Keynote Speakers

Dr. Jon Mark (University of Waterloo, Canada)    

Dr. Hisashi Kobayashi (Princeton University, USA)

Dr. Anthony C.K. Soong (Ericsson, USA)

Dr. Jon Mark   Centre for Wireless Communications Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Waterloo Waterloo, ON, Canada

Evolution of Wireless Communications and Networking

(8:30 AM - 9:30 AM, Monday, August 22)

Abstract:

Over the ages, research in wireless communications has been evolving through a quest for answers to the fundamental questions: why, what and how? Why do people, separated by physical distances, cannot hear each other talking? Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone was driven by this curiosity; so was Guglielmo Marconi's telegraphic signalling across the Atlantic Ocean in 1901.

Societal evolution has also been driven by curiosity, especially in the pursuit for quality of life (QoL). The quest for QoL invariably creates conflicts, since greediness is a human trait (or perhaps fraud). Conflicts lead to warring among humans, and the need to observe the battle front in Europe during World War II was the pedal-stone on which research in wireless technology escalated. Through the cold war and subsequent relatively peaceful periods, wireless communications research continues to flourish. QoL becomes synonymous with wealth and health creation. With the ability to provide information in large volume and high-speed to enrich wealth creation, telecommunications research becomes the front banner in societal evolution. Quality of service (QoS) provided by an effective and efficient information transport platform becomes synonymous with QoL.

To achieve global communications, it is necessary to interwork different domains of telecommunications. Interworking of different domains, however, has profound ramifications on the formulation of the building blocks and the glues needed to construct an information transport platform, and interdependency issues amongst the different layers of the information transport platform. This talk will provide an exposition and a critical look at future evolution of wireless communications and networking, beginning with a brief historical perspective of wireless technology, a critical look at the obstacles posed by nature, and then an examination of the building blocks and the glues necessary for the construction of the information transfer vehicle capable of delivering large volume of information at high-speed, and with end-to-end QoS satisfaction.

Biosketch:

Jon W. Mark received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from McMaster University in Canada in 1970. He is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus and the founding Director of the Centre for Wireless Communications at the University of Waterloo, Canada. A life Fellow of the IEEE, Dr. Mark is the recipient of the 2000 Canadian Award in Telecommunications Research for significant research contributions, scholarship and leadership in the fields of computer communications networks and wireless communications and the 2000 Award of Merit by the Education Foundation, Association of the Chinese Canadian Professionals, for significant research contributions in telecommunications research. He is a co-author of the text Wireless Communications and Networking, Prentice Hall, 2003. Over the years, Dr. Mark has served on several editorial boards, and held memberships in the Steering Committee of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and the Awards Committee of ComSoc.

Dr. Hisashi Kobayashi  Department of Electrical Engineering School of Engineering and Applied Science Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544-5263, USA

Capitalizing on Analogies between Different Applications in Stochastic Modeling

(8:30 AM - 9:30 AM, Tuesday, August 23)

Abstract:

Stochastic or statistical modeling has been successfully practiced by engineers and scientists in design and analysis of various systems and applications. In this talk I will discuss several examples where stochastic models and algorithms developed with some specific problems in mind have found their successful applications and extensions in seemingly different fields. These examples clearly suggest the importance of cross-disciplinary study.

I start with Brownian motion theory developed by Bachelier, Einstein, Wiener and others a century ago to model the random movement of molecules. A prominent generalization of Brownian motion is geometric Brownian motion (GBM), which is used in modeling stock and commodity prices. Then we will discuss fractional Brownian Motion (fBM) developed by Mandelbrot to explain a large class of phenomena possessing long-range dependency (LRD) and self-similarity.

Another notable example of analogies in stochastic modeling is a hidden Markov model (HMM), which was originally developed in the speech recognition research by Jelinek and others in 1970’s and has recently been used in bioinformatics for the analysis of DNA and protein sequences.

