I attended PIMRC 2012 in Sydney in the week of Sep 9th. The trip was very successfully. The main purpose again was to give a half-day tutorial about “Joint PHY-MAC Design for Spectral- and Energy-Efficient Wireless Networks”. There were in total five tutorials in PIMRC 2012, and I gave mine in the afternoon of Sep 9th. The attendance was around 40~50. More information can be found here:
http://www.ieee-pimrc.org/program.php#tutorials
In the conference I met many people and shared many views. Here’s something interesting.
On Tue I visited CSIRO(Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), the largest national research organization in Australia. They demoed a 22*1 MU-MIMO testbed, as shown in the above figure. The testbed was able to support 22 parallel video transmissions, each with a 50 Mb/s rate. In addition they also demoed a microwave backhaul transceiver system that can support a rate higher than 10G. About future wireless, it seems the theme lead I talked to is more interested in higher frequency.
On Thur, I visited University of Sydney and gave a one-hour seminar on “Energy-Efficient Wireless Communications-Interference Free and Limited Scenarios”. Regarding future, it seems they’re interested in capacity enhancement (a forever topic) and M2M.
The two keynote presentations on Wed were very interesting. Prof. A. Paulraj talked about his view about future network capacity enhancement and V. Tarokh talked about non-linear signal processing. In the following figure you can see Paulraj’s view for capacity enhancement. In addition, as indoor femtos would face direct competition from WiFi, he’s more interested in macro, micro/pico for mobile communications. He also advocates hyper MIMO, MIMO with lots of antennas working on high frequencies. After the presentation, I talked to him. It seems he is quite interested in using high frequency in short-distance communications for capacity enhancement and use traditional technologies for coverage purposes ( high frequency and fast speed mean significantly higher power consumption?) I also talked to Prof. Tarokh and he is more interested in breakthrough technologies like quantum communications.
