Over the ages, research in wireless communications has been evolving through a quest for answers to the fundamental questions: why, what and how? Why do people, separated by physical distances, cannot hear each other talking? Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone was driven by this curiosity; so was Guglielmo Marconi’s telegraphic signalling across the Atlantic Ocean in 1901.

Societal evolution has also been driven by curiosity, especially in the pursuit for quality of life (QoL). The quest for QoL invariably creates conflicts, since greediness is a human trait (or perhaps fraud). Conflicts lead to warring among humans, and the need to observe the battle front in Europe during World War II was the pedal-stone on which research in wireless technology escalated. Through the cold war and subsequent relatively peaceful periods, wireless communications research continues to flourish. QoL becomes synonymous with wealth and health creation. The flexibility of allowing communications from anywhere at anytime makes wireless communications the front banner in societal evolution. The realization of an effective and efficient information transport platform to support end-to-end information delivery with quality of service (QoS) provisioning is the driver behind continuing research in wireless communications and networking.

Channel impairments and multiple access interference limit the capacity and the geographical coverage of a wireless system. Radio resource management is essential to achieve high system utilization, while global communication necessitates the interworking of different telecommunication domains. Interworking of different domains, however, has profound ramifications on the formulation and linkage of the building blocks to construct an information transport platform. This talk will first provide an exposition and a critical look at future evolution of wireless communications and networking, beginning with a brief historical perspective of wireless technology, a look at the obstacles posed by nature and the challenges facing the designers, and then examines power distribution/allocation mechanisms that are essential functions of radio resource management.

About our speaker:

Jon W. Mark completed and received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from McMaster University in 1970 under the auspices of an NRC PIER Fellowship, while on leave from Westinghouse Canada Ltd. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering (later Electrical and Computer Engineering) at the University of Waterloo in September 1970 and served as the Department Chair from July 1984 to June 1990. He was on sabbatical leave at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY (1976-77) as a Visiting Research Scientist, Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ (1982-83) as a Resident Consultant, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (1990-91) as an Invited Professor, and the National University of Singapore (1994-95) as a Visiting Professor.

He is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus and the founding Director of the Centre for Wireless Communications at the University of Waterloo. A life Fellow of the IEEE, Dr. Mark is a co-author of the text titled Wireless Communications and Networking, Prentice Hall, 2003. Over the years, he has served on a number of editorial boards, the ComSoc Awards Committee, and the Steering Committee of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.