IEEE Seminar Announcement

Abstract: We consider wireless communications equipped with multiple antennas at both the transmitter and the receiver in order to mitigate the effects of quasi-static flat fading. We introduce an approach that is related to the low-complexity Horizontal-BLAST (Bell Labs layered space-time) architecture. Our scheme, like H-BLAST, transmits the data in parallel streams from the transmit antennas that are decoded successively at the receiver. Unlike H-BLAST, however, we allow for the transmit powers and rates to be different on the transmit antennas, and the order in which the streams are decoded at the receiver is fixed. We call this scheme Rate/Power-Tailored BLAST, or RPT-BLAST. The outage capacity of this new approach is derived and shown to be higher than the outage capacity of H-BLAST in the high-SNR regime. Moreover, asymptotically in SNR, RPT-BLAST outage capacity grows at the same rate as the outage capacity of an optimal system with a maximum-likelihood receiver.

Speaker Bio: Tommy Guess received his degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder (Ph.D. in 1998), Purdue University (M.S.E.E. in 1990), and Texas A&M University (B.S. in 1989).

He joined the University of Virginia faculty in 1999, where he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering. For the 1998-1999
academic year, Dr. Guess was a visiting researcher and lecturer at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 1991-1992 he was employed as an Electronic Systems Engineer for E-Systems of Garland, Texas. His current research interests are in the areas of communication theory, information theory, and statistical signal processing. Dr. Guess is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award.