Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing

CPCC Seminar Series Launched

CPCC launched a seminar series in order to provide a forum for dissemination of its research during the Winter quarter of 2009, extending into the Spring quarter of 2009. In this series, CPCC faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students are presenting their research results to fellow researchers. Currently the series covers topics in communication and information theory. This series will be extended into the 2009-2010 academic year and then it will cover networking and circuit design in addition to communication and information theory. The talks take place Mondays at 10 AM and are open to the public. In order to receive talk announcements, subscribe to the CPCC Mailing List or visit the CPCC Mailing List Archives to browse through past announcements.
 

CPCC Fellow Joins Academia, Publishes Book

Sudeep Pasricha was a CPCC Fellow during the academic years 2004-2005, 2005-2006, and 2006-2007, working on his Ph.D. with his advisor Prof. Nikil Dutt. During this time, he worked on a project sponsored by Conexant Systems, Inc. on a System-on-Chip power optimization framework. His work resulted in a Best Paper award from the Asia South Pacific Design Automation Conference in 2006 (please see below). He completed his Ph.D. degree at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences during Summer 2008 and consecutively joined Colorado State University at Fort Collins, Colorado as an Assistant Professor. Together with Professor Dutt, he has recently completed a book entitled On-Chip Communication Architectures: System on Chip Interconnect, published by Morgan-Kaufman in 2008. The book provides a survey of research and standards as well as the future trends in on-chip communication architectures. A reader commented on amazon.com that "As a Professor in CS/EE, I consider using the book in advanced design courses. I will certainly recommend it for those of my master students who need in-depth knowledge in this area for the thesis work. I am also convinced that the book will be very useful for design engineers in industry."
 

CPCC Member Receives ONR Young Investigator Award

CPCC Member Dr. Syed A. Jafar is one of 27 recipients of the 2008 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. Dr. Jafar's proposal was on multi-user information theory and was titled "Interference Alignment and the Promise of Unlimited Secure Spectrum for Tactical Communication Networks." The award grant covers three years.

In wireless networks, interference, which is caused by simultaneous transmissions from multiple transmitters, has an adverse impact on the efficiency and capacity. The traditional approach to avoiding interference over wireless networks is to divide the available spectrum/channel/bandwidth among the users proportionally. For example, if there are 10 wireless users who wish to access the same channel, then each user is allotted 10 percent of the available spectrum. However, Dr. Jafar's group has found a new approach called interference alignment . This approach is based on designing signals so that they cast overlapping shadows at the unintended receivers while they remain distinguishable at the intended receiver that can, in theory, allow every user to access half the spectrum. Potentially, this means the data rates of wireless networks can be significantly improved and wireless networks may not be fundamentally interference-limited as was previously believed.
 

Yet Another CPCC Member Receives NSF CAREER Award

CPCC Member Athina Markopoulou received a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation for her work on network coding applications in the Internet. In network coding, intermediate nodes in a network combine incoming packets from multiple sources into their destinations instead of simply forwarding them. This can increase the throughput and can improve scheduling  performance. Dr. Markopoulou is working with her five students to explore ways to apply network coding to the areas of network security and multimedia delivery. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award is intended to support the development of research programs of faculty in their early careers. The grant process is highly competitive and the reception of the award is very prestigious for the individual and her or his institution. Previously CPCC Members Hamid Jafarkhani, Payam Heydari, and Syed Jafar received NSF CAREER awards.
 

CPCC Welcomes New Faculty Member in EECS

Dr. A. Lee Swindlehurst has joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as of September 2007. Dr. Swindlehurst's research interests are in the application of detection and estimation theory to problems in signal processing and wireless communications. Currently, he is working on problems with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communications, including space-time characterization of indoor and outdoor radio frequency propagation, channel estimation and performance analysis for time-varying MIMO links, downlink beamforming in multiuser MIMO systems, and space-time processing for ad-hoc networks.

Dr. Swindlehurst received B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. degrees from Brigham Young University in 1985 and 1986, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1991. Prior to joining UC Irvine, he was a faculty member in Brigham Young University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he began his academic career in 1990, and most recently held the position of full professor and department chair. He also served as vice president of research for ArrayComm LLC, a San Jose-based company working on smart antennas for wireless communications applications.
 

