We present a new delay-based transport protocol named FLOWER, that aims at providing a Lower-than-Best-Effort (LBE) service for background traffic using the remaining network capacity. The objective is to propose an alternative to the Low Extra Delay Background Transport (LEDBAT) widely deployed within the official BitTorrent client. Indeed, besides its intra-fairness problem, known as latecomer unfairness, LEDBAT can be too aggressive against TCP, making it ill suited for providing LBE services over certain networks such as constrained wireless networks. By using a fuzzy controller to modulate the sending rate, FLOWER aims to solve LEDBAT issues while fulfilling the role of a LBE protocol. Our simulation results show that FLOWER can carry LBE traffic in network scenarios where LEDBAT can not while solving the latecomer unfairness problem.

End-to-end (E2E) reliable communication in Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is a challenging task due to long delay and frequent link disruptions. To enable reliability, the IETF is currently looking at strategies to integrate erasure coding mechanisms inside DTN architecture. The objective is to extend the ability of the existing DTN bundle fragmentation mechanism to support cases where bundles have a high probability of being lost. To date, discussions agree that an intermediate node can re-encode bundles, leaving all decoding process at the destination node in order to let intermediate node operations be as simple as possible. We propose to study and analyze possible re-encoding strategies at intermediate nodes using an on-the-fly coding paradigm. We also investigate how re-encoding and acknowledgment strategies based on this coding scheme would enable E2E reliable communication. Finally, we propose an adaptive mechanism with low complexity that deals with both rerouting events and network dynamics which are common in the context of DTN. Simulation results show that re-encoding at the relay and the adaptive mechanism allows a significant reduction in terms of network overhead injected by erasure codes while ensuring the E2E reliability.

The spatial coupling is an efficient technique that improves the threshold of Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the serial concatenation of Continuous phase modulation (CPM) and LDPC convolutional codes over a memoryless additive white Gaussian noise channel. We show that coupling protographs optimized for CPM improves their performance and helps designing very good ’small’ protographs. Inspired from convolutional codes and thanks to the inner structure of CPM, we also introduce a new termination without rate loss but that still exhibits a coupling gain and it thus has a very good threshold. We will illustrate the behavior of different LDPC convolutional codes with different termination methods by giving some examples and studying their performance using multidimensional EXIT analysis.

The increasing spatial resolution of hyperspectral remote sensors requires the development of new processing methods capable of combining both spectral and spatial information. In this article, we focus on the spatial component and propose the use of novel multifractal attributes, which extract spatial information in terms of the fluctuations of the local regularity of image amplitudes. The novelty of the proposed approach is twofold. First, unlike previous attempts, we study attributes that efficiently summarize multifractal information in a few parameters. Second, we make use of the most recent developments in multifractal analysis: wavelet leader multifractal formalism, the current theoretical and practical benchmark in multifractalanalysis, and a novel Bayesian estimation procedure for one of the central multifractal parameters. Attributes provided by these stateof-the-art multifractal analysis procedures are studied on two sets of hyperspectral images. The experiments suggest that multifractal analysis can provide relevant spatial/textural attributes which can in turn be employed in tasks such as classification or segmentation.

This paper presents an unsupervised Bayesian algorithm for hyperspectral image unmixing accounting for endmember variability. This variability is obtained by assuming that each pixel is a linear combination of random endmembers weighted by their corresponding abundances. An additive noise is also considered in the proposed model generalizing the normal compositional model. The proposed model is unsupervised since it estimates the abundances and both the mean and the covariance matrix of each endmember. A classification map indicating the class of each pixel is also obtained based on the estimated abundances. Simulations conducted on a real dataset show the potential of the proposed model in terms of unmixing performance for the analysis of hyperspectral images.

This paper studies a new Bayesian optimization algorithm for fusing hyperspectral and multispectral images. The hyperspectral image is supposed to be obtained by blurring and subsampling a high spatial and high spectral target image. The multispectral image is modeled as a spectral mixing version of the target image. By introducing appropriate priors for parameters and hyperparameters, the fusion problem is formulated within a Bayesian estimation framework, which is very convenient to model the noise and the target image. The high spatial resolution hyperspectral image is then inferred from its posterior distribution. To compute the Bayesian maximum a posteriori estimator associated with this posterior, an alternating direction method of multipliers within block coordinate descent algorithm is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed fusion method when compared with several state-of-the-art fusion techniques.

High sampling rate Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) can be obtained by time-interleaving low rate (and thus low cost) ADCs into so-called Time-Interleaved ADCs (TI-ADCs). Nevertheless increasing the sampling frequency involves an increasing sensibility of the system to desynchronization between the different ADCs that leads to time-skew errors, impacting the system with non linear distortions. The estimation and compensation of these errors are considered as one of the main challenge to deal with in TI-ADCs. Some methods have been previously proposed, mainly in the field of circuits and systems, to estimate the time-skew error but they mainly involve hardware correction and they lack of flexibility, using an inflexible uniform sampling reference. In this paper, we propose to model the output of L interleaved and desynchronized ADCs with a sampling scheme called Periodic Non-uniform Sampling of order L (PNSL). This scheme has been initially proposed as an alternative to uniform sampling for aliasing cancellation, particularly in the case of bandpass signals. We use its properties here to develop a flexible on-line digital estimation and compensation method of the time delays between the desynchronized channels. The estimated delay is exploited in the PNSL reconstruction formula leading to an accurate reconstruction without hardware correction and without any need to adapt the sampling operation. Our method can be used in a simple Built-In Self-Test (BIST) strategy with the use of learning sequences and our model appears more flexible and less electronically expensive, following the principles of ”Dirty Radio Frequency” paradigm: designing imperfect analog circuits with subsequently digital corrections of these imperfections.

