To be developed; the focus of this thrust will be an understanding of the effects of underlying propagation phenomena on radio communications at frequencies ranging from 1 to 60 GHz. Included shall be multipath effects (fading and delay spread), shadowing effects, rain attenuation, and statistical time correlation of propagation events (the latter topic, largely unstudied to date, has enormous impact on system architecture, impairment concealment, and perceived service quality; as an example, short/frequent bursts of errors caused by rapidly varying multipath fading is treated differently, and has different impact, than longer, less frequent bursts of errors). The focus of antenna-oriented research will be tilted toward smart arrays appropriate to the abatement of time-varying propagation impairments and co-channel interference, thereby providing much-needed stabilization of the physical radio link. We anticipate that much of the higher-layer efforts addressing network architecture will be strongly influenced by constraints imposed by the need for smart antennas at the base station.
Affiliated Faculty
Research Thrust Areas