ABSTRACT The next generation of wireless communication systems aims at supporting applications with high-rate, high-mobility and high-reliability. To achieve this goal, wireless systems have to cope with formidable challenges such as frequency-selectivity induced by multipath channel propagations and time-selectivity induced by mobility. As a promising solution to these challenges, multi-input multi-output (MIMO) technique has been developed in recent years targeting high-performance and/or high rate for future wireless systems. In this talk, we will first discuss recent research advances in MIMO communications and show that MIMO system designs enhance transmission rates and offer diversity improving performance. However, to exploit different flavors of diversity, most designs employ maximum likelihood (ML) or near-ML detectors at the receiver, which are of high complexity. On the other hand, empirical results have shown that linear detectors offer inferior performance but come with low complexity. We will introduce lattice reduction aided linear equalizers which collect maximum diversity with complexity near that of linear equalizers. We also explore the tradeoffs among rate, diversity and complexity. In addition, we will also discuss some recent results on MIMO techniques for distributed relay systems and wireless networks.

BIOGRAPHY Xiaoli Ma is currently an assistant professor in School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. She received the B.S. degree in Automatic Control from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1998, the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2000, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2003. After receiving her Ph.D., she joined the Department of ECE at Auburn University as an assistant professor. Since 2006, she has been with Georgia Tech.

Her research interests include transmitter and receiver diversity techniques for wireless fading channels, signal processing and communications over time- and frequency-selective channels, complex-field and space-time coding, channel estimation and equalization algorithms, and carrier frequency synchronization for (MIMO-) OFDM systems. She has published over 70 technical papers and one book on these subjects. Her current research focuses on wireless network routing, distributed synchronization and signal processing for wireless sensor networks.