Trends and Challenges in Wireless Systems

The field of wireless network systems has witnessed tremendous growth in recent years causing it to become one of the fastest growing segments of the telecommunications technology. As wireless networks evolve with increasing size and profitability, they will be able to integrate with other wireless technologies enabling them to support mobile computing applications and perform as efficiently as wired networks. Due to the difficulties posed by the wireless transmission medium and the increasing demand for better and cheaper services, the area of wireless networks is also an extremely rich field for research and development. This keynote will address the current trends in research and development in wireless networks and communications. Also, it will shed some light on the future and challenges facing the progress in this fascinating technology. We will review the fundamental techniques in the design, operation, and evaluation of wireless networks and systems. We will present some of our recent research results including new protocols for wireless networks. Among these, an adaptive MAC protocol for distributed wireless LANs that is capable of operating efficiently under bursty traffic conditions. According to the proposed protocol, the mobile station that is granted permission to transmit is selected by means of a neural-based algorithm. Another new protocol for dynamically setting 802.11 wireless LAN waveforms and transmission power levels based on the wireless channel´s signal to noise ratio will be introduced. Our method, known as Signal-to-Noise Ratio-Waveform Power Adaptation (SNR-WPA), changes the power in discrete steps matched to each of the 802.