A Technical Post: why I've been on hiatus...

I've had this blog on hiatus for a couple of months, as I was supremely busy at work; anything political I had to say I did over at Kos.

Anyway, what I've been up to I can finally talk about - and in fact I will be doing so at a meeting of a major telecommunications standards body.

It's not 802.

Those guys - the 802 guys- have, I think jumped the shark.

It may not be known around many places, but the ITU is planning on a review of recommendations for spectrum usage this year.

The 802 guys are putting together a bit of recommendations for the usage of new spectrum for telecommuncations services, and as Jimmy Durrante would say, "Everybody's gettin' into the act!"

The most amusing bit came from the WPAN folks, who for some reason have Bluetooth and UWB confused with cell phones, but it wasn't the only amusing bit.

Some of the 802 wireless folks' greatest minds were spent on how to get the phrase "contention based access" into consideration before the mighty ITU.

What was especially amusing about this was that "contention based access" connotes lots of things, including but not limited to how one aspect of 3G phones already work.

But, as I say, that's not what I've been working on.

I've been working on some pretty neat stuff that effectively obsoletes a significant bit of 802.16 and 802.11n, in that I've developed a new way to get at pilot signal design for OFDMA/MIMO systems when the dimensionality one is given aren't nice numbers. It uses something called Frame Theory (see this excellent tutorial for an inro) by coming up with some neat extensions to this paper.

It may or may not reach standards nirvana, but it's pretty elegant stuff, if I do say so myself. It better be; the Muses had me working beacoup overtime on it.