Steven D. Blostein received his BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 1983, and the MS and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1985 and 1988, respectively. He has been on the Faculty at Queen's University since 1988 and currently holds the position of Professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
He spent 1994-1995 at Lockheed Martin Electronic Systems in Montreal as a Visiting Associate Professor in the department of Electrical Engineering at McGill University in 1995. From 1999-2003, he was leader of the Multirate Wireless Data Access Major Project sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Telecommunications Research. Since then, he has led multi-university/industry projects related to fourth generation (4G) wireless communications systems. He has also been a consultant to industry and government in the areas of image compression, target tracking, radar imaging and wireless communications. He has collaborated with Communications Research Centre and more recently, with the Australian National University in the area of synchronization in cooperative communications and since 2008 has worked on multicasting multimedia over wireless systems. Over the years he has supervised close to 50 PhD, MASc and post-doctoral students.
He has been a member of the World 4G Wireless Forum as well as an invited distinguished speaker. He served as Chair of IEEE Kingston Section (1994), Chair of the Biennial Symposium on Communications in 2000, 2006, and 2008, Member of the NSERC Strategic Grants Committee in Information and Communications Technology (2000-2003), Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (1996-2000), Publications Chair for IEEE ICASSP 2004 and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication (2007-2013). He has also served on Technical Program Committees for numerous IEEE conferences. He has also held key administrative positions in ECE at Queen's, including Coordinator of Graduate Studies (2000-2003), Associate Head, Research (2002-2003) and Department Head (2004-2009). He is a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario and a Senior Member of IEEE.
His current research interests lie in the application of signal processing to wireless communications systems, including 5G communications, massive MIMO systems, next-generation adaptive and dense Wi-FI as well as sequential detection and estimation, especially for sensor networks (see more details below). He has been a member of the World 4G Wireless Forum as well as an invited distinguished speaker. He served as Chair of IEEE Kingston Section (1994), Chair of the Biennial Symposium on Communications in 2000, 2006, and 2008, Member of the NSERC Strategic Grants Committee in Information and Communications Technology (2000-2003), Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (1996-2000), Publications Chair for IEEE ICASSP 2004 and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication (2007-2013). He has also served on Technical Program Committees for numerous IEEE conferences. He has also held key administrative positions in ECE at Queen's, including Coordinator of Graduate Studies (2000-2003), Associate Head, Research (2002-2003) and Department Head (2004-2009). He is a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario and a Senior Member of IEEE.
As new wireless services are emerging, propelled by diverse requirements for the 2020 envisaged fifth generation (5G) systems, from the Internet of Things (IoT) to the explosion of multimedia, demand escalates for higher capacity networks to operate at low latency with dynamic spectrum access, as well as those with energy efficiency. To realize continued increases in capacity, coverage, throughput and quality of service, substantial investments in new algorithms are required to achieve spatial frequency reuse, since the bandwidth increase allocated to the future systems is limited, which also has created a drive toward by millimeter wave frequencies. Ideally, solutions that do not require significant investments in infrastructure are needed. This motivates research into cooperative communications systems and networks to obtain an understanding of their performance limitations at the physical and higher layers. Current research in this area includes Wi-Fi offloading, synchronization, multi-user beamforming, opportunistic user selection, as well as optimization of dense-deployments expressed in terms of graph algorithms and game theory. The interactions of energy efficient network protocols on the physical layer will also be critical, as TCP/IP becomes inefficient for interference-limited systems. Solutions that incorporate element of network and fountain coding are needed, and where modified version forms TCP also will play a role.