(A NICTA – WATRI Joint Project)
Lamp project was formulated to address and provide solutions for the final link of connectivity in a wireless information link. This communication can be in various forms such as voice, video, biometric data, surveillance data or location information. An important feature is non-invasiveness and ease of communication.
The LaMP project, as the title states (Last metre Problem), is mainly concerned with the short range information transfer by means of wireless communication. The information transfer for such applications is limited by the available resources, such as bandwidth, power and space. These are the key areas of research in this project. NICTA together with WATRI will jointly develop cutting-edge technologies on spatial information transfer with power and bandwidth efficient systems for short range wireless communication for specific applications.
The specific application that we look into initially is speech. Therefore, the project consists of two main parts in terms of research, one isCommunications Technology and theother isSpeech Technology. Figure below shows the crystallization of the research activities in terms of the overall project. The merge of both communications and speech technology in terms of systems level and component level design are shown in the figure.
The activities within the two main areas of research, Speech and Wireless, are given below:
Communications Technology:
- Wireless Inner Receiver Design: Synchronisation and Parameter Estimation
- Spatial Information Theory: sub-project completed
- Voice over Wireless Links
- Wireless Test-Bed design: sub-project completed
- Short Range Underwater Transceiver Design: sub-project redefined as a new (major) project
- Waterborne 2.4GHz Wireless Channel and Signal Propagation Analysis (jointly conducted with the FLoW project): sub-project completed
Contacts: Dr. Kandeepan - kandee@nicta.com.au
Speech Technology:
Contacts: Prof. Sven Nordholm - sven@watri.org.au
What will this research achieve?
One of the many challenges of new technology is making the consumer be unbounded to the technologically extended environment but at the same time benefiting from it to its fullest. ‘Wireless’ is the keyword to unbound humans to communicate and it (wireless) has existed since Stone Age, people talk to each other, hear each other, and see each other without any use of wires. In these means however, their communications are spatially limited and the “Last Metre Problem” extends the spatial limitation on human communication by demanding technologies that address mobility, freedom, untetheredness and invisibility, ease of deployment and lack of clutter. One needs not to be aware of the technology and the environment to communicate regardless of the geographical location of the peer. This project provides such freedom to the user by means of wireless technology.
Who will benefit?
Such technology is directly applicable in many fields such as commercial and home usages, military and defence, remote monitoring and sensing of health and environmental systems, emergency services systems, and various sports and fitness training activities.
What are the key features?
Some of the key features of the project are:
- Application specific wireless transceiver deigns for various wireless channels
- Real-time implementation and system prototypes using DSP and FPGA
- Highly efficient background interference and noise cancellation techniques for speech
- Improved localisation and tracking techniques
- Blind signal separation techniques for arbitrary microphone arrays
Progress update
Commercialisation activities are in progress for some of the techniques and algorithms developed in speech technology.
Several real-time implementations of short range wireless transceivers, with rapid signal acquisition and high speed transmission have been developed and tested.
Continuing publications on international journals, and high quality conferences.
Research team:
NICTA - Dr. Kandeepan Sithamparanathan, Prof Rodney Kennedy (completed), Prof Thushara Abhayapala, Dr Leif Hanlen (completed), Tofazzal Hossain (student)
Contacts: Dr. Kandeepan - kandee@nicta.com.au
Duration: 36 months, year 2005 - 2007
Western Australian Telecommunications Research Institute – WATRI