News from the SPCOM-TC

Contributed by Roberto López-Valcarce
(SPCOM TC Newsletter Subcommittee chair)

Although, historically, the IEEE Signal Processing (SPS), Communications (COMSOC), and Information Theory (IT) Societies have evolved somewhat independently, there is no doubt that there are significant connections among the technical areas covered by these societies. The Signal Processing for Communications and Networking Technical Committee (SPCOM TC) is devoted to exploring and elucidating signal processing challenges at the intersection of these areas. These span multiple layers in the protocol stack of communication systems, including such rapidly growing fields as data compression and coding, network-distributed signal processing, channel modeling, estimation and equalization, multiuser, multicarrier and multiaccess communication, antenna arrays for wireless communications, synchronization, cross-layer resource optimization, ad-hoc, sensor and smart grid networks, cognitive radio and dynamic spectrum access systems, and experimental analysis and measurements.

All of these SPCOM TC technical areas of interest were covered in the 115 papers presented at the 11 SPCOM track sessions, the two joint SAM/SPCOM sessions (on Communication Networks and Relay-Assisted Communications) and the three joint SPTM/SPCOM sessions (two on Sampling, Sparsity and Reconstruction, and one on Adaptive Filtering) held at the ICASSP12 conference in Kyoto. The SPCOM TC will in turn review those papers that will be submitted to the SPCOM track of the ICASSP13 conference in Vancouver.

The SPCOM TC sponsored the 13th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC12), which took place in Çesme, Turkey, in June 2012, co-chaired by Hakan Deliç and Georgios Giannakis. The workshop featured 5 plenary talks (slides from some of these can be found at the workshop’s website) and 119 papers organized into 10 regular sessions. The workshop scope has progressively expanded over the years to cover not only wireless, but also other aspects of networking and communications in general in which signal processing plays a role. The next edition of SPAWC will take place in Darmstadt, Germany, in June 2013.

One of the TC tasks is the nomination of candidates to Best Paper as well as Young Author Best Paper Awards of the SPS. To this end, SPCOM TC members scanned a total of 337 papers in the SPCOM area. As a result of this first round of scan review, each of a total of 44 candidate papers underwent peer review by at least two TC members; in this way, over 35,000 words of review were generated. At the time of writing a voting process was being carried out based on this input, as well as for the nomination of candidates for the Magazine Best Paper Award, and the Society and Technical Achievement Awards.

The SPCOM TC will be holding elections in October in order to fill 8 vacant positions for committee members. We are looking for technically solid, broad, and experienced candidates. These can be self-nominated, or nominated by a TC member; we encourage worthy and willing SPS members to consider submitting their nomination. In addition to this, the TC is looking for affiliate members and encourages anyone with interest in the SPCOM TC to apply for affiliate membership. Candidates from industry are especially welcome, as one of the short-term goals of our TC is to strengthen ties with this sector.

For further information, please visit the SPCOM TC webpage.