Unclassified Tutorials

MILCOM 2003 will feature the following Tutorials:

Morning Tutorial
Time: 9:00a.m. – 12:00p.m.

T1 - Free Space Optical Communications
Room:
Tutorial Instructor: Dr. Fred Davidson, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University

Tutorial Description:  The tutorial will cover the basics of both direct detection and coherent detection optical communication systems with emphasis on the differences between optical systems and their radio or microwave frequency counterparts. The first part of the tutorial will focus on basic receiver structures for idealized direct detection systems and then move on to descriptions of real systems with finite bandwidth electronics and photo-detectors with gain (e.g., avalanche photodiodes). Lidar receivers will also be covered. The second part of the tutorial will cover coherent receivers, including mode matching and frequency or phase tracking of the local oscillator and signal beam lasers. The remainder of the tutorial will concentrate on unguided optical field propagation through free-space and the turbulent atmosphere to obtain link loss equations and to include the effects of clear air turbulence on increased system losses and receiver bit error rates.

Target Audience:  Military, industrial, or academic staff interested in understanding optical subsystems and the latest directions in optical communications.

Instructor bio: Dr. Fred Davidson has been a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Johns Hopkins University since 1975.  He teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses and his research interests are in optical communications, quantum electronics, optical coherence, quantum optics, photorefractive materials, and photoconductive semiconductors.  Professor Davidson is a Senior member of the IEEE, is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, has been an Associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Communications, and a reviewer for a number of referred journals.  He has consulted with a number of commercial companies and has been the recipient of many NSF, NASA, and DOD grants.  He has edited a book, has over 50 technical journal papers, he has over 40 conference papers, and he has mentored about twenty-five graduate students.  His educational background is in physics (Cornell University – BSEE, 1964; University of Rochester – Ph.D., 1969).

Afternoon Tutorial
Time: 2:15 – 5:15 p.m.

T2 – Ultra-Wideband Communications
Room:
Tutorial Instructor: Dr. Georgios B. Giannakis, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota

Tutorial Description:  The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave its approval, in the form of a spectral mask in the range 3.1-10.6 GHz, for commercial applications of Ultra Wideband (UWB) systems in 2002.  Since this recent FCC approval, UWB has emerged as an exciting technology whose “time has come” for wireless communications and local area networking. Conveying information over Impulse-like Radio (IR) waveforms, UWB technology comes with unique features:  low-power carrier-free transmissions, ample multipath diversity, low-complexity baseband transceivers, and a potential for increase in capacity.  Thanks to its ultra-short pulses, UWB also allows for very accurate delay estimates, which provide position accuracy within a few centimeters.  UWB connectivity is welcomed into the workplace, because of the general scarcity of bandwidth resources coupled with the capability of IR to overlay existing systems, and it will be very useful at home for indoor, and especially, short range wireless links.  However, to realize these attractive features, UWB research and development has to cope with a number of formidable challenges, including:  high sensitivity to timing the reception of ultra-short pulses, mitigation of fading propagation effects with pronounced frequency-selectivity, low-complexity constraints in decoding high-performance multiple access protocols, and strict power limitations imposed by the desire to minimize interference between UWB communicators and co-existing RF systems.

This tutorial will address the fundamentals of UWB communication systems, their driving applications, recent developments, and open problems. Emphasis will be placed on physical layer issues, but implementation aspects, as well as cross-layer, and networking topics will also be covered.

Target Audience:  Military or industrial staff interested in Ultra Wide Band Communications capabilities, or academic researchers interested in existing problems and research directions in this field.

Instructor bio: Dr. Georgios B. Giannakis holds the ADC Wireless Telecommunications Chair at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Minnesota.  Prior to this position, he spent 12 years at the University of Virginia.  Professor Giannakis’ general academic interests include communications and signal processing, estimation and detection theory, time-series analysis, and system identification.  His current research focuses on transmitter and receiver diversity techniques for single- and multi-user fading communication channels, precoding and space-time coding for block transmissions, multicarrier, and ultra-wideband wireless systems.  He has published more than 160 journal papers, 300 conference papers, and he has edited two books on Signal Processing for Wireless and Mobile Communications.  Dr. Giannakis has an electrical engineering educational background, with a BSEE (National Tech. University, Athens, Greece, 1981), an MSEE, and Ph.D. EE (USC, 1983 and 1986, respectively) and he also has an MS in Mathematics (USC, 1986).  Dr. Giannakis has been very active with the IEEE, winning four best paper awards, organizing workshops, and editing referred journals and special publication editions.

