PREFACE

National Conference on Communications (NCC) 2008 is the fourteenth conference in a series of national level conferences being organized every year by Joint Telematics Group (JTG). JTG comprises of all Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. The conference has provided a national forum for researchers in the area of communications and signal processing to come together to discuss and debate their important research findings. It also has helped in stimulating an environment for basic and applied research in India in the broad area of telecommunications. Traditionally, NCC has been held in each IIT and IISc by rotation. This year, it is being held in IIT Bombay. It also coincides with the Golden Jubilee year of IIT Bombay and forms part of the on-going celebrations.

Over the years, the quality of submitted papers has grown steadily and the conference has established for itself the status of an important annual event. This year, we followed a rigorous review process through EDAS, an internationally accepted conference management system. This proved to be very useful for scoring the quality of manuscripts. We received a total of 193 submissions. Each paper was reviewed by at least 2 independent reviewers. For a large number of papers, we could obtain 3 or even 4 reviews. Given a rather tight deadline, all the reviewers did an excellent job of providing very useful and constructive feedback on the papers. Based on the average scores obtained for each paper, we decided to include 93 papers for oral presentations and 12 papers for poster presentations. The accepted papers span all areas of communications namely communications theory, wireless communications, wireless networks, coding and cryptography, signal processing algorithms, optical communications, video and image processing, speech processing, microwaves and antennas. The conference has been organized into 19 technical sessions and 2 poster sessions. The detailed program is given overleaf. We sought help from about 290 peers for conducting timely and thorough reviews. We would like to thank all the reviewers and the authors of all contributed papers for making the technical program a great success.

Apart from contributed papers highlighting the research contributions, the conference also features Plenary Talks by two eminent experts and 6 pre-conference tutorials. The plenary talks are-"Applications of Stochastic Approximation in Communication Systems" by Prof. Vivek S. Borkar of TIFR and "Advances in Cognitive Radio Networks" by Prof. Vijay Bhargava of University of British Columbia. The pre-conference tutorials provide a comprehensive coverage of various issues and research challenges in state of the art topics. These tutorials are (1) Low Complexity Distributed STBC and Large MIMO Detection by B. Sundar Rajan and A. Chockalingam of IISc, Bangalore (2) Mobile Terminal Software Architecture: Present and Future by S. Vijay Anand of Sasken Communications Technologies, Bangalore (3) Signal Processing for Fiber Optic Communications by Kasyapa Balemarthy of OFS Fitel and Shanthi Pavan of IIT Madras (4) Communication over Relay Channels by Adrish Banerjee of IIT Kanpur (5) Capacity, QoS and Security Related Advances in IEEE 802.11 by Kaustubh Phanse and K.N. Gopinath of AirTight Networks, Pune and (6) Universal Compression, Entropy Rate and Hypothesis Testing by R.K. Bansal of IIT Kanpur. All the tutorials have received a great response. We are grateful to all the invited speakers for accepting our invitation.

In the recent years, India has witnessed a significant growth in telecommunications. This has thrown up many challenges for service providers, equipment vendors, policy makers and technologists. With this view, an industry track that debates challenges and opportunities for telecommunications growth in India has been organized. The session is coordinated by Prof. Girish Saraph. This session features invited talks from key personnel from various companies and academia. The conference has been benefited immensely by enthusiastic participation from industries in the Telecom sector.

It is not possible to organize an event of this nature without active help from a large number of people. First and foremost, we would like to express our gratitude to all the sponsors of the conference. The three key players in telecom service providers-Bharti, Reliance Communications and Tata Communications enthusiastically supported the conference by becoming Platinum Sponsors. Similarly, Tejas Networks, Bangalore, a key telecom equipment vendor from India, also lent enthusiastic support by becoming Gold Sponsor. We sincerely appreciate all their support and help. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people including the technical program committee members who have helped in organizing this conference. In particular, two individuals-Hemant Rath and Punit Rathod who have contributed in a significant manner to the overall organization of the conference right from the beginning deserve special mention. We would also like to thank Mallapur Veerayya, Rajnish Sethi, Sangeeta, Satish and other members of Information Networks Laboratory of Department of Electrical Engineering who have provided critical help at various stages.

We hope you would enjoy the conference.

Abhay Karandikar
S.N. Merchant
Subhasis Chaudhuri