Wireless Research Centre:
Research Areas |
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Research
MIMO & Diversity techniques
Software Defined Radio
OFDM (high data rate modulations in general)
Linearisation, including efficient PA's
Multi-octave RF power amplifiers
Other areas of interest
Overview of 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.
