Jafarkhani and Grad Student Win Best Paper Award
Irvine, Calif., 05-26-06 – UC Irvine Calit2 academic affiliate Hamid Jafarkhani, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and doctoral student Yun Zhu have received a prestigious award for their paper “Differential Modulation Based on Quasi-Orthogonal Codes” from the IEEE Communications Society.
|
The Guglielmo Marconi Best Paper Award is given for an original paper in the field of wireless communications. Jafarkhani will travel to Istanbul , Turkey next month to attend the IEEE International Conference on Communications, where he will be presented with the award and a $1,000 stipend.
The paper details Jafarkhani and Zhu’s research on communications systems that use multiple antennas without estimating channel information. Jafarkhani explains that one way to design wireless communications systems is to estimate channel information at the receiver and use that knowledge to decode data. But channels can change quickly, invalidating results. The differential modulation system uses mathematical formulas to transmit information and can be used in systems utilizing more than two antennas.
Jafarkhani has been researching the theoretical and practical challenges of designing systems that use multiple antennas for nearly nine years. Specifically, he has been interested in studying the theoretical tradeoffs and limits from an information theory perspective and designing practical coding and beamforming schemes that satisfy those limits using signal-processing methods. Currently, he is interested in cross-layer adaptation, network connectivity and power-aware wireless network protocols especially for ad hoc networks with multiple-antenna nodes.
He has a long list of awards to his credit, including UCI’s Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research, the NSF Faculty Career Award and the Best Paper Award from the IEEE International Symposium on Advances in Wireless Communications. In addition, he is an IEEE fellow, an honor bestowed upon those with extraordinary records of accomplishment.