Another CPCC Member Receives NSF CAREER Award

CPCC Member Dr. Syed A. Jafar received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2006 for his proposal titled "Capacity of Wireless Networks with Side Information - Theory and Applications." Capacity refers to the highest information rate that can be transported through a medium, typically restricted by bandwidth and noise, and in some cases, interference. Capacities of individual links for various transmission media are known, while the capacity of a network of links is currently an active research area. Dr. Jafar's research will investigate network capacity in the presence of side information and will be a further step towards understanding the capacity of networks. Knowledge of the capacity of a network is essential in allocation of resources and network design.
 

CPCC Authors Receive Best Journal Paper Award

CPCC Member Dr. Hamid Jafarkhani and his graduate student Yun Zhu are the recipients of the 2006 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications from the IEEE Communications Society. They received this award for their paper "Differential Modulation Based On Quasi-Orthogonal Codes," published in the November 2005 issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Quasi-orthogonal codes belong to the class of space-time codes which provide improved performance for wireless communications systems employing multiple transmit or receive antennas. Prior to this work, all of the known space-time codes required the knowledge of the transmission channel. Differential modulation, as described in the paper, removes the need for this information. The Marconi Prize Paper Award is given to the paper deemed best in terms of originality, utility, timeliness, and clarity of presentation among the papers published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications during the previous year.  

Yun Zhu

CPCC Authors Win Best Paper Award at ASPDAC

CPCC Fellow and UC Irvine graduate student Sudeep Pasricha, his advisor UC Irvine Computer Science Professor Nikil Dutt, and Conexant coauthor Dr. Mohamed Ben-Romdhane are the recipients of the Best Paper Award at the Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASPDAC) that took place in Yokohama, Japan, January 24-27, 2006. The paper, titled “Constraint-driven Bus Matrix Synthesis for MPSoC,” proposes novel techniques to reduce the cost and development time of communication architectures for high performance electronic systems used in the next generation electronic devices such as mobile phones, video game consoles and high-speed networking equipment. 

The paper is based on the authors’ work in a CPCC project that has been supported by Conexant, Inc. during 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 with Dr. Ben-Romdhane serving as the leader of the Conexant team.

CPCC Welcomes New Faculty Member in EECS

Dr. Athina Markopoulou, an expert in networking, has joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Irvine effective January 1, 2006. Dr. Markopoulou received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in November 2002. Prior to joining UC Irvine, she worked at Stanford University, Sprint Advanced Technologies Laboratories, and Arastra, a startup, as Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Member of Technical Staff, and Research Scientist, respectively. During her Ph.D. education, she has had internships at Aloha Networks, Nokia Research Center, and Cisco Systems. Dr. Markopoulou’s research interests are in voice and video over wired and wireless packet networks, network measurement and control, and Internet reliability and security.
 

CPCC Member Jafarkhani Elected IEEE Fellow

CPCC Member Hamid Jafarkhani is one of the 271 professionals the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named an IEEE Fellow effective January 1, 2006. Election to the IEEE Fellow Grade is the highest member grade the IEEE, world’s largest engineering society, can bestow on a member. The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the Board of Directors upon an IEEE member with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year does not exceed one-tenth percent of the total voting Institute membership. Dr. Jafarkhani’s citation is “for contributions to space-time coding.” More…

2005 HSSoE Research Symposium CPCC Session

There is a research symposium organized every spring by the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine. The theme of the Symposium in 2005 was “California: Prosperity Through Technology.” One of the sessions during this symposium, titled “Precursors of the Next Wave in Communications,” was organized by CPCC. The session took place May 23, 2005. After a Keynote Opening by Raouf Halim, Chief Executive Officer of Mindspeed Technologies, Inc. (a CPCC donor), five faculty associated with CPCC outlined their most recent research. Presentations used during the session, as well as its video, are available from the links on the right.

2005 HSSoE CPCC Panel

UC Irvine The Henry Samueli School of Engineering organized its yearly Research Symposium in 2005 on May 23-24, 2005. Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing contributed a panel, titled “Pervasive Communications: All the Time, Everywhere,” held on May 23, 2005. The eight panelists, drawn from Southern California academic and industrial organizations, discussed the state and the future of the telecommunications industry during the panel. For a video of the panel as well as the Power Point presentations, follow the links on the right.

