Current Research: Communication/Information Theory and Signal Processing

To be updated soon...

In the meantime, below is a glance into my work on bounding the power envelope of OFDM signals.

Past Research: Noncoherent Communication using Roots of Polynomials

Most wireless communication links are coherent, meaning the receiver (and often the transmitter, too) uses knowledge of the channel to enable more reliable communication. But acquiring knowledge about the channel is not free: it requires overhead signaling (e.g., the use of pilot signals), which reduces the throughput and wastes energy. 

For the transmission of short packets, reference overhead can comprise a nonnegligible fraction of the total packet and dominate the information exchange. An attractive alternative for short packets is therefore noncoherent communication, where the transmitted and received signals are processed without knowledge of the channel (no pilots needed).

This research studied a novel noncoherent technique called binary modulation on conjugate-reciprocal zeros (BMOCZ). The principle of BMOCZ is quite unique: transmit the coefficients of a polynomial whose zeros (i.e., roots) encode the bits. With this approach, convolution corresponds to polynomial multiplication, which preserves the transmitted data zeros, regardless of the channel realization!

Together with my coauthors, I proposed signal processing techniques for BMOCZ to yield robust performance under hardware impairments at the physical layer (e.g., time and frequency offsets). I also analyzed BMOCZ in more conventional communication scenarios, such as uplink OFDMA, where I exploited its autocorrelation properties to design a pilot-free, fixed-PAPR OFDM-BMOCZ framework.

The bulk of this work is presented in my paper available here; I also have a related GitHub repo here.