Wireless Research Centre

WRC Background	WRC Research
WRC Scholarships	WRC News
WRC Contacts

WRC Background

The Wireless Research Centre (WRC) is a key research theme within NZi3, focusing on wireless communications.

WRC information sheet (PDF 2MB)

Vision
To be a world class centre of excellence in wireless communications that produces industry led research and high calibre people.

Purpose
To secure the continuing presence in New Zealand of a strong and successful industry knowledge base in wireless communications.

Goals of the WRC
Attract & retain world class researchers, employees and students.

Seek further sponsors through both industry and government.
Develop a national, collaborative research group and accommodate the desires and aspirations of the collaborators.
Develop international linkages.
Produce highly skilled graduates.

Research areas

The expectation of high data-rate network connectivity anytime, anywhere, at a reasonable cost stands out as a prime driver for the research carried out by the Wireless Research Centre.

This in turn translates to requirements for:

High data capacity
Spectral efficiency
Power efficiency
Good and reliable coverage / range

Much of the WRC research takes place within University of Canterbury's Communications Research Group (UCCRG) which is part of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. It is one of the largest research groups within the Department and has strong links with industry, and other universities in New Zealand and overseas.

Some of the areas in which the WRC plans to conduct research in the near future, include:

MIMO & Diversity techniques. This subject area looks at techniques of overcoming the limitations of the faded-channel to allow increases in the throughput. MIMO is a fast moving and exciting area. Areas of interest in these fields are; multi-user detection; space-time coding; transmitter and receiver diversity; smart antennas and beam forming solutions in the MIMO context.

Software Defined Radio. This area of research explores areas of the software defined radio and includes cognitive radio which is an emerging area of research
OFDM (high data rate modulations in general). Multi-carrier modulations such as OFDM are becoming common in many of the emerging standards. OFDM, and variants of it, are areas where practical research into their implementation and performance is of interest.
Linearisation, including efficient PA's. The high-power RF amplifier dominates the power consumption of a radio. As linear modulations become dominant, efficient PA's that can provide a linear modulation are becoming increasingly sought after. This subject area investigates efficient architectures for amplifying linear modulation signals and methods of increasing the linearity of them. For example: EER, outphasing, Cartesian loop, predistortion, Doherty, dynamic biasing.
Multi-octave RF power amplifiers. An important aspect of software defined radio is the ability to operate over many octaves of bandwidth. To achieve this accurate device, characterisation and model extraction is needed for the development of wide band (several octaves) high power linear RF/microwave amplifiers. The importance of accurate models of the amplification devices to be used in CAD software packages becomes a high priority to enable engineers to design these amplifiers in finite time. These models need to be extracted from characterisation (load pull) and/or pulsed DC measurements on these devices.

Other areas of interest to the WRC are:

Mesh Networks
Antenna technology and propagation effects
RFIC’s; MEMs.

Scholarships

$30,000 Postgraduate Scholarships

Tait Electronics Undergraduate Scholarship
For: Full-time students enrolled for the 2nd or 3rd Pro year of BE(Hons) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Value: $5,000
Tenure: 1 year
Applications to: The Scholarships Office
Closing date: 13 April 2007

Steven Bly Memorial Scholarship In Electrical And Electronic Engineering (Undergraduate)
For: Full-time students enrolled in the 2nd or 3rd Professional year of BE(Hons) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Value: $1,500
Tenure: 1 year
Applications to: The Scholarships Office
Clo sing date: 13 April 2007

News

NZi3 Scholarship enables base station research (PDF 3MB)

Wireless communications student wins Poster Competition (March 08) Karla Smith

Karla Smith is now $2000 better off, having won the 2008 College of Engineering Postgraduate Research Poster Competition. Karla is a postgraduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and received a Tait Electronics scholarship to assist her with her studies.

Professor Jim Cavers Visits Wireless Research Centre (February 08)

Professor Jim Cavers of Simon Fraser University in Canada is visiting the Wireless Research Centre during a research semester.

Jim’s research interests include modulation and detection for mobile communications, and integrated RF/DSP design. He has published many well-known journal and conference papers and one book, and holds twelve patents. He has received several national and provincial awards for innovative and commercially successful research. Prof. Cavers is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Jim is working with the WRC’s manager and advisory group in order to provide advice on developing the Centre’s engagement with the wireless community and refine the research directions of the Centre.

As part of the affiliation with the WRC he will be working with Tait Electronics Ltd and the newly formed Mimomax Wireless Ltd, where he will be identifying problems to which he can apply his expertise, whilst also identifying suitable projects for further research work within the WRC.

Jim will use his time in NZ to help identify new problems for him to focus his research on whilst supporting his students with their analysis of problems.

New Wireless Research Centre Manager (February 08)
Jeremy Reece has recently commenced his position as Manager of the Wireless Research Centre. He has a strong background in University Industry collaboration, having worked in this field at the University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom, for 13 years. At Wolverhampton , he rose to the level of principal lecturer, primarily through project managing and consulting on a wide variety of ICT-related, technology transfer projects.

He has undertaken several industrial secondments, including representing the West Midlands region's 13 Universities on its ICT Cluster's strategic board, the remit of the cluster being to define and implement a $200 million strategy for the development of the region's ICT industry.

Jeremy's final position at Wolverhampton was a secondment on to the IT Futures project, which created a team to specialise in collaborating and supporting industry in the use and development of ICT technologies, through the leveraging of University expertise. He has also worked for Lucas Aerospace, where he undertook research and development into fly-by-wire and fly-by-light actuation systems and engine control systems.

Since emigrating to New Zealand in 2006, Jeremy has been working for Tait Electronics Ltd in their development department, helping to define the solutions for their range of terminal radios. We welcome Jeremy aboard NZi3 and wish him every success with his work in the Wireless Research Centre.

WRC benefits from UCi3 scholarship (March 07)
The Wireless Research Centre (WRC) has received a boost to its next generation mobile communications research, thanks to one of its students receiving an inaugural $30k UCi3 Master's Scholarship.
Apran
Arpan Mandal, a postgraduate student within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Canterbury, received the award to assist him with his research being carried out in the WRC in collaboration with Tait Electronics.

Under the supervision of Professor Harsha Sirisena (Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Dr Kishore Mehrotra (Tait Electronics), Arpan will conduct research on advancing high-speed wireless broadband technology known as WiMAX.

"The technology is not yet fully developed and there are thousands and thousands of engineers working on this worldwide but to our knowledge we are the only academic institution in New Zealand working on this technology," Arpan said.

Brazilian Police Force Opts For Digital Tait Radios
(Tait Electronics website)

Contacts

If you are a potential postgraduate student for the WRC or would like to know more about the WRC, please contact the people below:

University of Canterbury contacts:
Jeremy Reece
WRC Manager
Tel: +64 (0)3 366 7001 Ext 7871

Tait Electronics contacts: