AFRL Adviser, NRC Associate Win IEEE ICC Best Paper Award

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  • By John Matylas
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ROME, New York --  Air Force Research Laboratory adviser Dr. John Matyjas, and AFRL NRC Associate Dr. Weifeng Su, received the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) Best Paper Award for their work on "The Outage Probability and Optimum Power Assignment for Differential Amplify-and-Forward Relaying." The award ceremony took place during IEEE ICC 2010 on 25 May in Cape Town, South Africa. IEEE ICC is the longest standing flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society.

The awarded work proposes a novel differential cooperative relaying construct which is appealing in next-generation wireless network design for agile, robust communications; spectral effectiveness; and low implementation complexity. This contribution may revolutionize how UAVs (and other air/space assets) are used as wireless relays to achieve reliable end-to-end wireless network connectivity.

The work tackles an emerging communication concept - cooperative communications and networking. In contrast to conventional point-to-point wireless communications, cooperative communications enable different users/nodes to share resources and cooperate to establish and maintain robust end-to-end communication links through a distributed, resilient, and integrated transceiver strategy that exploits the dynamic nature of the ground/air/space network topology. In such a way, the cooperative transceiver design optimizes signal transmissions from both the physical and medium-access control (MAC) layers, whereby each user's information is transmitted not only by the node itself, but also by cooperating nodes. As a result, cooperating nodes create a virtual multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) system that can significantly increase the link capacity and realize a new form of spatial diversity, known as cooperative diversity.

The work also proposes "cyber smart" amplify-and-forward techniques in lieu of traditional decode-and-forward packet relaying strategies. As such, intermediary nodes are not required to decode the packets they are relaying. This minimizes information broadcast/disclosure and inherently mitigates potential vulnerabilities associated with cooperating nodes.

This novel communications approach has great potential to increase the capacity, reliability, and throughput/delay performance of future wireless networks. Drs. Matyjas and Su continue to conduct research and development on this emerging cooperative communication concept to design cognitive wireless networks for future integrated air, space, and terrestrial communications.