Many applications, including meteorology, remote sensing, irrigation, mining, oil and gas exploration, and fisheries, preclude the use of consumer-oriented terrestrial wireless broadband services because of the remote and distributed locations involved. In these situations, satellite communications provides the only feasible means of providing connectivity for telemetry, supervisory control and data acquisition, tracking and fleet management.

This project will develop novel bandwidth efficient satellite communications technologies, and it aims to extend both basic understanding and engineering practice for satellite modems. Project outcomes will include fundamental contributions to the theory of information transmission, new coding and decoding methods for satellite communications and a proof-of-concept implementation demonstrating benefits in real-world conditions.

The purpose of the project is to develop new approaches to the design and implementation of very high-rate modems (to 1 Gbit/s) for satellite communication links. The project resulted in new techniques for the reception and processing of high bandwidth signals to achieve better performance with flexible and cost-efficient designs such as high end earth-resource and surveillance satellite data reception

Expansion of Wireless LANs as primary access technology for mobile computing devices has resulted in growing expectations of continuous area coverage and controlled Quality-of-Service. This work produced network-wide resource management mechanisms to dynamically allocate resources to cells and users, taking into account user mobility and radio interference between multiple cells.

The key outcome of this cross-disciplinary project is a prototype single-chip (RF section), short-range, 1 Gbit/s, wireless network operating at 60 GHz. This employs new Silicon Germanium technology in a ‘system on chip” methodology that will pave the way for low-cost consumer applications of such technology. ITR’s principal involvement is in the development of modem processing techniques. The significance will be application in very high speed high-bandwidth wireless local networks.

This project will extend the theory and engineering practice of robust mobile networks by developing and demonstrating novel methods for relaying and decoding of information in a wireless mesh network. Specific project innovations will be to: develop cooperative coding strategies for transmission using relays, Reduce bottlenecks caused by medium access control and routing: Increase reliability and throughput via network-wide joint processing of received signals. Targeted scientific and commercial outcomes are: Contribution to the theory of information transmission: Practical coding and decoding methods for mesh networks: A hardware prototype demonstrating the resulting benefits in real-world operating conditions.

Future wireless communications networks will require vast improvements in data rates and user-mobility to meet increasing demands of advanced data services such as Video and CD quality audio. This work contributed to design techniques that meet future Quality of Service demands and that allow for better use of limited resources. Novel approaches for guaranteeing QoS are developed by exploiting the strong interplay between signal processing and networking techniques.

Communications networks are a key enabling technology, yet are theoretically poorly understood. Despite discoveries of codes approaching Shannon’s theoretical limits, for networks these limits are unknown. This project developed bounds on transmission in unreliable networks and codes approaching these bounds, emphasizing mathematical fundamentals, tempered by practical requirements. Outcomes are fundamental contributions to network information theory and design guidelines for ad-hoc and sensor networks.

Wireless data communications is becoming ubiquitous. To meet the demands of future high-speed wireless applications, systems are approaching fundamental physical limits, where implementation complexity is a major problem. Iterative information processing has emerged as the dominant low-complexity design paradigm.

The aim of this project is the optimization of data communications systems subject to constraints on computational complexity. The project builds on previous research accomplishments in these areas, aiming to formally include complexity constraints into the design of concatenated coding systems, and into the development of low-complexity iterative algorithms. The main research tasks are to formulate a mathematically tractable measure of complexity relevant for concatenated systems and corresponding iterative processing algorithms, and to incorporate this analytical complexity measure into the design of optimal, complexity-constrained code structures.

Performance of commercial deployment of sensor networks often falls well below expectations, due to the lack of theoretical understanding of these networks. The aim of the project is too develop a theoretical framework to analyse sensor networks, based the the theory of Random Markov Fields, which capture the spatial relationships between nodes. The theoretical framework will be instrumental in evaluating the performance of existing protocols used in sensor networks as well as developing new high performance protocols. The project will benefit the deployment of effective and efficient sensor and ad hoc networks in the area of military, emergency services and agricultural applications.

With higher data rates in wireless communication networks, new broadband services like DVD-quality video and CD-quality audio become relevant for wireless devices. Each application requires the network to deliver a specific Quality-of-Service (QoS) in terms of minimum errors and delay. Performance of broadband wireless communication networks is limited by availability of resources such as frequency bandwidth and transmission power.

A major network design challenge is to provide a wide range of QoS, given the limitations of wireless channels, and the limited available resources. Transmission schemes, adapting to instantaneous channel characteristics can significantly improve performance.

The main objective of this project is to increase the throughput of future wireless communications systems by adopting adaptive principles in the underlying communications protocols. The specific aims are to determine optimal adaptive transmission strategies for delay-limited block-fading channels, minimizing the outage probability; extract design guidelines for adaptive transmission schemes through a thorough theoretical understanding of the outage probability; and develop practical adaptive, low-complexity coding and decoding strategies that can perform arbitrarily close to the outage probability for delay-limited block-fading channels.

This research aims to understand the relation between resource allocation and service quality in communication networks. Network Coding changes the way we think about networks. Performance increases are predicted for distributed storage, content distribution and multimedia streaming. The project focuses on network coding to increase throughput and to reduce management overhead in wired and wireless multimedia networks. Targeted outcomes: Contributions to network coding theory; Deeper understanding of performance, complexity and resource trade-offs; Practical network coded data transport schemes; New network designs balancing available resources.

Mathematical and engineering approaches are increasingly assisting neuroscientists to understand how neurons encode sensory signals. This project will develop a novel lossy compression paradigm to model the encoding of sound intensities by populations of neurons in the auditory system. This approach will contribute to explaining the dynamic-range capability of the ear, in conjunction with elucidating the role of random noise, eg Brownian motion, and spontaneous neural activity, in the inner ear and auditory nerve. Theory and models developed will potentially lead to innovative idea s for improved cochlear implants and neural prosthetics, and to commercialisation and technology transfer opportunities for wireless sensor networks.