I am indeed delighted to participate in the inauguration of the International Conference on ?Signal Processing, Communications and Networking? (ICSCN 2007) organized by Anna University. My greetings to academicians, researchers, students and distinguished delegates participating in this conference. With the growth in communication technology, Signal processing has become an important area for researchers to ensure further value added communications. In this endeavour, this seminar is timely and will bring useful research directions which will be essential for maintaining the competitiveness of the information and communication technology sector of our economy. Hence I would like to share few thoughts on the topic ?Research is the foundation for Global Competitiveness in Communications?.

Recent trends in Signal Processing

Recent trends are towards a huge number of autonomous devices that have a lot of ?on-board? signal processing ability. This is different from earlier years when sensors were used merely to collect some data and send it across to a remote computer for further processing. Early versions of ?on-board? signal processing consisted of simple noise cancellation and other such forms of filtering. But now the on-board signal processing capability can be very sophisticated. For example, an implanted device can collect ECG signals (electro-cardio-gram). Now the on-board signal processing can be so complex that the device can, not merely collect ECG but also detect any anomalous behaviour, and even alert a physician or attendant via SMS to a cell phone.

Automobile applications: Look at an automobile these days, especially a modern car. It will have as many as fifteen or twenty independent systems on a chip, each carrying out its own signal processing. One device can alert if the headlights are left on, another can alert if the driver is not wearing his seat belt, another controls the throttle for cruise control, and so on. All of these are stand-alone control systems with their own signal processing capability. This kind of decentralized signal processing actually makes a system more flexible and fault-tolerant. Based on user feedback, more and more sophisticated systems are evolving.

Biomedical applications: A very noticeable trend is towards smaller, less power-consuming, but more sophisticated, implantable biomedical devices. Earlier, biomedical devices were used mostly to sit outside the body, to collect data through some simple electrodes. But, now they are getting more and more miniaturized and getting implanted with increased levels of reliability. The traditional challenges of ensuring that the system is encased within biocompatible material are fairly well solved by now. Now the new challenges, as the implanted devices are equipped with more and more functions, are to ensure that they function perfectly over a very long time. In a conventional application, a malfunctioning computer chip can be detached, thrown away, and replaced by another. Clearly this is impossible for implanted devices. These devices have to be mass-produced in order to be affordable. At the same time, they have to function satisfactorily under a wide variety of temperature and other conditions within the body. Myself and my team were working with the medical experts in developing an implantable pace maker. Since the pacemaker is responsible for regulating the heart rhythm, the reliability of the signal processing system has to be robust and should have a shelf-life for over 10 years. This gave us many technological challenges in the choice of the device, circuitry, software, system integration and fault tolerance.

Communications: Home appliances are also now equipped with sophisticated signal processing and communication capability. The day is not too far off when all the appliances in a home are connected via a ?home LAN (Local Area Network)? that can communicate with the outside world via the Internet. The technology for this kind of network already exists. But thus far there has not been too much customer demand, mostly because of cost factors. The appliance makers try to push dreams such as ?Wouldn?t it be nice to turn on your air-conditioner just as you leave the office, so that your home will be nice and cool by the time you reach home?? But marketing research shows that consumers are not yet ready to pay for such features.

Home networks: Home networks of the kind mentioned above bring with them their own peculiar security risks. Most such devices will have factory-installed software, which will permit the downloading of programs from remote locations. This is to make it easy for manufacturers to remedy functional defects without having to send a repair person to the customer?s home. However, malicious elements can misuse this facility to create mischief. For instance, if an oven can be commanded to turn on and remain at a very high temperature, then there is a risk of causing a fire. Considering how poorly protected normal home computers are because the home PC owner is not at all familiar with the concepts of protecting his computer from hackers, it is easy to see that the risk of intruders making merry is even greater with home appliances. This may be another reason why these kinds of features have not become too popular. I am sure these problems will be overcome with robust technology, redundancy, security and above all the next generation system may become cost effective.