In recent random access methods used for satellite communications, collisions between packets are not considered as destructive. In fact, to deal with the collision problem, successive interference cancellation is performed at the receiver. Generally, it is assumed that the receiver has perfect knowledge of the interference. In practice, the interference term is affected by the transmission channel parameters, i.e., channel attenuation, timing offsets, frequency offsets and phase shifts, and needs to be accurately estimated and canceled to avoid performance degradation. In this paper, we study the performance of an enhanced channel estimation technique combining estimation using an autocorrelation based method and the Expectation-Maximization algorithm integrated in a joint estimation and decoding scheme. We evaluate the effect of residual estimation errors after successive interference cancellation. To validate our experimental results, we compare them to the Cramer-Rao lower bounds for the estimation of channel parameters in case of superimposed signals.

Active and passive localization employing widely distributed sensors is a problem of interest in various fields. In active localization, such as in MIMO radar, transmitters emit signals that are reflected by the targets and collected by the receive sensors, whereas, in passive localization the sensors collect the signals emitted by the sources themselves. This dissertation studies optimization methods for high precision active and passive localization. In the case of active localization, multiple transmit elements illuminate the targets from different directions. The signals emitted by the transmitters may differ in power and bandwidth. Such resources are often limited and distributed uniformly among the transmitters. However, previous studies based on the well known Crámer-Rao lower bound have shown that the localization accuracy depends on the locations of the transmitters as well as the individual channel gains between different transmitters, targets and receivers. Thus, it is natural to ask whether localization accuracy may be improved by judiciously allocating such limited resources among the transmitters. Using the Crámer-Rao lower bound for target localization of multiple targets as a figure of merit, approximate solutions are proposed to the problems of optimal power, optimal bandwidth and optimal joint power and bandwidth allocation. These solutions are computed by minimizing a sequence of convex problems. The quality of these solutions is assessed through extensive numerical simulations and with the help of a lower-bound that certifies their optimality. Simulation results reveal that bandwidth allocation policies have a stronger impact on performance than power. Passive localization of radio frequency sources over multipath channels is a diffcult problem arising in applications such as outdoor or indoor geolocation. Common approaches that combine ad-hoc methods for multipath mitigation with indirect localization relying on intermediary parameters such as time-of-arrivals, time difference of arrivals or received signal strengths, are unsatisfactory. This dissertation models the localization of known waveforms over unknown multipath channels in a sparse framework, and develops a direct approach in which multiple sources are localized jointly, directly from observations obtained at distributed sources. The proposed approach exploits channel properties that enable to distinguish line-of-sight (LOS) from non-LOS signal paths. Theoretical guarantees are established for correct recovery of the sources'locations by atomic norm minimization. A second-order-conebased algorithm is developed to produce the optimal atomic decomposition, and it is shown to produce high accuracy location estimates over complex scenes, in which sources are subject to diverse multipath conditions, including lack of LOS.

Active and passive localization employing widely distributed sensors is a problem of interest in various fields. In active localization, such as in MIMO radar, transmitters emit signals that are reected by the targets and collected by the receive sensors, whereas, in passive localization the sensors collect the signals emitted by the sources themselves. This dissertation studies optimization methods for high precision active and passive localization. In the case of active localization, multiple transmit elements illuminate the targets from different directions. The signals emitted by the transmitters may differ in power and bandwidth. Such resources are often limited and distributed uniformly among the transmitters. However, previous studies based on the well known Crámer-Rao lower bound have shown that the localization accuracy depends on the locations of the transmitters as well as the individual channel gains between different transmitters, targets and receivers. Thus, it is natural to ask whether localization accuracy may be improved by judiciously allocating such limited resources among the transmitters. Using the Cráamer-Rao lower bound for target localization of multiple targets as a figure of merit, approximate solutions are proposed to the problems of optimal power, optimal bandwidth and optimal joint power and bandwidth allocation. These solutions are computed by minimizing a sequence of convex problems. The quality of these solutions is assessed through extensive numerical simulations and with the help of a lower-bound that certifies their optimality. Simulation results reveal that bandwidth allocation policies have a stronger impact on performance than power. Passive localization of radio frequency sources over multipath channels is a diffcult problem arising in applications such as outdoor or indoor geolocation. Common approaches that combine ad-hoc methods for multipath mitigation with indirect localization relying on intermediary parameters such as time-of-arrivals, time difference of arrivals or received signal strengths, are unsatisfactory. This dissertation models the localization of known waveforms over unknown multipath channels in a sparse framework, and develops a direct approach in which multiple sources are localized jointly, directly from observations obtained at distributed sources. The proposed approach exploits channel properties that enable to distinguish line-of-sight (LOS) from non-LOS signal paths. Theoretical guarantees are established for correct recovery of the sources' locations by atomic norm minimization. A second-order-conebased algorithm is developed to produce the optimal atomic decomposition, and it is shown to produce high accuracy location estimates over complex scenes, in which sources are subject to diverse multipath conditions, including lack of LOS.