System-Level Design Methodologies for Telecommunication

Long-term evolution (LTE) indoor coverage is becoming important day by day due to multilayer design and high traffic-building premises. Nowadays, it is true that user expectations from operator’s indoor high-quality services and capacity availability provides a well-promised opportunity to offer improved LTE services with appropriate traffic revenues. Customers expect indoor faster Internet connections than ever and they would not tolerate slow connections. Wireless network indoor capacity for data services will become more important in the near future. As a result, indoor LTE radio design is one of the key elements to provide a high-quality service to meet the user demand for a high-capacity mobile network.

Long-term evolution (LTE) indoor coverage, owing to its importance, is becoming very important for cellular operators lately. In international literature, there is a lot of research regarding visible light communication (VLC), especially indoor, to improve the expected throughput. To meet user expectations on operator’s indoor high-quality services and to provide adequate capacity availability, special issues have to be studied. Indoor users expect faster Internet with less interference and healthy environment.

This chapter provides a short introduction to the voice over long-term evolution (VoLTE). According to 3G Patent Platform (3GPP) release 8, LTE was introduced providing higher access rates and lower latency and more efficient use of radio network resources, which means lower cost per transmitted bit and voice spectral efficiency. Circuit-switched domain was excluded and all applications—services are implemented as packet-switched services. In 2009, the One Voice alternative was published by a number of communication service providers and vendors. The conclusion was that the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS)-based solution as defined by 3GPP was the best way to meet the end users’ expectations for service quality, availability, and reliability when moving from existing circuit-switched telephony services to IP-based LTE services. During 2010, the “One Voice” initiative was adopted by the global system for mobile association (GSMA). That was supported by organizations, mobile service providers, vendors, and handset manufacturers. The result of this action was a GSMA VoLTE solution based on standards and supported by industry. VoLTE using IP-based service poses several restrictions on quality of service (QoS), mainly over air interface. A general model approach is also presented in this chapter, contributing to the radio network designers planning algorithms and solutions.

Millimeter-Wave technology enables multi-gigabit wireless communications, while a number of standards have been published targeting the license-free 60 GHz band. With much more spectrum available than the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, the 60 GHz band has wider channels, enabling higher data rates. On the other hand, this technology comes with many technical challenges due to the high carrier frequencies and the wide channel bandwidths used. In this context, an overview of the IEEE 802.11ad, the 802.15.3c, and the Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WGA) which are poised to define the next generation multi-Gbps wireless LANs and PANs will be given and the major challenges faced by the developers of this technology will be discussed. In order to emphasize on the PHY (RF front-end), critical building blocks such as: low-noise amplifier, mixer, frequency doubler/quadrupler, and VCO will be designed demonstrating that their performance against the relevant standards is satisfactory.

Estimation of complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuits’ behavior, in terms of analysis and computation of their dynamic characteristics (such as propagation delay, transition time, and energy dissipation) is today a standard part of digital circuit design. Since these characteristics are critical design parameters in CMOS digital circuits, much effort has to be devoted for the extraction of accurate, analytical expressions for primitive circuits. Using transistor-level simulators with continuous-time modeling of the devices such as SPICE can be very expensive in terms of storage and computation time. Hence, much of the research has addressed the development of analytical timing and energy dissipation models, without the necessity of expensive numerical iterations. This chapter mainly regards the methodology for the derivation of closed-form, accurate expressions for the aforementioned parameters. The operational conditions of primitive CMOS structures are determined and the differential equations describing their operation are solved analytically by using appropriate approximations in order to simplify the modeling procedure, without significant influence in the accuracy. As a case study, the CMOS inverter is used. Following a detailed analysis of the inverter operation, accurate expressions for its output response are derived for the different operation regions, and based on this analysis, analytical expressions for the calculation of the timing and energy parameters can be produced. The derived models account for the influences of input voltage transition time, device sizes, parasitic capacitances, output load, as well as small-geometry device effects. The inverter model can be extended to multi-input CMOS gates by using reduction techniques of series-connected and parallel-connected transistors. Since the accuracy of the used MOSFET device I–V model determines the accuracy of primitive circuits’ timing and energy models to a large extent, accurate and compact device models that take into account the influences of predominant effects in modern nanometer device technologies should be adopted.

