LabVIEW & WNCG

On Wednesday, April 16, 2003, WNCG professor Robert W. Heath Jr. gave an invited presentation entitled "Applications of LabVIEW in Digital Signal Processing and Wireless Communications" for National Instrument's "Academic Week." This is a corporate event to promote NI's involvement in teaching and research at universities worldwide. Prof. Heath described his experience with LabVIEW both in education and in research. LabVIEW is an intuitive graphical programming language developed by National Instruments that is suitable for a broad range of applications including system simulation, data acquisition, analysis, and prototyping.

LabVIEW is currenlty in use on the educational front as a tool for enhancing learning in digital signal processing (DSP). Dr. Heath's undergraduate DSP class, EE 351M, experienced LabVIEW in a number of mutually enriching contexts including class demos, homework assignments, and a term project. The homework assignment Processing Sound in LabVIEW required the students to implement upsampling, downsampling, and lowpass filtering and apply them to real sound files. Many students built on this assignment to develop term projects on more complex subjects such as changing time scales, pitch shifting, electronic distortion, 2D sound processing, vocoding, and speech recognition. The teaching assistant Roopsha Samanta and the informal help network provided by National Instruments comprising Abhay Samant, Austin Talley, and Jason Clifton were essential to making the integration a success.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems research at UT is also benefitting from the use of LabView. MIMO wireless systems, created by using antenna arrays at both the transmitter and receiver, provide substantial improvements in quality, capacity, and coverage in wireless systems. Prof. Heath's Wireless Systems Innovations Lab (WSIL) developed the MIMO ToolKit, a publicly available download for LabView that provides VIs for simulating various aspects of MIMO communication systems. It includes space-time trellis codes, space-time block codes, spatial multiplexing, and various receiver algorithms. Prof. Heath's recently developed frame-based linear space-time codes are included as part of the package.