Prototyping Wireless Systems: Challenges and Opportunities

Monday, November 2, 2009 - 5:00 p.m. to Tuesday, November 3, 2009 - 5:55 p.m.
CPCC SEMINAR

Featuring Hamid Eslami
Ph.D. Candidiate
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, UC Irvine

Location:  McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium
Free and open to the public

Abstract:
In recent years, Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) has become the technology of choice to increase spectral efficiency and combat multipath fading. To fully characterize the performance of such systems under all possible channel variations and modalities requires an unreasonably vast sample space of multiple antenna transmission schemes, wireless channel characteristics and antenna designs. To accurately quantify the performance such systems in the lab environment, a testbed to capture the behavior of each of the components listed above is essential. In this talk we discuss the design and development of a testbed configuration with the following features : A transmitter and receiver using a 2x2 Orthogonal Space-Time Block Coding (OSTBC) MIMO configuration, compliant with IEEE-802.16e (WiMax) standard are developed. The transmitter and receiver have modular designs so that the performance of different baseband algorithms can be quantified and compared.  Link performance improvement with a beam-tilting Multi-functional Reconfigurable Antenna (MRA) was quantified for a large number of multiple antenna transmission schemes. The MRA antennas are shown to provide significant performance gains over legacy omni-directional antennas in terms of capacity and SER.  An efficient scalable frequency domain MIMO channel emulator was prototyped for frequency selective channel. It is shown through implementation results that the frequency domain MIMO channel emulator has significantly less complexity than the conventional time domain channel emulators. 

About the Speaker:

Hamid Eslami was born in Tehran, Iran in 1981. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering, with a focus in communication systems from the University of Tehran, Iran in 2003, and a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering with a focus in communication systems and VLSI architectures from the University of California, Irvine in 2006. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Irvine.  Eslami's research interests include wireless system design and VLSI architectures. He was a recipient of the Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing (CPCC) Fellowship in 2006. Since July 2009, has been with Broadcom Corporation in Irvine, Calif.