[CPCC] Seminar by Prof. Mohamed-Slim Alouini

[Hamid Jafarkhani]

Title: Spectrum Scarcity and Optical Wireless Communications

Speaker: Prof.  Mohamed-Slim Alouini

Date: Jan. 27, 2015, Tue.

Time:  11:00 AM

Venue:  Calit2 3008

ABSTRACT

Rapid increase in the use of wireless services over the last two decades 
has lead the problem of the radio-frequency (RF) spectrum exhaustion. 
More specifically, due to this RF spectrum scarcity, additional RF 
bandwidth allocation, as utilized in the recent past, is not anymore a 
viable solution to fulfill the demand for more wireless applications and 
higher data rates. Among the many proposed solutions, optical wireless 
communication or free-space optical (FSO) systems have gained an 
increasing interest due to their advantages including higher bandwidth 
and higher capacity compared to the traditional RF communication 
systems. This promising technology offers full-duplex Gigabit throughput 
in certain applications and environment while benefiting from a huge 
license-free spectrum, immunity to interference, and high security. 
These features of FSO communication systems potentially enable solving 
the issues that the RF communication systems face due to the expensive 
and scarce RF spectrum. The first part of the talk will give an overview 
of FSO communication systems by offering examples of advantages and 
application areas of this emerging technology. In the second part of 
talk, we will focus on some recent results and on-going research 
directions in the accurate characterization of the performance of FSO 
systems in the presence of inevitable impairments due to atmospheric 
turbulence and misalignment between transmitter and receiver.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Mohamed-Slim Alouini was born in Tunis, Tunisia. He received the Ph.D. 
degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of 
Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA, USA, in 1998. He served as a faculty 
member in the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, then in the 
Texas A&M University at Qatar, Education City, Doha, Qatar before 
joining King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), 
Thuwal, Makkah Province, Saudi Arabia as a Professor of Electrical 
Engineering in 2009. His current research interests include the 
modeling, design, and performance analysis of wireless communication 
systems.