Abstract of doctoral thesis - Mahesh NAIR

"Hybrid Sensor and Information Fusion to enhance signal classification of a Multi Receiving System"

The areas of application of wireless communication is increasing rapidly with the developments in IOT and the successful implementation of wireless technologies in medical, defence and industrial applications. There are numerous challenges to be addressed like limited availability of the radio frequency spectrum, an increase in requirement of better quality transmission, transmission problems such as multi path fading, inter channel interference etc. This study is to investigate how information fusion of same signals from multiple receivers improves on the accuracy of reception when compared to reception by a single receiver. We will focus on the use of hybrid sensor and information fusion to improve signal reception for a Multi Receiving digital communication System using Bi-linear Time-Frequency Analysis for parameter extraction, in a multi-path fading environment. Performance of classifiers is evaluated by comparing their performance at different SNRs. The classification accuracy of receivers will be different as each receiver has different propagation characteristics. Different types and levels of information fusion are compared and the most suitable method for this application is selected. This method aims at combining the signal at sensor level and decision level thus making it a novel hybrid method of multi sensor information fusion.