The need to survey the battle front in Europe using surveillance radar during World War II was the pedal-stone on which research in wireless technology flourished and escalated. Through the cold war and subsequent relatively peaceful periods, wireless communications research continued to flourish. During the cold war, radar and sonar signal processing research was in the forefront. In the post cold war period, moving information from anywhere at anytime to enhance quality of life (QoL) became the focus of wireless communications research. The flexibility of allowing communications from anywhere at anytime, and moving information at a fast pace make wireless communications the front banner in societal evolution. The realization of an effective and efficient information transport platform to support end-to-end information delivery with quality of service (QoS) provisioning is the driver behind continuing research in wireless communications and networking. Wireless systems are limited by severe channel impairments and geographical coverage. Sophisticated techniques to mitigate channel impairments are imperative to enhance spectral efficiency to accommodate high transmission rates. To achieve global communications, it is necessary to interwork different domains, both wireless and wireline, and to envision the transport of information via conceptual layers. Interworking of different transmission domains and coupling between different layers, however, have profound ramifications on the problem formulation and protocol design. This talk will provide an exposition and a critical look at the evolution of wireless communications, beginning with a brief historical perspective of wireless technology, a look at the obstacles posed by nature, and then an examination of the building blocks necessary for the construction of the information transfer platform with end-to-end QoS provisioning. Diversity is the most common method used to enhance spectral efficiency. The last part of this talk will address cooperative diversity issues, in which a source user engages another user in the same radio network to relay information to the destination to emulate a multiple transmit antennas environment to achieve transmit diversity. Although cooperative diversity may not achieve as much diversity gain as in a MIMO system, it provides a feasible solution to situations where the transmitter cannot accommodate the complexity of multiple antennas.

Jon W. Mark received the BASc. degree from the University of Toronto in 1962, and the M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from McMaster University in 1968 and 1970, respectively. He was with Westinghouse Canada Ltd from 1962 to 1970 where he conducted research in advanced sonar signal processing. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo in 1970 where his is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus and the founding Director of the Centre for Wireless Communications. He was department Chair during the period 1984 to 1990, and was on sabbatical leave at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY (1976-77) as a Visiting Research Scientist, Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ (1982-83) as a Resident Consultant, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (1990-91) as an Invited Professor, and the National University of Singapore (1994-95) as a Visiting Professor. A life Fellow of the IEEE, Dr. Mark is the recipient of the 2000 Canadian Award in Telecommunications Research for significant research contributions, scholarship and leadership in the fields of computer communications networks and wireless communications and the 2000 Award of Merit by the Education Foundation, Association of the Chinese Canadian Professionals, for significant research contributions in telecommunications research. He is a co-author of the text Wireless Communications and Networking, Prentice Hall, 2003. Over the years, he has served on a number of editorial boards, as a member of the IEEE COMSOC Awards Committee, and as a member of the Inter-Society Steering Committee of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking for 11 years.