ABSTRACT:
The purpose of this talk is to examine (i) some of the models commonly used to represent fading, and (ii) the information-theoretic metrics most commonlyused to evaluate performance over those models. We raise the question of whether these models and metrics remain meaningful in light of the advances that wireless communication systems have undergone over the last two decades. A number of critical weaknesses are pointed out, and ideas on possible fixes are put forth. Some of the identified weaknesses have to do with models that, over time, have become grossly inadequate; other weaknesses have to do with changes in the operating conditions of modern systems, and others with the coarse and asymptotic nature of some of the most popular performance metrics ("diversity" and "multiplexing").
BIO:
Angel Lozano is a Professor of Information and Communication Technologies at UPF (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) in Barcelona, Spain. Prof. Lozano received the Telecommunications Engineering degree from UPC (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya), Spain, in 1992 and Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1994 and 1998, respectively. Contemporarily, between 1996 and 1998, he also worked for Rockwell Communication Systems (now Conexant Systems) in San Diego, USA. In 1999 he joined Bell Labs (Lucent Technologies, now Alcatel-Lucent) in Holmdel, USA, where he was a member of the Wireless Communications Research Department until 2008. Between 2005 and 2008 he was also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. Prof. Lozano is a senior member of the IEEE since 1999. He served as associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications between 1999 and 2009, has guest-edited various other IEEE and non-IEEE journal special issues, and is actively involved in committees and conference organization tasks for the IEEE Communications Society. Since 2010, he is an associate editor for the Journal of Communications & Networks. He has further participated in standardization activities for 3GPP, 3GPP2, IEEE 802.20 and the IETF. Prof. Lozano has authored over 85 technical journal and conference papers, holds 15 patents, and has contributed to several books. His papers have received two awards: the best paper at the 2006 IEEE Int'l Symposium on Spread Spectrum Techniques & Applications, and the Stephen O. Rice prize to the best paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Communications in 2008. He has held visiting appointments at Stanford University, at the University of Minnesota, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and at Universidad Tcnica Federico Santa Mara (Valparaiso, Chile).