Emerging media overlay networks for wireless applications aim at delivering Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoded media contents to nomadic end users by exploiting the (fading-impaired and time-varying) access capacity offered by the "last-hop” wireless channel. In this application scenario, a still open question concerns the closed-form design of control policies that maximize the average throughput sent over the wireless last hop, under constraints on the maximum connection bandwidth available at the Application (APP) layer, the queue capacity available at the Data Link (DL) layer, and the average and peak energies sustained by the Physical (PHY) layer. The approach we follow relies on the maximization on a per-slot basis of the throughput averaged over the fading statistic and conditioned on the queue state, without resorting to cumbersome iterative algorithms. The resulting optimal controller operates in a cross-layer fashion that involves the APP, DL, and PHY layers of the underlying protocol stack. Finally, we develop the operating conditions allowing the proposed controller also to maximize the unconditional average throughput (i.e., the throughput averaged over both queue and channel-state statistics). The carried out numerical tests give insight into the connection bandwidth-versus-queue delay trade-off achieved by the optimal controller.

Power Line Communication (PLC) systems are currently envisioned as a possible solution for distributing multimedia contents and allowing Internet access with a capillary (already built) network without demanding further infrastructure. The real challenge for PLCs consists in providing connectivity where Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN)-based Internet Access and/or Wi-Fi/WiMAX seem to be unable to solve the problem of Digital Divide. In this paper we introduce a new metric, i.e. the goodput, to balance transmission rate and bit error rate (BER) in resource allocation issues for Power Line Communication systems. In detail, we state the well-known integer bit-loading problem as a goodput maximization with constraints on the power consumption and the maximum decoding time. The use of Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM) allows to pursue the goodput maximization weighing error probability and transmission rate which would have otherwise been in trade-off. Numerical results are presented to stress how our solution improves system performances, both in ideal conditions and with additional impairments such as crosstalk and impulsive noise, with respect to the conventional Maximum Rate (MR) and Minimum BER (MB) approaches and to validate the suitability of TCMs in comparison with higher complexity codes.

The interference induced by UWB communication on systems operating in the frequency range between 0 and 10.6 GHz is the main reason why the essential role in these systems' design is played by the pulse shape selection. That's why an accurate shaping choice can lead to avoid severe performance reduction and to guard systems coexistence. To this end, FCC (and ETSI in the near future) gave strict indications about the spectral limits to be respected, so as to define, as the purpose of UWB systems realization, the compliance with this spectral mask. The, widely used, choice of Gaussian-like pulses is, however, largely suboptimal from a power emission point of view since they are unable to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Goal of this contribution is to achieve a good compromise, in a cognitive way, between spectral emission, rate and synchronization errors robustness, via a modified version of the Parks-McClellan method, considering channel impairments due to its frequency-selective nature, to the inter-pulse interference and in-band interference.