Morning Tutorial
Time: 9:00a.m. – 12:00p.m.

T3- High-Speed Networking
Room:
Tutorial Instructor: Dr. James Sterbenz, Senior Network Scientist, BBN Technologies

Tutorial Description: This tutorial presents a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of high-speed networking, based on the instructor’s book High-Speed Networking:  A Systematic Approach to High-Bandwidth Low-Latency Communication.  This tutorial is not about any particular protocol or standard, but is rather a systematic approach to the principles that guide the research and design of high-speed networks, protocols, and applications.

The network is a complex system of systems, and high-speed networking does not result from the design of individual components or protocols in isolation.  Thus, this tutorial presents a systemic approach to high-speed networks, where the goal is to provide high-bandwidth and low latency to distributed applications, and to deal with the high bandwidth-x-delay product that results from high-speed networking over long distances. 

A set of fundamental axioms is presented (e.g., know the past present and future, application primacy, high-performance paths, limiting constraints, and systemic optimization), followed by the major topical areas:

• Network architecture and topology
• Network control and signaling
• Communication links
• Switches and routers
• End systems
• End-to-end protocols
• Networked applications

A set of design principles are defined and applied to each of these areas.  They are as follows:  selective optimization, resource tradeoffs, end-to-end arguments, protocol layering, state management, control mechanism latency, distributed data, and protocol data unit.  Similarly, a set of design techniques (e.g., scaling time and space, masking the speed of light, specialized hardware implementation, parallelism and pipelining, data structure optimization, cut-through and remapping) are also discussed  in relation to these main topical areas.

Target Audience:  The target audience includes computer scientists and engineers who may have expertise in a narrow aspect of high-speed networking (such as switch design), but want to gain a broader understanding of all aspects of high-speed networking and the impact that their designs have on overall network performance.

Instructor bio: Dr. James P.G. Sterbenz is a Senior Network Scientist at BBN Technologies, where he is a principal investigator and program manager for several DARPA and NASA funded research programs in high-speed, mobile, wireless, and active networks.  Prior to BBN, Dr. Sterbenz worked on gigabit networking and broadband multimedia services at GTE Laboratories and IBM Research.  Dr. Sterbenz has been heavily involved in IEEE (senior member) and ACM technical and conference activities, for example:  GBN, IWAN 2002, PfHSN’99, PfHSN’02 SIGCOMM’99, IZS 2002, ANTA 2002.  He is principal author of the book “High-Speed Networking: A Systematic Approach to High-Bandwidth Low-Latency Communication” (Wiley 2001).  His Ph.D. is from Washington University (1991) in Computer Science, with dissertation work on the first zero-copy gigabit host-network interface. 

Afternoon Tutorial
Time: 2:15 – 5:15 p.m.

T4 - Tactical AdHoc Sensor Networks
Room:
Tutorial Instructor:  Dr. Erdal Cayirci (LTC), Director Combat Models Operations Department, Wargaming and Simulation Center, Turkish War Colleges

Tutorial Description:  Recent advances in micro electro-mechanical systems technology, wireless communications, and digital electronics have enabled the development of low-cost, low-power, multifunctional sensor nodes that are small in size and communicate un-tethered for short distances. These tiny sensor nodes, which consist of sensing, data processing, and communicating components, leverage the idea of sensor networks, based on a collaborative effort of a large number of sensors.

Sensor networks have a wide-range of applications in the battlefield, including monitoring friendly forces, equipment and ammunition; battle-field surveillance; reconnaissance of opposing forces and terrain; targeting; battle damage assessment; and nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) attack detection and reconnaissance.

There are some important design factors that make these networks possible, such as the need for self-organizing capabilities, cooperative efforts amongst sensors, on-board processing, and the transmission of only essential and partially processed data. Low power consumption is one of the most important design constraints on the sensor nodes. It leads to the need for built-in trade-off mechanisms, giving the end user the option of prolonging network lifetime at the cost of lower throughput or higher transmission delay.

A survey of the present protocols and algorithms for sensor networks will lead to a discussion of the current research activities. Acceptable solutions need to meet stringent field requirements, and also the known design constraints.

