Contribute to Commercial Standards by Joining the IEEE Synthetic Aperture Standards Committee

The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) recently approved the creation of the Synthetic Aperture Standards Committee.  This body is the first Standards Committee created under the auspices of the SPS and it is actively recruiting new members for its initial roster. 

Standards are an important component of today’s marketplace for a variety of advanced commercial technology products.  Typically, standards are developed in a cooperative collaboration with partners from industry, government, and academia and serve as a quality benchmark that defines best industry practices for many technology products or industrial processes.  A frequently cited example of a successful commercial standard is the development of the IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi standard that today is used to connect billions of wireless devices to local area networks. 

Standards are especially important for new and emerging technologies and one such technology is the use of synthetic apertures for channel sounding applications.  Channel sounding refers to the practice of measuring propagating electromagnetic waves to determine the multipath scattering characteristics of a wireless communications channel.  A synthetic aperture (or equivalently a virtual array) is created by using a mechanical positioner, such as a robotic arm, to move an antenna connected to a digitizing receiver to predetermined locations along a spatial sampling lattice. At the location of each spatial sample the signal received by the antenna (also called a probe) is digitized and stored. In post-processing all the measured signals are coherently combined to synthesize a large aperture capable of higher angular resolution than the probe by itself.  The use of synthetic apertures for channel sounding is an exciting new development that may enable new advances in 5G communications, wireless security, and channel sensing applications. 

Prospective Standards Committee members are invited to send an email to Mr. Peter Vouras at synthetic_aperture_twg@ieee.org expressing their interest to participate in the development of synthetic aperture standards.