The Programme
The programme will focus on providing Ultra-high data rate (Gbps) in both wireless and wire-line broadband networks with ‘master-slave’ and peer-to-peer connectivity.  Such high speed personal connectivity will create new usage models and market opportunity across PC, consumer electronics and mobile terminal segments.

Advanced technologies will be innovated and developed to overcome constraints in power consumption, spectrum efficiency, propagation medium dispersion, hardware complexity; and to adapt individual connectivity to dynamic interference and access policy to boost overall system efficiency & reliability.

Specifically, the programme mission is to push Gigabit connectivity technology frontier.  In line with the 3 challenges in the programme, namely - to boost date rate, to lower power, and to extend coverage, are the following 3 programme clusters:

• High Rate UWB for Gbps data exchange – technology to improve Mbps/mW;
• Wide Area Access for Gbps data access – technology to improve Mbps/MHz;
• Wireline for Gbps coverage – technology to improve Mbps*km;

All these heterogeneous systems may eventually have a cognitive component that can adapt connectivity to dynamic interference and spectrum access policy to boost overall cross-system efficiency & reliability, while sharing the limited available frequency spectrum.

Key Competencies

• High data rate, spectrum efficient techniques
• MIMO and space-time-frequency modems
• Multipath robustness techniques
• Error control coding
• Low spectral density, high rate UWB communications
• Band Hopping OFDM
• Spread Spectrum & CDMA
• Channel modeling & Propagation channel measurements
• Multiple access / interference suppression techniques
• Power efficient modulation & coding
• Power / cost / complexity efficient algorithms
• Beamforming / antenna array / antennas
• Signal processing architecture
• Hardware / software co-design
• Wireless/wired communication systems design
• Medium access control
• Interference avoidance
• Channel / spectrum sensing

Potential Applications

• Short range power-efficient Gbps Data Exchange, e.g. high rate UWB for wireless USB applications
• Ubiquitous wireless bandwidth-efficient Gbps Data Access, e.g. 3GPP long term evolution for cellular applications
• LongRangeWire medium Gbps Coverage, e.g. UWB over coax / powerline for whole-home Gbps coverage

• “Multi-band Space-Frequency Transmit Selection for MB-OFDM UWB Systems with Multiple Transmit Antennas”, US provisional filing
• “Interference detection and avoidance in a WiMedia Beacon Group”, US provisional filing.
• “A simplified estimation and compensation method of carrier frequency offset and sampling offset using preamble for a MB-OFDM UWB system”, US provisional filing.
• “Complexity reduction for group space time block code (GSTBC) detector”, US Provisional filing
• “Method and apparatus for frequency offset estimation and system utilising same”, US filing.
• “Receiver having a Signal Reconstructing section for Noise Reduction, System & Method Thereof”, US filing.
• Yuen-Sam Kwok, Francois Chinand Xiaoming Peng “Ranging Mechanism, Preamble Generation, and Performance with IEEE 802.15.4a Low-Rate Low-Power UWB Systems”, IEEE ICUWB 2006, Sept 25-27, 2006, Boston, USA. (Invited paper)
• Yuan Li, Ying-Chang Liang, and Sumei Sun, “Adaptive Trellis and Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation for Ordered MIMO-OFDM Channels”, PIMRC 2005, Berlin, Germany, September 2005 (IEEE PIMRC Best Paper Award)
• YC Liang, F Chin and Ray Liu, Downlink beamforming for DS-CDMA mobile radio with multimedia services. In 1999 IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference-Fall, pp.17-21. Amsterdam, September 1999. (Paper presented at 1999 IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference-Fall, 19-21 September, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, awarded the “IEEE VTC Best Paper Award).
• Y. Dai, S. Sun, and Z. D. Lei, “A comparative study of QRD-M detection and sphere decoding for MIMO-OFDM systems”, IEEE PIMRC2005, Berlin, Germany

Significant Projects/Collaborations

• WiMedia high rate UWB Modem with range extension
  Ultra-Wideband (UWB) is a promising technology suitable for WPAN transmitting at the data rate ranging from 100Mbps to 1000Mbps within a distance of 15m.  We has achieved distinctive competency, i.e. 1Gbps over 2m – surpassing our previous record of 500 Mbps, which was already more than double the world record set in April 2003.  Moving forward, the key areas we are addressing in UWB now are enhancing the range performance of 1st generation of WiMedia and evolving to next generation of WiMedia. They are summarized as follows:
  • Range extension;
  • Detection and avoid (DAA);
  • Integrated wireless and coax to achieve whole home wireless coverage;
  • Integrated high rate and low rate;

In particular, the enhanced range performance is proven through working prototype with backward compatibility to current WiMedia version.