As security attacks are becoming an everyday real-life scenario, security engineers must invent more intricate countermeasures to deal with them. Infusion of strong security to a computer system by recruiting specialized hardware tokens has already an established foothold in the modern information technology (IT) world. However, these tokens nowadays must be appropriately adapted to ensure not only strong security but also trust. Modern security specialists believe that the ultimate security goal is not only to provide a strong security shield but also to guarantee in an undeniable way that a system is trusted (the system always performs its intended functionality).

In this chapter, we elaborate on the IT world’s transition from security to trust and describe the trusted computing approach to provide trusted systems. Current trends are presented and tools like trusted virtualization approaches are analyzed. The trusted computing technology features are discussed and our critical view on what the trusted computing future will be like is offered.

Technology and computers are becoming cheaper and easier to find every day, but it still remains hard to learn and understand how things actually work. Arduino is a great example of how a simple, inexpensive, and easy-to-program device can help students of all ages learn electronics and programming in just a few steps. Although such embedded devices and electronics have been adopted by the community, the barrier of entry remains high in comparison to other technologies like web design and generic computer programming. Additionally, collaboration and exchange of ideas remains hard and bound to the past. Internet and cloud technologies provide a solution to the above. Spreading the knowledge and sharpening the learning curve is the target of Codebender. Codebender is an online learning and collaboration hub for makers, students, and engineers. Students can benefit by learning easier and getting to the point where they can actually program much faster than before. Engineers and scientists get access to advanced development tools that help them code and collaborate with their colleagues faster and without pain.

The Internet of today offers access to content through the web via multiple channels. The next evolution will make it possible to access information related to our physical environment through a generalized connectivity of everyday objects. A car may be able to report the status of its various subsystems using embedded communicating sensors for remote diagnosis; personal devices may deliver the latest status of healthcare information of remotely cared patients to a central spot; environmental data may be collected and processed globally for real time decision making. Access to information relating to our surrounding environment is made possible through communicating objects able to interact with that environment and react to events. This evolution of networked devices is also known as the Internet of Things (IoT) and creates space for new application classes. IoT is a highly promising economic sector for sustainability, growth, and innovation. The challenge is to assess the right abstraction and complexity level of “things” involved in order to promote research on the benefits and the control that we want to retain over an environment where machines will gather, exchange, process, and store information automatically.

Most medical imaging applications base their functionality on replacing the physical patient model with the digital data of the patient coming from any medical imaging modality. Medical imaging techniques offer unique capabilities on collecting digital data of the human body. Nowadays, technical evolutions allow the generation of three-dimensional (3D) data within a few moments. The 3D dataset has a great benefit over conventional two-dimensional (2D) images, especially in cases with complex anatomy or pathology. Radiotherapy treatment (RT) is a very demanding cancer treatment process. The aim of the treatment is to cure or to limit the disease with a minimum possible damage of healthy tissues. The process is composed of several steps that are highly dependent on each other in order to achieve the desired results. Quantitative analysis of digital images requires detection and segmentation of the borders of the object of interest. Accurate segmentation is required for volume determination, 3D rendering, radiation therapy, and surgery planning. In medical images, segmentation has traditionally been done by human experts. Substantial computational and storage requirements become especially acute when object orientation and scale have to be considered. Therefore, automated or semiautomated segmentation techniques are essential if these software applications are ever to gain widespread clinical use. Many methods have been proposed to detect and segment 2D shapes, most of which involve template matching. Advanced segmentation techniques called Snakes or active contours have been used, considering deformable models or templates. The main purpose of this work is to apply segmentation techniques for the definition of 3D organs (anatomical structures) under RT.