Biography
Steven D. Blostein received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 1983, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1985 and 1988, respectively. He has been on the Faculty at Queen's University since 1988 and currently holds the position of Professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He spent 1994-1995 at Lockheed Martin Electronic Systems in Montreal and was a Visiting Associate Professor in the department of Electrical Engineering at McGill University in 1995. From 1999-2003, he was the leader of the Multi-rate Wireless Data Access Major Project sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Telecommunications Research. From 2002-2007 he has led multi-university/industry projects related to fourth generation (4G) wireless communications sysetms. He has also been a consultant to industry and government in the areas of image compression, target tracking, radar imaging and wireless communications. Since 2006 he has been collaborating with researchers at Communications Research Centre in the area of cooperative communications and since 2008 he has been involved with multicasting mutimedia over wireless systems. His current interests lie in the application of signal processing to wireless communications systems, including smart antennas, MIMO systems, and space-time-frequency processing for MIMO-OFDM systems. He has been a member of the World 4G Wireless Forum as well as an invited distinguished speaker at Bell University Labs, Ryerson University and at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology. He served as Chair of IEEE Kingston Section (1994), Chair of the Biennial Symposium on Communications in 2000, 2006, and 2008, Member of the NSERC Strategic Grants Committee in Information and Communications Technology (2000-2003), Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (1996-2000), Publications Chair for IEEE ICASSP 2004 and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication (2007-present). He has also served on Technical Program Committees for IEEE conferences such as ICC, Globecom and VTC on numerous occasions. He has also held key administrative positions in ECE at Queen’s, including Coordinator of Graduate Studies (2000-2003), Associate Head, Research (2002-2003) and Department Head (2004 to 2009). He is a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario and a Senior Member of IEEE.
Research Interests
As new wireless services are adopted, the demand escalates for higher performance systems to enable high-rate multimedia applications. To realize continued increases in capacity, coverage, throughput and quality of service, substantial investments in telecommunications network infrastructure will be required, since the bandwidth increase allocated to the future systems would be quite limited. More interestingly, solutions that do not require significant investments in infrastructure are needed. This motivates research into cooperative communications systems and networks to obtain an understanding of their performance limitations at the physical and higher layers. Currentl research in this area includes synchronization, relay power allocation, distributed beamforming, multi-point to multi-point communications.
Dr. Blostein's research also aims to achieve performance improvements for both mobile and fixed-location users without significantly increasing terminal costs. In particular, cellular base-stations and fixed wireless access points using smart antennas have been under investigation for some time. These include systems enhanced by antenna arrays with adaptive statistical signal processing algorithms that can be realized digitally at baseband and that can be customized for different classes of mobile users. Recent success story here.
In order to further improve spectral efficiency, multi-user detection, interference cancellation and cooperative communications methods are being investigated in conjunction with smart antennas. Here, the issues include performance improvements offered by multiple antenna (MIMO) systems that possibly include transmitter-side processing. Issues here are related to how to obtain channel state information reliably as well as how to design systems to operate with imperfect channel state information due to limitations on signaling overhead, as well as the development of robust methods to channel parameter estimation errors.
A related area of investigation is the development of advanced basestation signal processing algorithms that enable more efficient use of network resources. Our current efforts focus on the interactions between the physical (PHY) and higher layers (LINK,MAC, APP). This includes cross-layer call admission control to better couple the PHY signal processing to end-to-end quality-of-service (blocking probability and connection delay), as well as the use of rateless codes (e.g. Raptor codes) at the application (APP) layer to lessen PHY requirements.
Telephone: (613) 533-6561 Fax: (613) 533-6615
E-mail: steven.blostein@queensu.ca