Circumventing the threat of the 'World Wide Wait'

Advances in telecommunications and the issue of whether they are moving fast enough to service the emerging wireless Internet will be addressed by Professor Lajos Hanzo in a lecture to the Royal Academy of Engineering on Tuesday 1 May.

Professor Hanzo, Chair of Telecommunications at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) will deliver 'Genetics and Evolution in Wireless Multimedia Communications: A one-to-one with anyone – or the dawn of the “world wide wait"'?

In his lecture, the fifth in a series in Mobile Telecommunications & Networks, supported by VODAFONE, Professor Hanzo, who has established a reputation as one of the world’s leading authorities on adaptive wireless communication systems, will begin with a light-hearted historical perspective on the generations of wireless systems and contrast some of them with the practical constraints imposed on state-of-the-art multimedia communicators.

He will go on to examine the research challenges which will need to be met if the wireless Internet is to become a reality.

He will claim that, in the face of adverse wireless channel conditions, it is unrealistic to expect that any fixed-mode wireless system remains capable of maintaining a constant quality-of-service. This motivates the design of cutting-edge near-instantaneously adaptive wireless transceivers which offer capabilities beyond those of currently operational systems. For example, ‘roaming’ base stations in trains or buses would not only provide better service to users on public transport, but would also provide radio coverage to surrounding cars and pedestrians, in a traffic jam, for example.

‘These advances can be further augmented by quantifying the benefits of sophisticated adaptive antenna arrays, before demonstrating their system-level benefits – for example, their ability to circumvent the threat of the “world-wide waitâ€? in the emerging wireless Internet …,’ he will say.