Networking: By far the most dominant trend in networking is to have ?ad hoc networks,? and ?sensor-based networks.? In an ad hoc network, there is no base station to keep track of which communicating device is located where. Instead, the various elements establish their own communication protocols on the fly. It is like having a lot of cell phones trying to communicate with each other, but without any base station. Ad hoc networks originated in the military context, because of the need for field telephones to communicate with each other in the absence of bulky exchanges. However, now commercial applications are also becoming more popular. Unlike in the case of signal processing and wireless communication in all its various forms, the theory and technology of ad hoc networks is still not well-understood. Most of the methods and protocols that are now used are satisfactory when the number of communicating elements is small (say a few hundreds) but will break down when the number of communicating elements becomes larger. So this is a very good area for research.

Last mile connectivity: To speculate, it would be interesting to see whether villages in India could benefit from ad hoc networks. Anywhere in the world, most telephone calls are ?local.? However, providing the infrastructure to support local phone calls is much more expensive than doing so for long-distance calls. Much of the cost of local telephony comes from the exchanges and other such supporting equipment. Suppose we could develop low-cost telephone instruments that could only be used to communicate within a short radius. The low cost refers not just to the cost of the instruments but also to the cost of using them. This may be a way to promote the penetration of telephones in difficult to access areas. Now the VOIP Phones using Wi-FI hotspots created in the rural and urban areas may communicate through IP protocol via internet leading to low cost mobile phones. This of course has the limitation of short range. Researchers have to focus on mobility Wi-MAX technologies.

Let me now discuss about India?s experience and position in networking and communications.

India Poised for Bandwidth Boom

India has achieved the distinction as a country with the fast growing broadband market in the world during 2006. Many experts believe that India is now ready to become the most bandwidth-competitive country in the world. Thanks to the steps taken by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), price of bandwidth is continuously falling down. Resale of bandwidth is now allowed. It may be true that current bandwidth prices in India are as much as five times higher than on some international routes. But the trend is such that the bandwidth prices could drop significantly in the near future.

Bandwidth growth has been phenomenal in India. The total installed bandwidth capacity is in the range of 19-20 Tb and lit-up capacity is in the range of 500-700 Gb. That means there is a significant scope to optimally utilize the available infrastructure. Indian government's revised policy on foreign direct investment (FDI) now allows up to 74% foreign ownership in telecommunication sector. It opens up the whole world to contribute and participate in India?s growing economy.

Mobile Phones

In the recent years the growth of mobile phone market has been phenomenal. In the last 20 years, half of the people on our planet have got connected through cell phones. Out of 200 million total phones in India, 80% are mobile phones, which are continuing to increase at the rate of 6 million new mobile phones per month. The current global mobile subscriber base is 2.6 billion. In 2006, 1 billion new users were added. It took 12 years to reach the first billion; the second billion came in two and a half years; and the third billion is expected to be achieved in just one year. Of course, the growth rate has slowed down and may saturate. The voice traffic may begin to decline, giving way to mobile data services, which will demand faster and faster throughput, and higher bandwidth. Mobile WiMAX will demand significant increase in radio spectrum and innovative networking solutions. These are priority problems for the signal processing and communication community to address.

Radio spectrum utilization and electromagnetic pollution hazards from mobiles

Increased use of radio frequencies because of ever increasing number of mobile phones and expansion of mobile communication networks have brought in new problems and concerns. The situation is also getting complicated because of alarming increase in other wireless devices and systems. WiFi, WiMAX, Bluetooth, WIL and cordless phones are also competing for appropriate allocation of frequency bands. Communication systems have to share the available electromagnetic spectrum with other users such as Walkie Talkies, terrestrial TV, FM stations, Radars, Microwave Ovens, etc. There is significant congestion on some of the popular frequency bands. In addition to creating mutual electromagnetic interference, these are causing excessive electromagnetic pollution and electromagnetic radiation hazards. In the recent times, overwhelming increase in the number of mobile phones and the number of service providers competing with each other, have created such a situation that we see cell phone towers every where; even on residential buildings, schools, hostels and hospitals. These towers are radiating high power radio waves, continuously exposing children, senior citizens and people needing health care to harmful electromagnetic radiations. These towers should be located away from residential and other such vulnerable areas and should use minimum essential radio power. Several operators could share towers, saving on space, rentals and costs. Simultaneously, communication, electronics and signal processing scientists and engineers should work out innovative strategies for improving on efficient use of electromagnetic spectrum and bandwidth. There is an urgent need to evolve reasonable standards, rules and regulations and legislations for proper use of radio frequencies for telecom operations, including health related restrictions and interference related measures.

