The area of short range wireless communications has blossomed in the past few years with the popular success of WLAN technologies operating in the unlicensed spectrum. Silicon technology advances permit us to leverage ever more complex signal processing and communication theoretic techniques to squeeze higher throughput, range, quality of service and power consumption out of the limited amount of unlicensed spectrum available. The FCC has also opened a new gateway for future high speed wireless communications with the first R&O on Ultra-wideband radio (UWB). UWB systems are power spectral density limited and are (relatively) not limited in bandwidth. Under the current FCC rules, they are especially suited for delivering very high throughputs (in the 100s of Mbps, perhaps in the Gbps range) at much shorter ranges (~2-10m) than WLANs, thus their intended application for very high speed wireless personal area networks (WPANs).

This talk will start with a brief overview of the work being done in Intel Labs on future WLAN and WPAN technologies, but the main focus is on discussing aspects of system design for high data rate UWB wireless networks. We will compare different physical layer approaches for such networks and explore the important issue of signal design and how it affects the overall system performance, complexity, flexibility etc. Some of the key research directions we are pursuing in this area will be presented.

V. Srinivasa Somayazulu is a Senior Staff Researcher with the Wireless Technology Development group in Intel Labs, which has a broad charter to conduct research that enables Intel's leadership in the wireless communications area. He has been with Intel since 2000. In the past 12 years he has worked, among other things, on communications system design for digital TV broadcast systems, IS-95 and W-CDMA based cellular systems as well as OFDM based WLAN systems. His current interests lie in the areas of UWB and OFDM system design at the physical layer and MAC layer for high speed wireless networks. He received his B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published 6 papers and has 4 patents issued in the areas of communications systems and signal processing.

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