Abstract

As a research discipline, the field of telecommunications is at least 50 years old. In this talk, we shall briefly review some of the major milestone achievements of these past 50 years, and the impact that these have had on the commercial practice of telecommunications. Included will be such subjects as information/communications theory, digital transmission and switching, signaling systems, intelligent networks, optical communications, satellite systems, the Internet, and cellular radio networks. After this brief review, several topics of current research interest will be introduced and discussed. These include cooperation in wireless networks, wireless peer-to-peer networks, and broadband access networks. For each, we shall present a detailed description of the issues, proposed approaches for investigating and resolving these issues, and sample results reported to date. Also included will be a detailed discussion of techniques for bounding the performance of such networks, along with a comparison of the performance of practical solutions against these best-case bounds.

About the speaker

Anthony Acampora joined the Jacobs School of the University of California at San Diego in 1995, and was director of the Center for Wireless Comm. until 1999. For seven years, he was on the Columbia University faculty, where he directed the Center for Telecommunications Research. For 20 years, he was a research scientist and manager at AT&T Bell Labs. He holds 30 patents and is an IEEE fellow and author of a key textbook: An Introduction to Broadband Networks. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1973 from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.