Our key competencies are system and algorithm design for both UWB PHY and MAC, hardware prototype implementation for high speed system (>500MHz clock rate).

We have exploited our positionthat gained from our active contribution & achievement in WiMedia standardisation and have completed a project collaboration with a Japanese MNC on high rate UWB distributed MAC for multimedia streaming.

Current WiMedia-based UWB Transceiver IP blocks include:

• bit-true, cycle-true SPW / System Studio model, corresponding synthesizable VHDL codes and testbenches based on WiMedia PHY specification version 1.1;
• verified RTL coding based on WiMedia MAC specification version 0.95.

The transceiver has been validated in real room environment using FPGAs and discrete RF components.

We are continuously improving the performance of our design through development / modification of algorithms to extend the transmission range and boost data rate.

• World-First 162Mbps Pre-IEEE 802.11n MIMO Modem with largest coverage
  In this project, our team has developed a complete physical layer design concept for the next generation MIMO-OFDM-based WLAN modem. GSTBC has been adopted in our modem design to address the nature of an asymmetric structure in the access point (AP) and the terminal station. Usually the AP can accommodate more antennas than the terminal station, due to both the size limitation and the power consumption constraint. Therefore, an efficient space-time processing scheme is desired which can make full use of the additional antennas to improve the system performance with manageable complexity overhead.
  
  GSTBC has a very simple and flexible encoding structure at the transmitter, and it can provide significant performance improvement over a symmetric setup. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first STBC-based modem for asymmetric AP-station setups that delivers the peak data rate of 162Mbps. More over, our solution has also improved the range by 50%, and coverage area by 125%.
  
  Following the success of the GSTBC modem design, a multimode detector has later been incorporated into the modem with which multiple transmission modes specified in IEEE 802.11n draft standard can be supported. By doing this, we have greatly enhanced the modem capability and its competitiveness.

Significant Achievements

• Technology in Standard Specifications
  Co-proposed frequency domain spreading and interleaving scheme and collaborate and merge proposal with Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab (USA),Infineon and Broadcomto improved MB-OFDM range performance.  It can achieve ~25% range improvement for high data rate 480Mbps mode without additional complexity.  The joint proposal is officially incorporated into WiMediaHigh Rate Ultra Wideband PHY and MAC standard technical specification version 1.0.  This is also subsequently officially incorporated into ECMA-368 Standard. (Dec 2005)
  
  
• Eleven normative and informative proposals have been submitted to IEEE 802.11n High throughput Wireless LAN. In particular, our STBC proposal based on our system concept was accepted by TGn Synch Alliance as one optional mode in their IEEE 802.11n Technical Proposal which is now an optional mode in the IEEE 802.11n Draft Specification 2.0. Our STBC performance study has been contributed to IEEE 802.11n as reference benchmark for the industrial players in the field.
  
  
• Proposed Two-Layer OFDMA has been adopted as the PHY baseline inIEEE 802.22 Wireless Regional Area Networks (WRAN)which provides broadband wireless access using TV white space based on cognitive radio technology. Our two Spectrum Sensing Schemes have also been adopted in IEEE802.22 as the recommended practices to protect legacy systems (TV, microphone). We have also contributed in the area of channel coding and opportunistic spectrum sensing. Through these research activities, we have filed eight patents, one of which has also led to a collaboration project with a Japanese MNC.

Significant Awards

• Institution Engineering of Singapore(IES) Prestigious Engineering Award 2005
• Conference organisation
• 6th International Conference on Ultra Wideband (UWB) 2007, Singapore, Sept 2007
• 3rd International Conference on Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks and Communications(CrownCom 2008), Singapore, May 2008
• Licensing Fee
• Accumulated over Million dollars
• Technical leadership
• Official Technical Editor for IEEE802.22 PHY
• Lead guest-editor for IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Cognitive Radio
• Postgraduate Training
• More than 10 PhD & 30 MEng conferred in last 3 years