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INTRODUCTION Imagine a little hardware working like an MSN messenger which you may mount in your car, your home, your office, or even carry with you. But you do not have to TYPE, you simply SPEAK to it, and your friend, who may be at the other end of the city can receive your message instantaneously. Another key difference between this little gadget and MSN is that this thing needs no Internet. --- It is like a walkie-talkie, but can reach as far as the other end of a city of the size of, say Toronto or New York; it is also like a cell phone, but you do not need to pay any fee. In this project, we will build a prototype of such a voice messaging system, or at least demonstrate that the current technologies allow this to become real. (Then we go to a VC and build a start-up company :). A group of at least 8 students who are interested in aspects of communications and computer networking are needed for completing this project. --- Basically your team need to consist of people who are willing to work on RF circuits (hardware), voice compression (software), communication algorithms (software), and networking (software). As you may feel, the majority part of the work is on software and algorithms, except for the RF front-end. This is made so in order to decrease the complexity of the project. A consequence of this choice is a sacrifice of system performance (for example, it may take up to a minute or a couple of minutes for your friend at the other end of the city to receive your message). Even in this case, I must mention that this project can be quite chanllenging, as it covers all key components (in an, of course much smaller scale, ) of our contemporary wireless communication systems (such as cell phones and their base stations). If you have a team of 8 or more motivated and capable students, please contact me. I can have a couple of my graduate students helping with various aspects of the project. |