COMunity – News

News

October, 2011

IMS2011 Competition

Under the guidance and encouragement from Professors Ammar Kouki and François Gagnon, Nouria Belambri, Master's student, participated in the competition for making a low amplifier noise figure, as part of the "International Microwave Symposium", held in Baltimore, Maryland United States from June 5-10, 2011.

This project required the production of multiple channels for the development of a prototype that meets the criteria of the competition with the performance of a competitive level. After tests and measures, the circuit built at the LACIME, an ÉTS Laboratory, obtained the fifth place.

Measurement results:

LNA à 2.45 GHz : Figure de bruit =1.04, Gain = 13.1 dB

Output Power First Harmonic (at 2.46 GHz) = -6.97 dBm

Output Power Third Harmonic (at 2.48 GHz) = -55.86 dBm

Output Third Order = 17.475 dBm = 55.91 mW
Power Consumption = 35.048 mWLNAFOM (LNA figure of Merit) = 1.54

Congradulations!

Conference website: IEEE IMS2011 Baltimore

Science & Outdoors Day

	On June 16, members of SYTACom were invited to participate in the presention « Stochastic Decoding » by professor Warren J. Gross of the McGill University. This activity was followed by a poster competition. The following prizes were awarded to the three best posters: a Sony eBook reader, a 2TB external hard drive and a presenter with laser pointer and timer.
	The jury was composed of professors François Gagnon, ÉTS, Warren J. Gross, McGill University, Claude Thibeault, ÉTS and Ghyslain Gagnon, ÉTS.
Winners: > 1st : Camille Leroux, McGill > 2nd : François-D. Richardson, ÉTS > 3rd : Marc Joliveau, ÉTS
To complete this pleasant day, participants were directed to the courtyard of the ÉTS students' residence to continue discussions, or just play volleyball, enjoy the sun or eat.

Inauguration: Laboratoiry LTCC@ÉTS

Laboratory LTCC (Low Temperature Cofired Ceramic) was officially opened on September 15 at ÉTS. MM. Yves Beauchamp, Director General of the ÉTS and Jean Belzile, Director of Research and Industry Relations proudly participated in this event. Note that Mr. Belzile was behind this project, while he was professor at the electrical engineering department.

This laboratory has equipment that allows highly sought prorotyping and low volume production of multilayer ceramic circuits. It goes without saying that professor Ammar Kouki, director of the Laboratory of communication and integration of microelectronics is proud of this significant achievement that will benefit both research professors, students, as partners in the laboratory.

See brochure (pdf)

http://www.etsmtl.ca/nouvelles/2011/Inauguration-du-laboratoire-LTCC@ETS

GNU RADIO

On last September 14th to 16th, the first conference on the free software development toolkit GNU Radio was held in Philadelphia (http://gnuradio.squarespace.com/gnu-radio-conference-2011/). This toolkit provides the signal processing runtime and processing blocks to implement software radios using readily-available, low-cost external RF hardware and commodity processors. The Research Chair has sent two research professionals to establish contacts with developers and upstream maintainers of GNU Radio, to get and overview of the latest developments and those projected, to learn more about the process of contributing to the development of GNU Radio and real-world applications made by the user community.

Several elements have been discussed that can be very beneficial for the Chair and its students. First and foremost, the project manager strongly wishes that educational institutions use GNU Radio and also contribute back to its development. Indeed, by their own admission, the current GNU Radio implementation has weaknesses in some algorithms where theoretical justification his either light or totally missing. The Chair would certainly be able to address few of these issues.

Furthermore, there is a great lack of contributors, despite a growing community of users. Interesting developments have been done on stream flags and event-based scheduler that will be of great assistance for the Chair projects under development and upcoming projects. Also noteworthy, the GNU Radio upstream maintainers have simplified and codified the process for bug reports, bug fixes and new contributions. An information session about these processes is planned for those in the Chair who like to get to know more. Finally, real applications presented at the conference demonstrated the extent of the GNU Radio potential. A special mention goes to the presenter who has made a practical design approach to a packet-based receiver in GNU Radio using ADS-B and a system for noncompliant aircraft positions using multiple, geographically-distributed networked devices. This allowed the user to locate airliners, cargo planes and even "Air Force One."

To conclude, the Research Chair will soon acquire a group of new USRPs for the benefit of its students and researchers, and will shortly conduct a new training session on the use of GNU Radio and the USRP.

