Beyond 4G, everything communicates

Professor Mikael Skoglund intends to make the future wireless communications society more cost-effective and environmentally sustainable. All in order to make peoples daily lives easier.
We cant just keep aiming at higher speeds and greater bandwidths, we must start looking seriously at energy systems, says Mikael Skoglund, Assistant Dean of the KTH School of Electrical Engineering from January 2009. Wireless more cost-effective and environmentally sustainable This "total" wireless communication has the potential of being much more cost effective than using cables. There are considerable savings to be made in many industrial applications, for example there is no need to fit cables for communication between different machines. Another driving force behind new theories and technologies in this field is the need to save energy in future systems. Today's mobile communications account for a far from negligible part of the world's total energy consumption, and this is attracting increasing attention. For example, in EU calls for new research in the area, Green ICT has now become a significant part of the budget. We cant just keep aiming at higher speeds and greater bandwidths, we must start looking seriously at energy systems, says Mikael Skoglund, Performance for the Communications Society Communication Theory for the wireless communication society concerns how to transfer more information - audio and video via wireless units - at lower cost, lower power consumption and with higher performance levels. Mikael Skoglund develops mathematical theories and algorithms for transmission and storage of information into a working capacity and efficiency that far exceeds the level currently available. Making daily life easier, automatically In order to research into the technology needed to make everything communicate, more collaboration across subject boundaries is essential. Michael Skoglund cooperates with Karl Henrik Johansson and Mikael Johansson at the Department of Automatic Control. The aim of this research is to make people's daily lives easier using automatics. Technology is becoming more and more embedded, while striving to use natural resources as efficiently as possible. This can be illustrated by traffic management which also has a major impact on environmental emissions. With such technology it is possible, as the Japanese are already doing, to channel traffic onto motorways in order for it to flow freely. When motorists do not need to queue up with their engines idling, they do not emit as much carbon dioxide. In this example it is the algorithms, in terms of communications theory, which transmit all the data and gather information, while the automatic control technology takes care of traffic management, says Mikael. Mathematics the foundation of communications theory

Mikael Skoglund has always been interested in mathematics and problem-solving so he applied to study at Chalmers University of Technology and later took a PhD. But it was something of a coincidence that his subject became communications theory. Its Arne Lions fault that I'm sitting here, says Michael, laughing. No, actually I studied a course in communication theory taught by Arne Lion (who was then a lecturer at Chalmers) and became very interested. First, you decide to study for a PhD explains Mikael Skoglund, but in reality the teachers are interested in students who have good grades. I went and talked to Arne Lion and he told me that I was the first person ever to have nailed the Communication Theory exam, says Mikael Skoglund proudly. And that was a good thing because now I'm a professor in the subject! Getting multiple nodes to cooperate Claude Shannon's information theory of 1948 is behind today's communication theory. Everything is based on his model of a transmitter and a receiver, what is currently more generally referred to as nodes, and can be in the form of anything from a cell phone to a sensor in a sensor network explains Mikael Skoglund and shows me this picture from a mammoth book. There are still many researchers looking at one transmitter and one receiver. But we are looking at how many nodes can work together to collect and transmit information. When we have these equations, we know how close to the limit we are. Then we can identify the technology to get closer (to optimise performance). Certain technologies are based on mathematics and equations, others may use protocols, states the Professor. Mikael Skolunds homepage
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Claude E. Shannon, founding father of information theory