Summary:
The IEEE wireless workshop was well run, fast-paced event organised by Canterbury folks with a number of presentations from academics and engineers from Australia, Waikato, Auckland and Canterbury. Lots of engineering projects, ranging from physical modelling and analysis of wave propagation through various protocols down to DSPs and controllers/processors implementations on FPGAs. There have been few government and industry speakers too, discussing funding and commercial activities within the industry. Few student research projects have been included.
Unfortunately, my plane to Christchurch was 90 minutes delayed due to fog and emergency lighting system on the runway not working properly. I have missed the first hour or so of the event.
** 08:30 Networking and registration
09:00 Welcome: Dr Darin Graham, NZi3
09:05 Harsha Siresena, Chair IEEE Communications Chapter
09:10 Jeremy Reece, NZi3 – Wireless Research Centre
09:25 Vodafone
09:40 ARC Innovations
09:55 Mark Siddall, Tait Electronics Ltd
I have managed to catch the end of highly technical talk. I have missed the context of what the problem domain was.
10:10 Dr Dave Rankin, Indigo Systems
Mobile sensory network technologies initially for home automation, eventually for agricultural needs. The company decided not to go with ZigBee due to interoperability issues. Decided to go with proprietary systems. Done market research independently of the initial business plans (smart homes) and moved towards agriculture. First deployments for monitoring vineyards.
** 10:30 Morning Tea Sponsored by Telecom
10:45 Dr Philippa Martin, University of Canterbury
Collaborative transmission through relays into a single destination within environment that contains node with single anthena only. Very interesting idea about using a number of devices to form a multi-antenna collaborative transmission for more robust signal. Can be used to go around obstacles too.
11:00 Dr Michael Neve, University of Auckland
Research going into interference reduction. Using the buildings structure (for example elements with metal reinforcements) to shape and benefit the signal propagation. Positioning antennas accordingly to reflections of the signal may substantially improve the coverage.
11:15 Dr Pawel Dmochowski, Victoria University Wellington
Highly technical talk with lots of complex math. All about space-time block coding. Improving existing methods through statistical methods and on-the-fly analysis of the signal.
11:30 Prof. Adnan Al-Anbuky, Auckland University of Technology
Introduction to engineering research institute (ERI). Various activities, and various sub groups. One of the fastest growing group is the Wirless Mobile and Sensory Network (WMSN). Mobile devices, mobile interfaces, mobile databases. Sensory Network and sensing technologies. Smart environments, smart networks. Trying to put intelligence into the individual nodes. Examples for mobile data acquisition applications and sensosor networks projects: bluetooth scatter net performance analysis, slaughter house and cow relaxation just before the slaughter. another project: Sirktrack – wildelife research. Energy efficient dynamic clustering, embedded intelligence.
11:45 Andrew Bridger, Harris Stratex / Massey University
Physical layer, digital domain, focused on digital receiver computational unit. FPGA vs ASIC – 20-40 more silicon area, 3-4 slower, 12x more power. But the flexibility and reprogramable. Implementation of a distributed arithmetic filter.
12:00 Scott Raynel, Waikato University
12:00 Sayuj Nath, Software defined systems, SDR for RF Research
Construct modular instrumentation in software. Usually 3 components: digitisers plus microcontroller or microprocessor. Long-term support, 40+ years is not uncommon. traditional communication technologies: usb and ethernet. But problems with overheads. Current industry standard PXI and PXI Express (132MB/s – 4MB/s). The PC component uses a multi-core (AMD) chips. Embedded controller runs Windows (!). It all comes down to software at the end of the day. High-level ready-made libraries are essentials. Low-level prmitives necessary too – this provides flexibility and extensibility. Lavyu graphical programming language for parallel processing (designed with multi-core in mind). Data-driven stream processing.
** 12:15 Lunch Sponsored by FRST >
13:25 Prasan de Silva, Telecom
Talk: Enterprise architect, wireless and systems convergence. FMCA. Convergence is at the heart of comm, allowing customers ta access data, people and services.