PROMTP - Financing

The grant application to Prompt Inc. for the project entitled "Design and Integration and Algorithms Towards a Cognitive Radio" has been granted. This project directly related to the objectives of the NSERC Chair - Ultra Electronics, aims to explore four major complementary technologies for implementation on software-defined radios: 1) a chaotic multi-level modulation transmitter and receiver, 2) new spectrum sensing and jammer detection algorithms, 3) non-contiguous opportunistic OFDM, and 4) the introduction of Metamaterials and integrated circuits packaging in our LTCC (Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic) design and production capacities. The team members are professors François Gagnon (ÉTS), Claude Thibeault (ÉTS), Ammar Kouki (ÉTS, Yvon Savaria (Polytechnique) in partnership with Ultra Electronics Tactical Communication Systems and Orthogone Technologies Inc.

PUBLICATIONS - Latest

DESPINS, C., LABEAU, F., LE NGOC, T., LABELLE, R., CHERIET, M., THIBEAULT, C., GAGNON, F., LEON-GARCIA., A., CHERKAOUI, O., ST-ARNARD, B., MCNEILL, J., LEMIEUX, Y., LEMAY, M., “Leveraging green communication for carbon emission reductions: Techniques, testbeds, and emerging carbon footprint standards”, IEEE Communications Magazine, August 2011, Vol. 49, Issue 8, pp. 101-109.
SABELKIN, M., GAGNON, F., “Data Transmission Oriented on the Object, Communication Media, Application, and State of Communication Systems”, International Journal of Interdisciplinary Telecommunications and Networking (IJITN), June 2011, Vol. 3, Issue 2, pp. 51-65.
SABELKIN, M., GAGNON, F., “Fast transform for multi-carrier wireless communications”, 2011 Wireless Advanced (WiAd), London, United Kingdom, June 2011, pp. 1-6.
TREMBLAY, C., ENRIQUEZ-CASTILLO, A., BELANGER, M. P., GAGNON, F., “Filterless WDM optical core networks based on coherent systems”, 2011 13th IEEE International Conference on Transparent Optical Networks (ICTON), Stockholm, Sweden, June 2011, pp. 1-4.
JOLIVEAU, M., GIARD, P., GENDREAU, M., GAGNON, F., THIBEAULT, C., “Design of low complexity multiplierless digital filters with optimized free structure using a population-based mataheuristic”, 2011 IEEE 10th International Symposium on Signals, Circuits and Systems (ISSCS), Iasi, Romania, June 2011, pp. 1-4.
BELAMBRI, N., DUBOUIL, D., TALBOT, C., KOUKI, A., GAGNON, F., “Design of a buried hybrid coupler for wideband applications using LTCC technology”, 24th Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE2011), Niagara Falls, Ontario, May 2011, pp. 001101-001104.
ABDELMALEK, S. E., GAGNON, F., DESPINS, C., HU, H., “Vertical Handoff Algorithm for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks Based on Scalar Kalman Filtering”, IEEE 73rd Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2011-Spring), Budapest, Hungary, May 2011, pp.1-5.
KADDOUM, G., VU, M., GAGNON, F., “Performance analysis of differential chaotic shift keying communications in MIMO systems”, IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 2011, pp. 1580-1583.
KADDOUM, G., GAGNON, G., GAGNON, F., “Robust synchronization technique for chaotic symbolic dynamics modulation”, IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 2011, pp. 1968-1971.
LE PAPE, A. GAGNON, F., « Cooperative Transmission Scheduling in Multiuser Detection MAC for Tatical CDMA-MANET », International Workshop on Tatical Mobile Ad Hoc Networking, MOBIHOC2011, Paris, France, May 2011.
PARZYSZ, F., VU, M., GAGNON, F., “Energy-efficient schemes for on-demand relaying”, 2011 34th IEEE Sarnoff Symposium, Princeton, New Jersey, May 2011, pp. 1-6.
SABELKIN, M., GAGNON, F., “Combined source-channel transform for image transmission over wireless channel”, 2011 Wireless Telecommunications Symposium (WTS), New York City, New York, April 2011, pp. 1-4.
CHATELAIN, B., LAPERLE, C., ROBERTS, K., XIAN, X., CHAGNON, M., BOROWIEC, A., GAGNON, F., CARTLEDGE, J. C., PLANT, D. V., “Optimized pulse shaping for intra-channel nonlinearities mitigation in a 10 Gbaud dual-polarization 16-QAM system”, Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition (OFC/NFOEC) 2011 and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference, Los Angeles, California, March 2011, pp. 1-3.
KADDOUM, G., VU, M., GAGNON, F., “On the performance of chaos shift keying in MIMO communications systems”, 2010 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), Cancun, Mexico, March 2011, pp. 1432-1437.