Fifteenth National Conference on Communications
NCC 2009

The National Conference on Communications (NCC) 2009 is the fifteenth edition of the nationallevel annual conference in the broad area of communications organized under the aegis of the Joint Telematics Group (JTG) of the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science. Since the first NCC at IIT Kanpur in March 1995, the conference has grown steadily and become a common platform for researchers, students, and practicing engineers to share their research findings in communications and allied areas. NCC 2009 is being organized by IIT Guwahati during January 16-18. This is the first opportunity for IIT Guwahati to host this event and every effort has been made to organize an exciting technical program in the sylvan surroundings of the IIT Guwahati campus.

In order to provide a wider representation to our technical community as well as in-depth focus, this NCC is being organized for the first time into three different symposia: communications, networks and signal processing. NCC 2009 has received a total 189 papers for these symposia electronically submitted through the EDAS conference management system. After a thorough review process involving at least two reviews for each paper, 99 papers have been selected for oral presentation. The list of the reviewers is given in the proceedings and we would like to thank all of them for their invaluable contribution in helping us to select papers of the highest technical quality for presentation in NCC 2009.

The conference includes 19 technical sessions in two days distributed among the symposia. Apart from these sessions, it also features invited and plenary talks by eminent experts: Prof. Vijay Bhargava of the the University of British Columbia, Canada, Prof. Vinod Sharma of IISc, Bangalore and Prof. Ajit K. Chaturvedi of IIT Kanpur. We are indebted to all the invited speakers for accepting our invitation.

Like in the previous years, we have organized six pre-conference tutorials: (i) Scalable Image and Video Coding - With and Without Wavelets by Prof. Vikram Gadre of IIT Bombay, (ii) IPv6 and Sensor Networks by Prof. Laurent Toutain and Prof. Claude Chaudet of ENST Bretagne, France, (iii) Network-Error Correcting Codes by Prof. B. Sundar Rajan of IISc, Bangalore, (iv) Design of a Network Management Server by Prof. Timothy A. Gonsalves of IIT Madras, (v) New Generation Planar Antennas for Wireless Applications by Prof. Debatosh Guha of the Institute of Radio Physics and Electronics, University of Calcutta and (vi) Cardiovascular Signal Processing by Prof. S. Dandapat of IIT Guwahati. These tutorials are planned to provide comprehensive and topical overviews of research areas of current interest. We specially thank all the tutorial speakers for their contributions in helping us to organize exciting tutorial sessions.

We are also taking this opportunity to organize a half-day workshop on Industry-Academia collaboration in oil industry. The aim of the workshop is to bring the industry and the academia together to deliberate on various signal processing issues related to oil industry and provide a forum for technical exchange in this important area. Technical experts from the oil industries and the premier technology institutes will share their knowledge and expertise in the workshop.

We have been fortunate to receive the overwhelming support from different quarters in organizing the event. In particular, we would like to thank all members of the Technical Programme Committee and the Organizing Committee of NCC 2009. We also express our gratitude to the sponsors without whom organizing the conference would not have been possible. We especially record our thanks to the North Eastern Council (NEC), the Department of Science and Technology (DST), the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the Defense Research & Development Organization (DRDO) and the North Eastern Electric Power Corporation (NEEPCO), all belonging to the Govt. of India and Intel India for their generous support. Our sincere thanks to all volunteers for their hard work towards making NCC 2009 a memorable event.

Hope you will enjoy the conference on the beautiful bank of the mighty Brahmaputra!

Prabin Kumar Bora
Jyotindra Singh Sahambi
Rohit Sinha