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. The codes are designed to provide maximum diversity gain while requiring only a simple maximum likelihood decoding technique. The resulting system can achieve dramatic increases in the transmission bit rate of wireless systems using low complexity decoding. This is very attractive for wireless system design and space-time block coding has already been incorporated into 3rd generation cellular networking standards known as WCDMA and cdma2000.

In their award-winning paper, Prof. Jafarkhani and Dr. Taherkhani study the orthogonality properties of space-time codes. Orthogonality is a desired feature in space-time code design, however while most orthogonal space-time codes are designed for the real line or the complex plane, real communication systems employ only a subset of these. The paper develops the conditions necessary for space-time codes to exist under this constraint.