Vijay Bhargava
Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of British Columbia

The millimeter wave technology has been known for several decades but was mainly used for military communications. In this presentation we specifically focus on 60 GHz band as recently a massive unlicensed spectrum up to 9 GHz has been allocated worldwide in this band for civilian communication. This spectrum is a very promising candidate for multi gigabit wireless transmission systems including wireless personal area network (WPAN) as well as Wireless local area network (WLAN) usage. The effective interference level in this band is less severe than those WLAN systems deployed in the congested Wi-Fi bands (2-2.5 GHz and 5-5.8 GHz). As a result, higher frequency reuse can be achieved, leading to a very high throughput network. After summarizing the current status of standardization activities for 60 GHz band we will focus on a series of technical challenges that need to be resolved before the full deployment of multi gigabit wireless multimedia communications. These include 60 GHz propagation and antennas, CMOS circuit design, modulation schemes, LDPC-based error correction schemes and MAC layer design.

Vijay Bhargava, an IEEE volunteer for three decades, is Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he served as Department Head during 2003-2008. As a senior level IEEE volunteer, he has lectured in 66 countries and assisted IEEE Presidents in negotiating sister society agreements in India, Japan and Russia.

Vijay has served as the IEEE Vice President for Regional Activities Board, now known as Member and Geographic Activities (MGA) Board. During his tenure the program known as Graduates of the Last Decade (GOLD) was conceived and he developed a profound understanding of how IEEE Societies, Regions, Sections, Chapters and Student Branches work. He is the Founder of the IEEE Pacific Rim Conference on Communications, Computers and Signal Processing and of the Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering

Vijay played major role in the creation of the IEEE Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, for which he served as the Editor-in-Chief during 2007-2009. In 2010, he was appointed for a two year term as the IEEE Communications Society Director of Journals. He is a past President of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

Vijay Bhargava is a candidate for IEEE Communications Society President-Elect in the forthcoming election.