Signal Processing for Emerging Wireless Technologies

In many cases the analyst's problem is one of finding a needle in a haystack. The ever increasing flood of communication technology and traffic has resulted in a large and growing haystack and presents a daunting problem. The key to maximizing analyst productivity is the development of intelligent tools which automatically and accurately extract potential activity of interest while only rejecting uninteresting activity. As a case in point, the advent of third generation (3G) wireless communications is producing exponential growth of wireless information exchange. Existing stove-pipe systems are inadequate and too inflexible to handle this proliferation. 3G systems exacerbate the problem with increases in bandwidth, data rate, number of users and volume of traffic. Furthermore, complex modern modulation techniques push the envelope of processing requirements. Particularly challenging is the CDMA2000 standard (and its variants) and is the subject of the proposed effort. The focus of this proposal is the study of signal processing algorithms and architectures that will advance the current state of the art an order of magnitude, enabling processing of new and difficult signals and providing a 10X increase in analyst productivity.