Prof. Behnaam Aazhang
Rice University, United States COOPERATIVE COMMUNICATION: FUNDAMENTAL LIMITS AND ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES
Within the last five years, there has been a cultural shift from wired landlocked connectivity to pervasive wireless information access. Most emerging mobile devices are now equipped with some form of embedded wireless radio. The expectations of high data rates and increased battery longevity have put tremendous pressure on all aspects of wireless system design. To meet the challenges of next generation wireless system design, we need fundamentally new methods to exploit all available dimensions of communication channels and network. In this presentation, I will talk about emerging systems and network level techniques to increase spectral and power efficiency of communication systems, and extend coverage of wireless networks. The cooperative communication paradigm pools distributed resources of different nodes, such that the nodes act like a collaborative system instead of greedy adversarial participants. I will present our research and development plans in the context of a scalable experimental wireless system for mobile broadband Internet.
Prof. Ezio Biglieri
Politecnico di Torino, Italy A UNIFIED VIEW OF RECEIVERS FOR CODED SIGNALS
Normal factor graphs are a graphical representation of the factorization of a function of several variables into a product of functions of a lower number of variables. This representation yields efficient algorithms for computing the marginals of the original function with respect to any one of its variables. Originally developed for decoding turbo codes, it was recognized that factor graphs are a natural setting for the description of a number of general iterative and noniterative techniques for detecting coded signals transmitted on a variety of channels. In addition, they provide a unified framework allowing one to understand the connections among seemingly different detection problems. This talk summarizes the application of normal factor graphs to a number of these problems, such as equalization of coded signals, multiuser detection, decoding of multilevel coded modulation, and reception of space--time coded signals.

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