This tutorial will examine the following topics:

• Tactical sensor network applications
• Important sensor network design factors
• Current research directions

Target Audience:  Military or industrial staff interested in tactical ad hoc sensor networks, or academic researchers interested in research directions in this field.

Instructor bio:  Dr. Erdal Cayirci graduated from the Turkish Army Academy (1986) and from the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst (1989). He received his MS from Middle East Technical University (1995) and his PhD from Bogazici University (2000) in computer engineering. He was a visiting researcher in the Broadband and Wireless Networking Laboratory and a visiting lecturer with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at GeorgiaTech in 2001. Presently, he is director of the Combat Models Operations Department at Turkish War Colleges, Wargaming and Simulation Center, and a faculty member with the Computer Engineering Department of Istanbul Technical University.

Morning Tutorial
Time: 9:00a.m. – 12:00p.m.

T5- Communications Satellite Antenna Systems
Room:
Tutorial Instructor: Robert Dybdal, Senior Engineering Specialist, Aerospace Corporation

Tutorial Description: Satellite communication systems have had a long and successful history of operation and they face many new challenges as the demands for extended service continues.  Antenna systems, more than any other satellite subsystem, have had many designs to satisfy the diverse requirements of specific programs.  Present day satellite capacities, for example, have benefited from multiple beam designs.  Future antenna designs are more fully integrated with system electronics, a trend that will continue.  This course provides an overview of communication satellite systems and the role of antenna design, including their performance issues. Antenna technology for both space and user segments will be covered, including multiple beam systems, active array designs, adaptive antenna technologies, and antenna techniques to reduce system vulnerabilities to interference, an issue of increasing importance.  Two testing topics are also covered:  the testing procedures from development, qualification, and on-orbit as necessary to insure the reliability demanded for space antenna systems and future systems designs that are integrated with system electronics.

Target Audience:  Military or industrial staff interested in antenna design features, performance issues and testing requirements, and academic researchers interested in future research directions in this field.

Instructor bio:  Bob Dybdal is with The Aerospace Corporation, where he has participated in a broad range of developments for space and user system designs.  He has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from The Ohio State University and hold patents in instrumentation, adaptive antenna technology, satellite transponder design, and antenna tracking.

Afternoon Tutorial
Time: 2:15 – 5:15 p.m.

T6:   How I Learned to Love the Trellis:  Using the Viterbi Algorithm for Equalization and Detection
Room:
Tutorial Instructor: Dr.  Bernard Sklar, Director Advanced Systems, Communications Engineering Services

Tutorial Description: In 1967, Andrew Viterbi first presented his now famous algorithm for the decoding of convolutional codes.  A few years later, what became known as the Viterbi decoding algorithm (VDA), was applied to the detection of data signals distorted by intersymbol interference (ISI).  This half-day tutorial focuses on how the VDA can be used for signal detection and equalization, in a way that is quite different from the usual equalization approach of adjusting a received signal via filtering.  The filtering approach attempts to shape or modify the received signal in order to “reverse” the distortion.  However, with the VDA, the receiver can be described as “adjusting itself” so as to make good data estimates from the distorted waveforms.  Basic tools are reviewed, such as finite state machines, likelihood functions, and tree and trellis diagrams.  An application from the Global System for Mobile (GSM) Communications is demonstrated.  Also covered in the tutorial is the use of the VDA with a super-trellis to simultaneously perform detection, equalization, and decoding. The main goal of this half-day tutorial is to provide intuitive insight as to how the VDA works, and why it is a useful tool for detecting and equalizing signals that can be modeled as outputs from a finite state machine. 

Target Audience: Participants that are interested in how the Viterbi Decoding Algorithm (VDA) works and how it can be applied in applications.

Instructor bio:  Dr. Bernard Sklar has 50 years of electrical engineering experience at companies that include Hughes Aircraft, Litton Industries, and The Aerospace Corporation.  At Aerospace, he helped develop the MILSTAR satellite system, and was the principal architect for EHF Satellite Data Link Standards.  He has taught engineering courses at several universities, including the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California.  He has published scores of technical papers, and has presented numerous training programs throughout the world.  He is the recipient of the 1984 Prize Paper Award from the IEEE Communications Society for his tutorial series on digital communications, and he is the author of the book, Digital Communications: Fundamentals and Applications, 2^nd Edition, Prentice‑Hall, 2001.  He holds a Ph.D. degree in engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.