I will then discuss my personal work on PRML (partial-response channel coding, maximum likelihood decoding) invented in 1969-70, by drawing an analogy between a digital magnetic recording system and a digital communication signaling scheme called partial-response (PR). The Viterbi algorithm or maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding algorithm, originally designed for convolutional codes, finds its analogy in maximum likelihood sequence estimation of a PR signal. PRML is now the industry standard adopted in all hard disk drives (HDD) ranging from high-end computers, PC, iPod and the next generation cell phone. Optical storage devices such as CDs and DVDs have also adopted PRML signal processing to increase recording density and enhance performance.

Biosketch:

Hisashi Kobayashi is the Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Princeton University since 1986 when he joined the Faculty as Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science (1986-91). His current research fields include: network security protocols, ultra wideband (UWB) communications, wireless geolocation, hidden semi-Markov model (HSMM) and its computation algorithms. He is authoring with Brian L. Mark a graduate textbook “Modeling and Analysis: Foundations of System Performance Evaluation” (to be published by Prentice Hall, 2006).

During 1967-70, he was with the Applied Research Department of IBM Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, where he worked on data transmission theory, seismic signal processing, digital magnetic recording and image data compression. He is the inventor of a high-density digital recording scheme, now widely known as PRML (partial response, maximum likelihood). For this work he will receive the 2005 Eduard Rhein Technology Award (see www.Eduard-Rhein-Stiftung.de).

During 1971-86, he held managerial positions in the Computer Science Department at Yorktown Heights: Manager, systems measurement & modeling (1971-73), Senior manager, systems analysis & algorithms (1974-79); Department manager, VLSI design (1981-82). He was Founding Director of IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory (1982-86).

Major recognitions he received include: IEEE Fellow (1977); Senior US Scientist Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany (1979); Silver Core Award from IFIP (1980); Election to the Engineering Academy of Japan (1992); and IEICE Fellow (2005). He held visiting professorships at UCLA (1969-70); Hawaii (1975); Stanford (1976); Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany (1979-80); Free University of Brussels, Belgium (1980); University of Tokyo (1991-92); and University of Victoria, Canada (1998-99). He received his B.E. and M.E degrees from the University of Tokyo, and Ph.D. from Princeton in 1961, 63 and 67, respectively. He was a radar engineer at Toshiba, Japan in 1963-65.

Dr. Anthony C.K. Soong

Ericsson Inc.

Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Technological Enablers of the IEEE Wireless Metropolitan Area Network (IEEE 802.16)

(8:30 AM - 9:30 AM, Wednesday, August 24)

Abstract:

There has been keen interest in the literature recently on the IEEE wireless metropolitan area network (MAN) developed within IEEE 802.16. Through the use of flexible physical layer features and medium access control (MAC) layer mechanisms, this system can be used to deliver broadband voice and data into areas that may have a wide range of population densities, cell radii, propagation environments, and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. The physical layer provides flexibilities of time or frequency domain duplexing, multiple bandwidths, adjustable subchannelization, scalable OFDM formats, adaptive coded modulation, and advanced antenna system. The IEEE 802.16 MAC layer offers a connection-oriented service to upper layers of the protocol stack. The QoS of each connection takes one of four levels: constant bit rate grant, real time polling, non-real-time polling, and best effort. The MAC layer also offers packing, fragmentation and ARQ. The MAC privacy sublayer performs authentication, key exchange and encryption of MAC packet data units. The MAC Convergence sublayers at the top of the MAC enable Ethernet, ATM, TDM voice and IP (Internet Protocol) services to be offered. This presentation will endeavor to provide a high level overview of the system. It will discuss, from an information theoretic point of view, the key enablers of the system.

Biosketch:

Anthony C.K. Soong received the B.Sc. degree in animal physiology and physics from the University of Calgary, and the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering, the M.Sc. degree in biomedical physics and Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Alberta. He is currently a principal systems engineer for CDMA Systems at Ericsson Inc. in Boulder, Colorado, USA. He also leads the Ericsson physical layer delegation for the CDMA 2000 standardization body (3GPP2). Prior to joining Ericsson, he was with the systems group in Qualcomm Inc.. His research interests are in statistical signal processing, robust statistics, wireless communications, spread spectrum techniques, multicarrier signaling, multiple antenna techniques and physiological signal processing.