In December 1901, Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first transatlantic radio signal, the letter “S” in Morse code, from Cornwall, England to Signal Hill in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Seventy-three years later, his daughter founded the Marconi Society to promote awareness of major innovations in communications. Recently, the society’s antennae picked up on the work of Diomidis Michalopoulos, a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at UBC supervised by Electrical and Computing Engineering professor and ICICS member Robert Schober. Michalopoulos was given the society’s Young Scholar Award in 2010 for his innovations in cooperative wireless communications. Recipients are considered to have already had an impact in their field, and must be no older than 27, Marconi’s age when he made his landmark transmission. They are also seen as potential future candidates for the Marconi Award, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in communications science. Only two other young researchers worldwide were given the award in 2010.
In cooperative communications, relay terminals are used to forward information from source to destination terminals. In a cellular network, these might be fixed terminals that are simpler and consume less energy than large terminal hubs. Michalopoulos’ innovative research looks at using mobile relay terminals in the network, such as cellphones. He won the Young Scholar Award for protocols he developed for selecting relays, based on average channel conditions and specified energy consumption. A network using these protocols would work well in areas of low signal strength, and be able to re-route around obstacles.
Cellphone users in such a network may wonder why they should sacrifice battery power to relay somebody else’s call. Michalopoulos sees a parallel in nature. “Geese flying in formation,” he points out, “can fly non-stop much further than they can flying solo. They shield each other from wind resistance, and take turns leading the flock.” Similarly, fairness guides the selection of individual phones as relay terminals in his protocols; all phones involved ultimately consume equal amounts of power. By sacrificing a little, each user gains a lot. Indirectly, so does the environment: the network would operate at reduced transmission power, without the need for fixed relay stations.
Michalopoulos came to UBC in 2009 from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, where his PhD advisor was Professor George Karagiannidis. Robert Schober is happy he did. “I feel very privileged,” he says, “to have Diomidis in my group. His ideas may lead to a major overhaul of the telecommunications industry.” When you take a call in your basement or on a mountaintop in the next few years, you may have Diomidis Michalopoulos to thank for it.