CPCC Member Receives Best Journal Paper Award 

CPCC Member Payam Heydari is the sole recipient of IEEE Circuits and Systems Society’s 2005 Darlington Award. The award is given for Prof. Heydari’s paper “Analysis of the PLL Jitter Due to Power/Ground and Substrate Noise,” published in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I in December 2004. This award is given by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society to recognize the best paper bridging the gap between theory and practice published in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems. The award is based on general quality, originality, contributions, subject matter and timeliness. Prof. Heydari is the youngest recipient of this award during the award’s 37-year history.

CPCC Welcomes New Faculty Member in EECS

Dr. Ahmed Eltawil, an expert in system integration especially for wireless systems, has joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Irvine effective January 1, 2005. Dr. Eltawil received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2003 and worked as the Director of VLSI Design at Innovics, a startup, between January 2001 and August 2003 where he developed a 3G mobile wireless broadband system employing Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) technology. Prior to joining UC Irvine, Dr. Eltawil was affiliated with UCLA as a Research Engineer. His research interests are in the design of system and VLSI architectures for broadband wireless communication, and in implementations and architectures for digital signal processing.

CPCC Member Receives NSF CAREER Award 

Payam Heydari, CPCC Member and Assistant Professor in the UC Irvine Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. The announcement was made January 2005. He was awarded this prestigious award for his research on “Analysis and Design of Silicon-Based Performance Optimized Integrated Circuits for High-Frequency Wideband Wireless Communication Systems.”

Payam Heydari is working to design novel silicon-based integrated circuits for use in high-performance wideband wireless communication systems. These next generation high data rate wireless systems will be able to transmit at transmission speeds much higher than today’s wireless personal area and wireless local area networks.

The CAREER award is NSF’s most prestigious commendation for faculty members and recognizes the early career development activities of scholars most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awardees are chosen on the basis of creative career development plans that integrate research and education. Another CPCC Member, Hamid Jafarkhani, was awarded an NSF CAREER Award in January 2003.

CPCC Summer 2004 Research Presentation Day for Conexant, Mindspeed, and Skyworks Takes Place

CPCC held a Research Presentation Day for three of its donor companies Conexant Systems, Mindspeed Technologies and Skyworks Solutions on July 15, 2004. The event was organized in order to bring CPCC member and affiliate faculty together with researchers from the three companies and to discuss research interests of both sides. The day was part of a series of planned events to put a process in place so that CPCC and its donors can engage in close cooperative research. The first phase of this plan was a CPCC/Cal-(IT)² Poster Presentation Day held on-site at the lobbies of the Newport Beach facilities of Conexant and Mindspeed on May 14, 2004. The Research Presentation Day of July 15, 2004 will be followed by a number of proposals from CPCC member and affiliate faculty, which will result in the determination of a number of CPCC Research Fellowships for the academic year 2004-2005. More…

CPCC/Cal-(IT)² Poster Presentation Day for Local High-Technology Companies Takes Place

Graduate students from CPCC and Cal-(IT)² presented their research in a poster presentation session held on-site at the Newport Beach lobbies of Conexant Systems and Mindspeed Technologies May 14, 2004. A total of 30 graduate students, 15 from UC Irvine and 15 from UC San Diego, displayed their research.

The goal of the event was to bring graduate student researchers in close contact with the technical teams from the companies. “It’s not easy for our technical staff to get out of their offices and attend off-site research presentations,” said Debbie Mountford, director of staffing and university relations at Conexant Systems. “We decided it was a great idea to bring the research to them and based on the reaction it appears to be the way to go.”  More…

Multiuniversity Team with CPCC Member Jafarkhani Wins Major DoD Grant

CPCC member faculty Hamid Jafarkhani, who is one of the inventors of space-time coding, is part of a team of six universities that won a grant worth $3M total over a period of 3 years. The project is granted to develop "space-time processing for tactical mobile ad-hoc networks" by the Department of Defense (DoD) on behalf of the U.S. Army. The grant is part of a major program, called the Multidisciplinary Research Initiative (MURI), worth $146M, a five-year effort targeting topics of exceptional opportunity for the DoD.

