13 - UCL/UGENT

The Université catholique de Louvain is the largest university in the French speaking part of Belgium. In the Electrical Eng. Dpt, the UCL Communication Laboratory (TELE) and more particularly the DIGICOM team (3 professors, 4 postdocs and 10 PhD students) has a strong experience in signal processing for communications. The team has been actively involved in several European projects (NoE NEWCOM, the MEDEA projects MARQUIS, WITNESS and MIMOWA, and the CELTIC project MARQUIS). In the same Dpt., the UCL Microwave Laboratory has an experience of more than 30 years in radio propagation. The Propagation team, consisting in two Professors and, currently, 3 PhD students, has been or is very active in COST Actions 273 and 2100 and the Network of Excellence NEWCOM, as well as various MEDEA and FP6 projects.

Current interest of both teams, and contributions in NEWCOM++ concern channel modelling (WPR1), design of precoder and decoder for multiuser MIMO based on partial channel information (WPR2), adaptive coding and modulation in particular for OFDM where bit and power allocation is carried out based on a goodput criterion (WPR3), iterative techniques, in particular for relaying and concerning tools enabling the understanding of convergence (WPR4), relaying and cooperation where the design of distributed space time codes for OFDM is targeted (WPR6), radio resource management based on a cross-layer philosophy (WPR8) and localization and positioning (WPR.B) where bounds are computed for AOA and TDOA coupled with UWB.

UCL includes researchers from Universiteit Gent, Belgium, who will act as third party to UCL by carrying out part of the research (special clause no. 10 in GA). Universtiteit Gent (UGent) is one of the most important institutions of higher education and research in the Low Countries. Researchers from the Dept. of Telecom and Information Processing. (TELIN) of UGent have participated to recent FP6 projects, such as NoE NEWCOM and STREP B-VHF. The team from UGent-TELIN
currently consist of two Professors, one Post-Doc and 8 PhD students. UGent-TELIN will be involved in various research work packages of NEWCOM++, dealing with BER performance in case of partial channel state information (WPR2), adaptive modulation and coding in MIMO (WPR3), estimation and detection in the context of relaying and cooperation in networks (WPR6), and evaluation localization and positioning accuracy in multipath channels (WPR.B).