Pan-African Network

During my visit to the Africa, I addressed the inaugural session of the Pan African Parliament on 16th September 2004. During my address to the Pan-African Parliament, I made an offer to set up a Pan-African e-network which will provide e-connectivity to all the 53 countries of Africa and also connect all the Heads of States of the Pan African countries. The idea was to use the core competence of our country to assist these countries in the field of IT for providing at least one hub in each of the African countries through which various e-services like tele-education, tele-medicine and e-governance could be provided. Pan African e-Network project brings together the terrestrial network between India and Africa through the international under sea fiber cable network and also the African satellite network services to provide education and health care services from India and Africa to the 53 Pan African nations and also connecting the 53 heads of the state. The universities and Super Specialty hospitals of Africa will also use this Pan African e-Network to provide services and content. I am happy to inform you that this offer has been received very well all over the African Continent and 20 countries will be connected in the first Half of 2007 and the rest will be operationalized by early 2008 at a cost of $100 million. Lots of work has been done by our engineers and scientists to provide seamless connectivity through model based signal processing.

The recent communication networking disaster

The international communication networks are becoming increasingly complex and vulnerable. This was shockingly demonstrated recently, when an earth quake, of intensity 6.7 on Richter scale, hit southern coast of Taiwan at 8:26 PM on December 26, 2006. Significant stresses developed on the under-sea communication cables, and optical fibers started to stretch and break. By lunch time the next day, eight international cables had been severed at 18 places. The impact on broadband-happy east Asia was catastrophic. Hong Kong and Singapore lost 80% to 90% of connectivity, Taiwan loosing nearly 100%. It took two weeks for the phone services to return to normal while the internet took three weeks to become normal. It is interesting to note that despite the widespread damage, Reuters services were unaffected because of diverse and resilient routing. This communication disaster has woken up the entire high-tech networking community. Alternative routes will have to be used by optimally networking with other operators in the area. The days of captive networks are over; sharing of resources and cost effective utilization of the entire available infrastructure, irrespective of the ownership, will become essential. Also essential will be the use of higher capacity satellite links. The endless debate about cost benefit analysis of satellite vs. cable links must give way to finding methods to compliment each other, particularly for critical communication networks. The signal processing, communications and networking experts attending this conference have to develop hardware and software to realize quickly reconfigurable and adaptive routes to manage and automatically take care of such natural or even man made disasters.

Conclusion

The need to transmit high quality images, image sequences, voice and data over a variety of channel conditions and bandwidth, is increasing rapidly with the growth of the personal communications, security and healthcare markets. While concluding, I would like to suggest the signal processing communication and networking specialists assembled here may consider the following research areas for deliberations in this seminar.

1. Data and information fusion, classification, tracking and computational techniques for multi-media, biomedical, space and military applications.

2. Image, voice, data, video and multimedia communications over wireless networks

3. Image and video compression for fixed networks and storage devices

4. Content analysis, description and authentication for databases, archives and evidential purposes

5. Model based signal processing for low level signals incorporating physical phenomena, measurement and noise in the form of mathematical models

6. Robust Coding for Wireless Communications and Internet Security applications

7. 3D Processing and View Synthesis for Biomedical applications

8. Convergence technique for various communications in commercial entertainment and military applications

9. Living beings are great motivators for creativity and new design like birds for aviation. Likewise, as human beings are coordinating their different sensory perceptions, physical system robustness can be improved through research on multi-modal signal processing.

With these words, I inaugurate the International Conference on ?Signal Processing, Communications and Networking? (ICSCN 2007) organized by Anna University. My best wishes to all the participants for success in their mission of determining future related research areas.

May God Bless you.

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