NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMMUNICATIONS

The Joint Telematics Group of the Indian Institutes of Technology at Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Kanpur, Kharagpur, and Madras, and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore organizes the National Conference on Communications (NCC) annually. At the national level, NCC provides a platform for researchers in academic institutions and industry to discuss and publish their research work. The first edition of NCC was held at IIT Kanpur in March 1995. Since then two cycles have been completed and NCC 2007, being held during January 26-28, 2007 marks the beginning of the third cycle, again from IIT Kanpur.

Over the years, interest in NCC seems to have grown. Thus while NCC 2001 (the last edition at IIT Kanpur) had received only 122 papers, NCC 2007 received 227 papers in the areas of communications, signal processing, networks, optical communications, and microwaves. We wish to thank the authors of all submitted papers for their interest in the conference. After a fairly detailed review process involving 136 reviewers from across the country, only 96 papers could be accepted this year. Over successive editions of NCC, the expectation of reviewers seems to have risen and rightly so, resulting in declining acceptance rates. We would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank the reviewers for their time and effort. The list of reviewers is given at the end of the Proceedings.

Six pre-conference tutorials have been organised on 26th January before the inauguration in the evening on the same day. They are (1) Wireless System Evolution: Heterogeneous Networks and Convergence by Dr. Manoj Chaudhary and Balaji S Holur of TI, Bangalore. (2) Introduction to Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition by Dr. S Umesh of IIT Kanpur. (3) Channel Estimation for OFDM and OFDMA: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime by Dr. K Giridhar, Sheetal Kalyani and M R Raghavendra of IIT Madras. (4) QoS in 802.16 Wireless Broadband Access Networks: The Role of MAC, Cross-Layer Design, and Scheduling by Dr. Abhay Karandikar of IIT Bombay. (5) Video based Surveillance by Dr. Subhashis Banerjee of IIT Delhi. (6) Software based RF Measurements by Mr. Abhishek Nag of National Instruments, Bangalore.

The inaugural session includes an address on Interplay of Technology and Regulation by Mr. Pradip Baijal, former Chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. The technical program includes a plenary lecture by Prof. P Vijay Kumar of IISc Bangalore on Cooperative Diversity in Fading Wireless Networks Through Distributed Space-Time Codes and a panel discussion coordinated by Prof. U B Desai of IIT Bombay on How can India realize its research potential? The contributed papers will be presented over twenty sessions spread over two days.

NCC 2007 received support and cooperation from several students and staff members of IIT Kanpur. Ketan Rajawat deserves special mention for virtually holding everything together, almost single handedly. We would like to thank Dr. Y N Singh and Nagendra Singh for helping us in making the paper submission and review process web-based. We are also grateful to Phani Kumar Valiveti for setting up the site and then updating it, whenever needed. In the initial stages of our preparation, Nageswara Rao Majeti and Sudipto Nandi were of great help. Further, we would like to thank Kunal S Ghate and Pratap K S for helping us with the cover designs on the Proceedings as well as the CD, Vineet Narain for preparing the master CD, Prabhat Patel for helping in the identification and assignment of reviewers and Chetan K Patel, Sarat Kumar I V N, Prashant Bajpayee and Ram Bilas Pachori for helping in the preparation of the Proceedings and the final program.

We hope the participants will enjoy NCC 2007!

Ajit Chaturvedi
Chair, NCC 2007