Principal investigators on the project: R. Cruz, Y. Hua, T. Javidi, B. Rao, L. Milstein, J. Zeidler, M. Zorzi, J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves (kneeling), S. Krisnamurthy, L. Swindlehurst, M. Jensen, J. Proakis, and H. Jafarkhani.

CPCC Welcomes New Faculty Member

Dr. Syed A. Jafar, a graduate of the Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering, has joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UCI, as of January 2004. With his appointment, Dr. Jafar also joined the Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing.

Dr. Jafar's research interests are in communications and information theory. His Ph.D. thesis is on the fundamental capacity limits of multiple-antenna wireless systems. During his Ph.D. work, he has characterized the impact of channel uncertainty on the capacity of multiple-antenna wireless systems. He has also contributed to fundamental advances on a multi-user transmission technique known as Dirty Paper Coding, now known to be optimal for the multiple-antenna broadcast channel (downlink).

Dr. Jafar received his B. Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India in 1997, the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, in 1999, and the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, California in 2003. He was a summer intern with the Wireless Research group at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Crawford Hill, New Jersey during the summer of 2001. He was a Senior Engineer at Qualcomm Incorporated, San Diego from August 2003 to January 2004.

H. Vincent Poor Gives Distinguished Speaker Talk

H. Vincent Poor, a worldwide known scholar, researcher, and educator in the fields of information theory, communications and signal processing visited UCI and gave a Distinguished Speaker talk on February 18, 2004. The event was co-sponsored by the UCI division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, and the Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing. The talk was titled "Signal processing in communications: Issues and trends." In his talk, Professor Poor discussed a number of new areas in communications such as turbo processing, multiple-input multiple-output systems, cross-layer design, and quantum communications in a multiuser detection framework.

Digital Signal Processing Pioneer Visits CPCC

Professor Lawrence R. Rabiner, one of the pioneers of the field of digital signal processing, and a highly accomplished engineer, scientist, inventor, and research leader, visited the CPCC on February 13, 2003 and gave a presentation entitled "Telecom technology for the 21st century." In his talk, Professor Rabiner described the revolution that has taken place in telecommunications during the last decade and pointed to the new telecommunications network architecture that has arisen as a result of this big change. He outlined what the telecommunications network in the 21st century will look like, and gave demonstrations of new services that have already been built. Examples included a text-to-speech system that delivers the emotion in the text, a highly helpful customer care representative system based on speech recognition, and a travel agent software which employs speech recognition as well as facial expression on a 3-D model. Prior to assuming professor positions at Rutgers University and UCSB, Dr. Rabiner was most recently Vice President of Research at AT&T Laboratories where he managed a broad research program in communications, computing, and information sciences.

Inventor of TCM Visits CPCC

Dr. Gottfried Ungerboeck, inventor of the technique of Trellis Coded Modulation, visited the CPCC on December 9, 2002 and gave a presentation entitled "Coding with Euclidean-space signals: past, present and outlook." Dr. Ungerboeck, who is currently with Broadcom Corporation, is a well-known scientist and engineer, who has spent most of his career at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory. While working on voiceband modems, he made the critical observation that it is possible to enlarge the signal constellation by a factor of two, code in the new signal space, and achieve a rate very close to channel capacity without increasing transmission bandwidth. The invention immediately made its way into voiceband modem standards, microwave transmission, and many other applications. The talk is an overview of the current state of coding and modulation.

Communication Theory Pioneer Visits CPCC

Dr. Marvin Simon, one of the pioneers of the field of communication theory, visited CPCC on October 28, 2002 and gave a talk titled "Advances in Performance Techniques for Wireless Communications." Dr. Simon is a Principal Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. He has been a technology pioneer for the last 34 years and has performed research applied to the design of NASA's deep-space and near-earth missions. Dr. Simon is currently on a Research Leave in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles where he is responsible from forming research collaboration with academic institutions. More...

CPCC Faculty Member Receives Best Paper Award

CPCC member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani and his co-author Dr. Feraydoun Taherkhani were recently awarded the Best Paper award by the 2002 IEEE International Symposium on Advances in Wireless Communications for their paper titled "Pseudo Orthogonal Designs as Space-Time Block Codes". The paper was invited to the symposium. Prof. Jafarkhani is one of the inventors of space-time block coding which is a technique of employing multiple transmit and/or receive antennas in wireless transmission and thereby improving overall system performance. More...