Ph.D. Studentships in Advanced Communications Engineering

Position has been filled.

The following postgraduate opportunities in the field of Advanced Communications Engineering in the UCD School of Electrical, Electronic & Mechanical Engineering are available.

The projects are designed to lead to the Ph.D. degree. It is envisaged that research will begin in January 2011 but exceptions will be made where necessary.

Applications are invited from suitably qualified applicants who have already graduated or expect to graduate in 2010.

Contact Details:
Dr. Mark Flanagan
Room 335
Engineering and Materials Science Centre
Univeristy College Dublin
Belfield
Dublin 4
Ireland

Email: mark.flanagan@ucd.ie

Download Application Form: .pdf or .doc

Soft Information Relaying in Wireless Networks

In modern wireless communication networks, intermediate nodes (relays) may be used to forward information received from a source node to a destination node. Current approaches to the design of relays have inherent deficiencies: for example, the scheme of "amplify and forward (AAF)" suffers from the amplification of noise in the system by the relay, while the scheme of "decode and forward" (DAF) has the drawback that the message may be incorrectly decoded prior to relaying.

This project will investigate methods of optimally processing the coded signal received by the relay directly into a modulated signal for retransmission. The project aims are:

a) To design a relay in which all processing is performed in the soft (probabilistic) domain. This is in keeping with the processing required for iterative decoding of the coded information, and will avoid the drawbacks of the AAF and DAF schemes.

b) To update the destination's decoding design for the new configuration.

Applications are invited from candidates with a high level of academic achievement in electronic engineering. The successful applicant will have a strong ability at mathematics and a good knowledge of MATLAB and C programming. Some expertise in error-correction coding and/or signal processing would be beneficial.

Pseudodistance Based Communication Receiver Design

Communication receivers based on iterative information processing are providing promising solutions to current communication receiver design problems. For such receivers, analysis of performance is in general a difficult problem. The concept of pseudodistance has recently emerged as a powerful tool as it provides an elegant mathematical characterization of some aspects of the performance of modern iterative receivers.

However many challenging problems remain to be solved before this concept can be applied to the design of modern communication systems. This project will attempt to solve these outstanding problems, with an emphasis on coded modulation systems. The project aims are:

a) To further complete the pseudodistance characterization of communication systems.

b) To develop a pseudodistance-based tool for design of coded modulation systems.

Applications are invited from candidates with a high level of academic achievement in electronic engineering, mathematics, or related disciplines. The successful applicant will have a strong ability at mathematics and a good knowledge of MATLAB and C programming. Some expertise in error-correction coding and/or signal processing would be beneficial.

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