Professor Dominic O’Brien is a Professor of Engineering Science at Oxford and leads the optical communications group. He is also Associate Head (Research) in the department, and the co-director for systems engineering for the Oxford Led Networked Quantum Information Technologies (NQIT) hub. He has a range of experience in optoelectronics research in industry (BT labs) and academia, and has authored or co-authored approximately 200 publications in this area. The group has a wide range of experience in free space optical communications and optical wireless, demonstrating integrated optical wireless transceivers, a full room-scale system at 300Mbit/s, integrated visible light communications systems, and free-space communications systems with unmanned aerial vehicles.
Optical Wireless Communications: Current status and future prospects
Abstract:
The Radio Frequency ‘Spectrum Crunch’ has led wireless engineers to look to higher carrier frequencies to support the exponential increase in demand for wireless access. In the RF domain 60GHz and higher bands are being exploited, with systems of differing degrees of maturity available. The optical spectrum offers capacity that is many orders of magnitude greater than that available in the RF region, and there is a large body of research on both infrared, and more recently, visible light communications. In this presentation we will discuss the state of the art for both infrared and visible systems, future prospects, and some of the barriers to achieving widespread adoption of optical wireless as part of the future wireless landscape.
Harish Viswanathan received the B. Tech. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the School of Electrical Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. He was recipient of the Sage Graduate Fellowship at Cornell. Since joining Bell Labs in October 1997, he has worked on multiple antenna technology for cellular wireless networks, network optimization, network architecture, and IoT communications. He currently leads the Radio Systems Group in the Mobile Radio Lab within Bell Labs. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Bell Labs Fellow.
The Future of Mobile Access
Abstract:
Wireless communications began when Marconi invented the radio in 1894 and, ever since, innovation in wireless communications has been breathtaking, starting with microwave transmission over long distances and then moving into the mobile access domain. Today the expectation is that we should be wirelessly connected at all times and all places, in order to increase our social interactions, as well as to continuously access information and services. But the next decade will witness an even more dramatic change in wireless access, as the technology transforms, yet again, to enable new modes of human communication and content consumption. We will begin with a discussion of our view on the essential ingredients of future mobile access systems, namely, the delivery of seemingly infinite capacity, user/device experience performance optimization, and energy efficiency. We will then describe new technologies and architecture that we expect to be the foundation of the future mobile access systems.