Abstract

The provision of indoor wireless communication services presents many challenges to radio systems engineers - even to those experienced in outdoor cellular system design. Many factors must be considered, including: the three dimensional arrangement of cells and interferers; the differences between the uplink and the downlink; the irregular propagation environment; the correlation of radio signals; the flexibility in locating base stations (or ports); and, the ability to deliberately modify the environment.

Research, like that conducted at the University of Auckland, continues in the fields of indoor propagation mechanism identification and modeling, reliability measurement and assessment, traffic characterisation, and system capacity estimation. However, the challenge for the practicing engineer is to synthesise effective and efficient communication systems that will cope with (and take advantage of) the indoor environment. This seminar will overview indoor wireless communications research at the University of Auckland and will discuss an approach that uses optimisation techniques to design effective indoor systems.

About the Speaker:

Kevin Sowerby received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Auckland in 1989. After a year as a Leverhulme Visiting Fellow at the University of Liverpool, UK, he returned to Auckland to begin an academic teaching career. Now a Senior Lecturer he has supervised a number of masters and doctoral research students in the general field of communication systems, with particular emphasis on wireless system anaylsis and design. In 1997 he took a sabbatical and spent eight months with the Mobile and Portable Radio Research Group at Virginia Tech, USA and four months in the School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of Simon Fraser University and is also Chair of the IEEE Communications Society's New Zealand Chapter.