance. We propose and evaluate the Active Product concept that permits a product's reactive behaviour to environmental changes and to products' vicinity interactions.