Space is 'current frontier' for engineer working on next-gen wireless technologies

“Bhaskar has had a tremendous impact on the field of signal processing, especially in the areas of MIMO systems and speech processing. His work has both theoretical elegance and great commercial importance. The Ericsson Endowed Chair in Wireless Access Networks is a well deserved honor,” said Frieder Seible, Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD. “Bhaskar’s work is currently influencing the next generation of cell phones.”

Bhaskar Rao earned his doctorate from the University of Southern California in 1983 and joined the UCSD faculty that same year. Over his 25 years at UCSD, Rao has spent time at Qualcomm, Microsoft Research, AT&T Bell Labs and Stanford University in various research and consulting capacities. He is currently an active participant in UCSD’s Center for Wireless Communications and the UCSD division of Calit2.

“Bhaskar is a highly distinguished scholar with more than 200 journal and conference publications that span numerous aspects of signal processing, including digital signal processing, estimation theory, speech coding, multiple-antenna transmission, and space-time coding,” said Larry Larson, Chair and Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

The 2008 Stephen O. Rice Prize Paper Award in the Field of Communications Systems was just awarded jointly to Bhaskar Rao, fellow electrical engineering professor Rene Cruz and Cruz’s Ph.D. student Bongyong Song, who is now at Qualcomm.

“The power of this work is that we did not restrict ourselves to just base-station-and-multi-user scenarios,” said Bhaskar Rao. Instead, this work encompasses arbitrary wireless networks consisting of heterogeneous types of communication devices.

The paper appeared in the March 2007 issue of IEEE Transactions on Communications.

In this award-winning research, the engineers designed a combination of transmission and reception algorithms that work together in order to find the jointly optimal communication strategy. The algorithms can be implemented either in a centralized or decentralized fashion. The decentralized strategy is very practical and performs almost as well as the centralized one.