The ever-increasing demand for wireless connectivity has led to a spectrum shortage which prompted the FCC to release multiple new bands for dynamic spectrum sharing. This is part of a bigger vision to dynamically share much of the currently under-utilized spectrum, creating GHz-wide spectrum superhighways that can be shared by different types of wireless services. However, a major technical obstacle precluding this vision is the need for receivers that can capture and sense GHz of spectrum in real-time in order to quickly identify unoccupied bands. Such receivers consume a lot of power because they need to sample the wireless signal at GigaSample/s.
To overcome this challenge, we leverage the fact that the wireless spectrum is sparsely utilized and use the Sparse Fourier Transform to build a receiver that can capture and recover GHz of spectrum in real-time, while sampling only at MegaSample/s. We use the aliasing filters and phase rotation techniques described in Section 1.1.3 to build the entire receiver using only cheap, low power hardware similar to what is used today by WiFi and LTE in every mobile phone. We implement our design using three software radios, each sampling at 50 MegaSample/s, and produce a device that captures 0.9 GHz, i.e., 6× larger digital bandwidth than the three software radios combined. The details of the system design, implementation, and evaluation can be found in Chapter 7.
1.2.2 GPS Receivers
GPS is one of the most widely used wireless systems. In order to calculate its position, a GPS receiver has to lock on the satellite signals by aligning the received signal with each satellite’s code. This process requires heavy computation, which consumes both time and power. As a result, running GPS on a phone can quickly drain the battery.
We introduced a new GPS receiver that minimizes the required computation to lock on the satellite’s signal hence reducing localization delay and power consumption. Specifically, we observed that GPS synchronization can be reduced into a sparse computation problem by leveraging the fact that only the correct alignment between the received GPS signal and the satellite code causes their correlation to spike. We built on this insight to develop a GPS receiver that exploits the Sparse Fourier Transform to quickly lock on the satellite signal and identify its location. We prototyped this design using software radios. Our empirical results with real satellite signals demonstrate that the new GPS receiver reduces the computational overhead by 2× to 6×, which translates into significant reduction in localization delay and power consumption. Chapter 8 presents the analysis and evaluation of the design in detail.
1.2.3 Light Field Photography
Light field photography is an active area in graphics where a 2D array of cameras or lenslets is used to capture the 4D light field of a scene.5 This enables a user to extract the 3D depth, refocus the scene to any plane, and change the angle from which he views the scene. This is essential for Virtual Reality (VR) systems as well as post processing of images and videos. Capturing light fields, however, is costly since it requires many cameras or lenslets to sample the scene from different viewpoints.
Thus, our goal is to reduce the cost of light field capture by using only few of the cameras in the 2D array and reconstructing the images from the missing cameras. To do this, we leverage the fact that the 4D Fourier transform of a light field is sparse and we use the Sparse Fourier Transform to subsample the input and reduce the number of cameras. Once we have computed the Fourier transform, we can invert it back to recover the images from the missing cameras which were not sampled and hence recover the full 2D array. However, as explained earlier, natural signals like light fields are not very sparse in the discrete domain. To address this issue, we developed a light field reconstruction system that optimizes for sparsity in the continuous Fourier domain. This improves the quality of reconstruction while reducing the required number of cameras by 6× to 10×. The light field reconstruction algorithm along with the reconstruction results can be found in Chapter 9.
1.2.4 Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS)
One of the next frontiers in MRI is Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS). MRS enables zooming in and detecting the biochemical content of each voxel in the brain, which can be used to discover disease biomarkers that allow early detection of cancer, autism, and Alzheimer’s. MRS tests, however, take prohibitively long time, requiring the patient to stay in the MRI machine for more than 2 hr. MRS images also suffer from a lot of clutter and artifacts that can mask some disease biomarkers. These two challenges have been a major barrier against adopting these tests in clinical diagnosis. To overcome this barrier, we demonstrated that processing MRS data using the Sparse Fourier Transform enhances image quality by suppressing artifacts and reduces the time the patient has to spend in the machine by 3× (e.g., from 2 hr to 40 mins). The details of our MRS algorithm, experiments and results can be found in Chapter 10.
1.2.5 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)
NMR is a technique that provides the detailed structural properties of chemical compounds, providing the 3D structure of complex proteins and nucleic acids. However, collecting NMR measurements is a very time consuming and costly process that can take from several days up to weeks. This prevents researchers from running high-dimensional NMR experiments which are needed for analyzing more complex protein structures. NMR uses spectral analysis to find the resonance frequencies that correspond to the coupling between different atoms. NMR spectra are sparse. Hence, using the Sparse Fourier Transform, we show how to generate the NMR spectra by subsampling the NMR measurements. We customized the Sparse Fourier Transform for multi-dimensional NMR and showed that it can reduce the time of an NMR experiment by 16×. Chapter 11 describes the Sparse Fourier Transform techniques used for processing our NMR experiments along with our recovery results.
1.2.6 The Sparse Fourier Transform Chip
Traditionally, hardware implementations of FFT have been limited in size to few thousands of points. This is because large FFTs require a huge I/O bandwidth, consume a lot of power, and occupy a large silicon area. The Sparse Fourier Transform naturally addresses these issues due to its low computational and memory cost, enabling very large Fourier transforms. We built the largest Fourier transform VLSI chip to date with nearly a million point Fourier transform while consuming 40× less power than prior FFT VLSI implementations. The hardware architecture and benchmarking of the fabricated chip can be found in Appendix G.
1.3 Book Overview
This book is divided into two parts. Part I describes the theoretical foundations of the Sparse Fourier Transform. It presents the Sparse Fourier Transform algorithms in detail and provides the analysis and proofs of the guarantees of these algorithms. Chapter 2 presents the notation and basic definitions that will be used in this part of the book. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on reducing the runtime complexity of the Sparse Fourier Transform algorithms while Chapter 5 focuses on optimizing the sample complexity. Finally, in Chapter 6, we present numerical simulations to evaluate the performance of the Sparse Fourier Transform.
Part II describes the applications and systems designed using the Sparse Fourier Transform. Chapter 7 describes the design and implementation