Wireless Communications
Wireless Communications is a multidisciplinary subject, requiring expertise in radio propagation, antennas, RF electronics, analog and digital (mixed-signal) signal processing, systems theory, some control theory, and many mathematical topics, as statistics, coding theory, queuing theory, game theory, and others. Continuously, new topics have been emerging over the past years. Only a few years back, concepts as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems, ultrawideband (UWB) systems, cooperative communications, or cognitive radio have been considered as visionary but most likely unpractical ideas. Nowadays, many of those have found applications. They have been included in communications standards and they are being discussed in lecture courses on wireless communications. Ultra-wideband (UWB) systems and techniques have become our key topic, potentially offering ultra-low-power wireless links that are robust against the ever-present multipath propagation in wireless channels. Based on UWB techniques, high-accuracy indoor localization, next-generation RFID systems, and ultra-wideband channel modeling have been the main research topics in Wireless Communications during the last years.