Instructor:
Moe Z. Win, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract:
Ultra-wide bandwidth (UWB) transmission systems have gained recent interest in the scientific, commercial and military sectors. Wide bandwidth provides fine delay resolution, making UWB a viable candidate for communications in dense multipath environments, such as short-range or indoor wireless communications. By virtue of their robustness against fading and superior obstacle penetration, UWB systems allow reliable communication in extremely challenging environments where there are many obstacles producing dense multipath. Therefore, they are currently under consideration for high data rate communications and sensor networks, because they allow low-cost production and reuse of (already occupied) spectrum. UWB is also highly interesting for military application because it provides low probability of detection as well as anti-jam capabilities. Interest in UWB systems has intensified recently due to the ruling by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) concerning UWB emission masks. This ruling opens the way for coexistence with traditional and protected radio services and allows the potential use of UWB transmission without allocated spectrum. Standardization bodies (like IEEE 802.15) have started to develop standards for UWB systems and companies are announcing products. In this tutorial, we will give a technical overview that will allow the attendants to distinguish between commercial hype and the true technical possibilities.

Instructor Bios:
Moe Z. Win received the B.S. degree (magna cum laude) from Texas A&M University, College Station, and the M.S. degree from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, in 1987 and 1989, respectively, in Electrical Engineering. As a Presidential Fellow at USC, he received both an M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1998. From 1994 to 1997, he was a Research Assistant with the Communication Sciences Institute at USC, where he played a key role in the successful creation of the Ultra-Wideband Radio Laboratory. From 1998 to 2002, he was with the Wireless Systems Research Department, AT&T Laboratories-Research, Middletown, NJ. Since 2002, he has been with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he holds the Charles Stark Draper Chair. His main research interests are the application of communication, detection, and estimation theories to a variety of communications problems including time-varying channels, diversity, equalization, synchronization, signal design, ultra-wide bandwidth communication, and optical communications.