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. Dr. Simon is currently working with the CPCC faculty member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani on extending the techniques presented in his talk to the analysis of error performance of space-time codes in fading channels. Dr. Jafarkhani is one of the inventors of space-time codes, invented three years ago and have already been adopted by next generation cellular network standards WCDMA and cdma2000.

In his talk, Dr. Simon illustrated techniques that enable a unified analysis methodology for different fading channel models and yield closed form solutions. Until recently, when Dr. Simon and his colleague Prof. Slim-Alouni invented the new closed form techniques, system design for fading channels was mostly based on simulations. In communication engineering, closed form solutions are preferable to simulations since they provide substantially more insight into system behavior. Most of the techniques described by Dr. Simon in his talk can be found in his two books Digital Communication Over Fading Channels: A Unified Approach to Performance Analysis (John Wiley and Sons, 2000) and Probability Distributions Involving Gaussian Random Variables: A Handbook for Engineers and Scientists (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002).