Dr Christian Schlegel
High Capacity Digital Communications

Dr Christian Schlegel is an iCORE Professor of High Capacity Digital Communications, a position he now holds in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Alberta. iCORE has committed $350,000 per year for five years for a total of $1.75 million dollars to develop this research group at the University of Alberta. This represents roughly 50 percent of the total budget. Dr Schlegel was recruited to Alberta from the University of Utah, where he was associate professor in electrical engineering.

Biographical Information
Dr Schlegel received his first engineering degree from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1984, and his masters and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, in 1986 and 1989, respectively.

In 1988 he joined the Communications Group at the research center of Asea Brown Boveri, Ltd., in Baden, Switzerland, where he was involved in mobile communications research. He spent the 1991/92 academic year as Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Hawaii, before joining the Digital Communications Group at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia from 1992-1994, where he supervised research in mobile communications. From 1994-1996 he was with the University of Texas at San Antonio, and in 1996 he joined the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. In 2001 he was named iCORE Professor for High Capacity Digital Communications at the University of Alberta, Canada.

His rapid rise in research success stems from his accomplishments in improving efficiency, enhancing security and pre-empting bottlenecks in network communications, all of which are becoming increasingly important as network use explodes. These issues are most acute in the area of wireless communications, where bandwidth is limited.

Dr Schlegel is the author of the research monograph Trellis Coding published by IEEE Press in 1997, and the upcoming book, Trellis and Turbo Coding, with Professor Lance Perez, to be published by IEEE/Wiley in 2002. He is an associate editor for coding theory and techniques for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, and served as the technical co-chair of the IEEE Information Theory Workshop 2001 held in Australia. He is also a senior member of the IEEE Information Theory and Communication Societies. In 1997, he received a National Science Foundation 1997 Career Award and, in 2001, a Canada Research Chair.

Dr Schlegel has published close to 100 technical papers and received research grants for over US$1 million from the National Science Foundation, Army Research Office, State of Utah, and private industry.


Research Program
Dr Schlegel's research in Alberta will concentrate on advancements in the core technologies that enable the development of high capacity digital communications systems. His research is a strong complement to the work of the Wireless Communications Laboratory, directed by iCORE Chair Dr Norman Beaulieu, which focuses on the design and analysis of future wireless systems.

The combined team of Drs Beaulieu and Schlegel makes Alberta one of the pre-eminent locations for wireless research and associated graduate study.

Dr Schlegel's research will focus on:
a) improving the efficiency of data transmission over existing networks, wireless or otherwise, by applying modern error control methods in conjunction with signalling and accessing schemes;

b) studying novel ways of increasing the inherent information capacity carrying potential of wireless links and harnessing this capacity via the application of novel signalling and communications methods;

c) developing and prototyping new hardware components for modern error control and high-efficiency communications systems;

d) researching the role, potential and future of analog processing of digital data, promising extremely low-power high data rate integrated circuits;

e) studying the impact of network functions on the data throughput of future wireless devices and improving the efficiency of these network functions to recapture the large capacity losses currently suffered by inefficient methods.


Research Team
Dr Schlegel's team will consist of a research associate, postdoctoral fellows and visiting researchers.

Extensive collaboration with existing faculty members and researchers in the department of electrical and computer engineering is expected, in particular with Dr Norman Beaulieu, Dr Witold Kryzmien and Dr Ivan Fair at the University of Alberta, whose expertise in the design and implementation of error control coding techniques is directly related to Dr Schlegel's iCORE-funded research program.

Visiting researchers include; Dr Alex Grant, University of South Australia, an expert in information theory and applications; Dr Lance Perez, University of Nebraska, an expert on turbo coding; Drs Gianluca Lazzi and Brian Hughes, North Carolina State University, in the area of unified space-time communications; Drs Chris Meyers and Reid Harrison, University of Salt Lake City, known for their contribution to the world's first CMOS implementation of an analog error control decoder; and Dr Ayyoob Abbaszadeh, a staff engineer at L3 Communications specializing in VLSI system design.


Related Links:
Dr Schlegel's Homepage
High Capacity Digital Communications website