Antonio Forenza wins the Best Student Paper Award at the VTC Spring 2006

Recent Ph.D. graduate and WNCG member, Dr. Antonio Forenza, won the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE 63rd Vehicular Technology Conference in Melbourne on May 2006. with a paper entitled, "Switching Between OSTBC and Spatial Multiplexing with Linear Receivers in Spatially Correlated MIMO Channels". Forenza co-authored this paper with Matthew R. McKay (from the University of Sydney, Australia), Iain B. Collings (from CSIRO, Australia ) and Robert W. Heath, Jr. his advisor at The University of Texas at Austin .

This paper presents novel adaptive transmission methods for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems. Through the use of sophisticated signal processing techniques, MIMO technology can offer high data-rate transmissions via multiplexing schemes and link robustness or reductions in fading thanks to diversity. Switching between multiplexing and diversity schemes is a key solution to exploit the multiple degrees of freedom offered by wireless channels and improve the performance of future generation wireless systems. This paper derives new closed-form analytical expressions of capacity and bit error rate performance of different MIMO transmission schemes.

These results are used to demonstrate theoretical tradeoffs between diversity and multiplexing schemes in spatially correlated channels. The paper also proposes a practical adaptive transmission algorithm to switch between orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBC) and spatial multiplexing. This adaptive method exploits the spatial selectivity inherent in the wireless channel and is designed to enhance the spectral efficiency of next generation wireless systems, for predefined target error rate.

WNCG is actively investigating all aspects of MIMO communications including antenna design, signal processing algorithms, channel feedback, and prototyping. MIMO technology is currently in the process of being standardized by different standard bodies for wireless local/metropolitan area networks and cellular systems.