Cooperative Communication

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.
Behnaam Aazhang received his B.S. (with highest honors), M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1981, 1983, and 1986, respectively. From 1981 to 1985, he was a Research Assistant in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois. In August 1985, he joined the faculty of Rice University, Houston, Texas, where he is now the J.S. Abercrombie Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Director of Center for Multimedia Communications (CMC). His research interests are in the areas of communication theory, information theory, and their applications with emphasis on multiple access communications, cellular mobile radio communications, and optical communication networks. He is a Fellow of IEEE