T5 - Ultra-Wideband Communications: A Technology whose Time has Come
| • | Georgios Giannakis, Univ. of Minnesota, USA |
In February 2002, a law-and-order of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave the "green light" (spectral mask in the range 3.1-10.6 GHz) for commercial applications of Ultra Wideband (UWB) systems. Since this recent FCC release, UWB has emerged as an exciting technology whose ``time has come'' for wireless communications, and local area networking. Conveying information over Impulse-like Radio (IR) waveforms, UWB technology comes with unique features: low-power carrier-free transmissions, ample multipath diversity, low-complexity baseband transceivers, and a potential for increase in capacity. Thanks to its ultra-short pulses, UWB also allows for very accurate delay estimates providing position and localization capabilities within a few centimeters. The scarcity of bandwidth resources coupled with the capability of IR to overlay existing systems, welcomes UWB connectivity in the workplace, and at home for indoor and especially short range wireless links. However, to realize these attractive features, UWB research and development has to cope with formidable challenges that include: high sensitivity to timing the reception of ultra-short pulses, mitigation of fading propagation effects with pronounced frequency-selectivity, low-complexity constraints in decoding high-performance multiple access protocols, and strict power limitations imposed by the desire to minimize interference between UWB communicators, and co-existing RF systems.
This tutorial will provide the fundamentals of UWB communication systems, driving applications, recent developments, and open problems. Emphasis will be placed at physical layer issues, but implementation as well as networking aspects will be touched upon.
Georgios B. Giannakis received his Diploma in Electrical Engr. from the Ntl. Tech. Univ. of Athens, Greece, 1981. From 1982 to 1986 he was with the University of Southern California (USC), where he received his M.Sc.. in Electrical Engineering, 1983, M.Sc.. in Mathematics, 1986, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engrg., 1986. After lecturing for one year at USC, he joined the Univ. of Virginia in 1987, where he became a professor in 1997. Since 1999 he has been with the ECE Dept. at the Univ. of Minnesota, where he now holds the ADC Wireless Telecommunications chaired professorship. His general interests span the areas of communications and signal processing, estimation and detection theory, time-series analysis, and system identification -- subjects on which he has published more than 175 journal papers, 325 conference papers, and two edited books on Signal Processing for Wireless and Mobile Communications. Current research topics focus on transmitter and receiver diversity techniques for single- and multi-user fading communication channels, precoding and space-time coding for block transmissions, multicarrier, and ultra-wideband wireless systems.
G. B. Giannakis is the (co-) recipient of four best paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing (SP) Society (1992, 1998, 2000, 2001). He also received the Society's Technical Achievement Award in 2000. He co-organized three IEEE-SP Workshops, and guest (co-) edited four special issues. He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Trans. on Signal Proc. and the IEEE SP Letters, as secretary of the SP Conference Board, as member of the SP Publications Board, as member and vice-chair of the Statistical Signal and Array Processing Committee, as chair of the SP for Communications Technical Committee, and as Editor in Chief for the IEEE SP Letters. He is a member of the Editorial Board for the Proceedings of the IEEE, and will chair the steering committee for the IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communications. He is a Fellow of he IEEE, has served as a member of the IEEE Fellows Election Committee, the IEEE-SP Society's Board of Governors, and is a frequent consultant for the telecommunications industry.
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