The purpose of this proposal is to seek support for the Sixth IEEE Signal Processing Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC-05). This workshop is the sixth in a series of annual meetings sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society. The successful SPAVC workshop series started with the intent of providing a forum for scientist coming from academia and industry and for students for presenting and discussing leading edge signal processing methods for communications systems. SPAWC has had a good history of sponsorship and was funded in the past from both NSF and ARG.
The fertile terrain for starting the SPAWC series was provided at the time by the rising importance of the digital front-end design in cellular systems and stimulated by the fervid discussion about cellular transmission standards and mobile communications in general.
Since then, the community of signal processing researchers devoting their attention to communications problems has steadily grown and the wireless technology has fast forwarded towards broadband wireless local area network applications and, more recently, towards ultra-wide band radios. New technologies are attracting the interest of this growing pool of researchers. In fact, wireless communications are also the natural choice in ad-hoc networks and sensor networks, whose importance has been brought to greater attention by the need of better addressing National Security threats and guarding critical infrastructures.
Networking efficiently embedded systems, unmanned vehicles, robots and sensors can have enormous societal impact, especially in surveillance applications. This technology is still immature and it is posing very challenging engineering issues that are attracting the interest of an increasing number of researchers. Advanced distributed signal processing techniques may help overcome the limitations posed by standard networking approaches.
The SPAWC 2005 topics (see the call for paper included) reflect these emerging new areas of interest. From this premise we can conclude that, while the content of the workshop is evolving, the necessity of providing an arena to present and discuss the most recent" Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications" has not diminished.
