OMRON develops first commercial Ultra-Wideband MIMO antenna for HD

[Bob Crabtree]

OMRON Corporation (TSE: 6645, US: OMRNY), a global leader in electronic components, sensing and control technologies, announced that it will release the world’s first commercial polymer antenna for Ultra-Wideband (UWB communications - see note 1) targeted toward high-definition (HD) and other telecast quality video transmission applications.

Shipping in mass production volume to High Definition television (HDTV) as well as related DVD and projector equipment manufacturers is scheduled to start in spring 2007.

The new antenna will be unveiled for preview at OMRON’s booth in the CEATEC JAPAN 2006 exhibition to be held at Makuhari Messe, near Tokyo, October 3-7, 2006.

Find out more. And also check out this related story - Wireless HDMI promises around-the-house high-def viewing.

[Dalia Hassanin]

Call for Papers
During the past decade, multiple-antenna transmission (MIMO) systems have matured. However, when comparing their potential capacities with their achieved throughputs, we notice large gaps. The price for the MIMO advantages is implementation complexity and the use of specific signal processing tools that cannot be directly inferred from one-to-one (i.e. single-channel) systems. For instance, water-filling does not seem feasible due to the large amount of required feedback information. State-of-the-art standards like 3GPP and WiMax support only very limited feedback. Nevertheless, adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) schemes, selective space-time coding, as well as antenna selection have shown that significant improvements are achievable even with very limited feedback. In this setting, MIMO-OFDM schemes are of central interest to industry and academia. For instance, an important challenge is to find an adequate representation of the MIMO channel's quality—independently of the system architecture and signal processing techniques currently available. A proper labeling or characterization of the MIMO channel quality regardless of the spatial processing to be used enables deciding on the reception or transmission strategy to use (e.g. with or without channel state information, to optimize diversity or rate, etc.) and, thus, on the amount of feedback that is required in transmission.

MIMO transmission can be point-to-point or distributed, in fact, when looking not just into the physical layer, but also into the link layer, feedback load is especially critical in multiuser MIMO systems because of its much higher number of degrees of freedom. Opportunistic scheduling strategies have been developed which (more or less heuristically) take into account the requirements on QoS.

This special issue focuses on such transmission systems with limited feedback and provides an overview of the state of the art.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Adaptive modulation and coding
Selective space-time coding
Antenna and beam selection
Adaptive beamforming techniques
Codebook selection for CSI feedback
Rate distortion for feedback systems
Approximate water-filling techniques
Feedback in highly mobile environments
MIMO with statistical feedback
Nonlinear/adaptive MIMO precoding
Fundamental limits on performance and robustness
Opportunistic schemes
MIMO and QoS diversity
Inclusion of MIMO concepts in wireless standards
Feedback in MIMO-OFDM and OFDMA schemes
Cross-layer approaches to multiuser MIMO scheduling
Authors should follow the EURASIP JASP manuscript format described at the journal site Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the EURASIP JASP Manuscript Tracking System , according to the following timetable:

Manuscript Due June 1, 2007
First Round of Reviews September 1, 2007
Publication Date December 1, 2007

Guest Editors:

Markus Rupp, Institute of Communications and Radio-Frequency Engineering, Vienna University of Technology, Gusshausstrasse 25/389, 1040 Wien, Austria

Ana Pérez-Neira, Department of Signal Theory and Communications, Technical University of Catalonia, North Campus, Jordi Girona 1-3, 08034 Barcelona, Spain

David Gesbert, Eurecom Institute, 2229 Route des Cretes, BP 193, 06904 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Christoph Mecklenbräuker, The Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (ftw.), 1220 Wien, Austria