Michael McGuire

< http://www.ece.uvic.ca/~mmcguire/ >

Digital Signal Processing Group
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Victoria

Present Research

I work on the application of digital signal processing algorithms to communications systems. Most of my work has focussed on wireless communication networks.

  • Proactive resource allocation.
  • Dynamic estimator allows for location prediction.
    • Future needs of mobiles can be predicted.
    • Channels, data routes, and power.
    • Networks can be run more efficiently with less resources.

Indoor Radiolocation

Outdoors, location of radio terminals is efficiently and accurately performed using GPS recievers. Indoors, however, the peformance of GPS receivers is signficantly degraded. My research group is developing techniques for accurate radiolocation of wireless terminals. In particular, my group has developing methods for accurately locating handheld terminals. We have developed methods that allow us to locate handheld terminals to within 3 metres of their true location more than 80 \% of the time.

This work is supported with grants from NSERC, Bell Canada, and Nokia Products, Ltd.

PhD Thesis

Mobile terminal location has attracted much interest for emergency communications, location sensitive browsing, and resource allocation. The topic of my Ph.D. thesis was location estimation based on propagation distance measurements from fixed location base stations. The relationship between the measurements and terminal location is complicated by so-called Non Line of Sight (NLOS) propagation when the shortest distance straight-line path from receiver to transmitter is obstructed, multipath propagation, receiver noise, and interference noise.

New location algorithms were develped using non-parametric estimation and adaptive filters. The new methods allow for location prediction in resource allocation algorithms to facilitate efficient cellular networks to carry more data using less bandwidth. The graph below shows the comparison of my filtering algorithm, called the multi-model filter, with a standard single Kalman filter approach, and location estimation without any filter, called zero memory estimation.

Papers

Presentations

  • A copy of some slides describing my past research and areas I hope to investigate in the future is available here.
  • A poster describing the dynamic model-based filtering algorithm I developed during my PhD is available here.

© 2009 < Michael McGuire >