FMCA, started in 2004, product requirements Definitions (PRDs),
Convergence:
Devices layer
Access Layer (wired or wireless)
Multi service core
service enabler layer
OSA (Open Services Access) Layer
Internet Layer
The convergence is to make it easy for 3rd parties to program, and for the user to use – all the magic is then done in the middle – some of which might not be trivial at all.
** 13:40-14:25 Student talks
Michael Krause “Multiuser Detection (MUD)” An alternative algorithm to reduce the complexity of Joint Maximum Likelyhood algorithm. Comparing it to jigsaw puzzle solving (NP-complete problem).
Gavathri Kengara “Channel Estimation and Equalization for Broadband single carrier MIMO systems”.
Judy Zhou Low complexity per survivor processing-based … TB9200 station for Tait Electronics.
Muhammad Fainan Hanif “Interference management in cognitive radio (CR) systems”, PEZ based scheme is not worse than decentralised scheme.
Alvin Kok-Lim Yau, Victoria/Wellington “Achieving Situation Awareness in Cognitive Radio”.
Weibo Li, “An address based adaptive flooding for SN”, work based another address-base scope.
Sayan K.Ray (Mobility Management in IEEE 802.16e MWAN. Mobile WiMax.
Liza Pujji, Univesity Auckland, Optimisation of Wirless Comm systems Andrew Austin, University of Auckland, Electromagnetic wave propagation inside the buildings, especially through walls and floors. One of the aspects of the research introduced earlier by Michael Neve.
14:30 Amir Forouzan, NZi3 – Wireless Research Centre
Increasing the Spectral Efficiency of Long Range MIMO systems, MIMOMax Ltd.
14:40 Craig Holmes, FRST
Royal Society: Marsden Fund Health Research Council: public good and health FRST: NERF, RFI, TechNZ
** 14:55 Afternoon Tea Sponsored by FRST
15:20 David Robinson, Ministry of Economic Development
Discussing the legal and management issues related to radio spectrum.
15:35 Alcatel Lucent
Aaron Dow “Evolution to Femto Cells for Radio Access” Femto-cell SI scale 10^-15, in-room, 0.02-0.1W, low costs, Femto-cells deployment can exceed by orders of magnitude the current macro-cell deployments. There are some technical and logistic complications. In the future femto-cells might replace the public mobile networks.
15:50 Doug McConnell, MIMOMax Wireless Ltd
http://mimomax.com/ — Born out of Tait Research Group. Initial product platform: point-to-point and point to-multipont, 320kbps in 25khz channel. 420-470MHz band. Small company of 14 people. Initial product, deployed already. Range >60km, user data rate >256kbps, latency <8ms, BER 1×10-7, MIMO conf. 2×2 and 2×4. Future: IP SCADA. Looks like nice and tidy company, with lots of young staff.
16:05 Dr Alan Coulson, Industrial Research Ltd.
Cognitive Radio, the most important aspect is avoiding interference. Originally, (2000), CR was designed as location aware service. Popular press hype. Using hidden markov models with Viterbi algorithm is the best. Excellent speaker.
16:20 Aaron Reid, Industrial Research Ltd
“Low complexity List Detection for MIMO systems”. Similar problem to Michael Krause talk described earlier.
16:35 Jimmy Yong, Kordia
Digital Terrestrial TV (DTT) Project. Kordia owns a lot of NGNs and everything that has to do with TV and Radio broadcast has to do with Kordia. Free-to-air DTT, currently engaged with FreeView. Operates in New Zealand and Australia. Covers 75% of NZ population (all within 14 months). That,s pretty much 5 cities ;o) $30M budget. ISN – changing, evolving, provisioning for errors and hardware failures. 30.7Mbps going in, with error correction (FEC). New Technologies deployed: standard both HD standard of video, MPEG-4 and Video over IP network (one of the first in the world), Single frequency network (SFN, spectrum efficiency, etc).
16:50 Close
17:00 Networking session at University of Canterbury Staff Club
Sponsored BY NZi3 / WRC This event is organised by wireless experts from the University of Canterbury, NZi3 – Wireless Research Centre, University of Auckland, Victoria University Wellington and Industrial Research Ltd.
Interesting to read your blog about the ’08 event. We are running it again this year – hope to see you here.
Thank you. Yes, I wish I will be able to attend, but not sure about the funding yet.