Andrew J. Viterbi
University of Southern California
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Primary Section: 34, Computer and Information Sciences Secondary Section: 31, Engineering Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1996)
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Research Interests
As a communication theorist and engineer, I have studied the design of signal waveforms to approach the maximum achievable throughput over a noisy or otherwise perturbed communication channel. Generally known as channel modulation and coding, this field owes its foundations to a 1948 paper of Claude Shannon, which established the limit on the performance of any communication system, referred to as "channel capacity." Much of my work has dealt with signal and code design techniques for approaching this limit. An algorithm I proposed in 1967 is now in common use in a multitude of wireless digital communication applications, ranging from deep space telemetry to satellite digital broadcasting to digital cellular telephones. While my early work concerned point-to-point communication, such as from space to Earth, recently I have been involved mostly in communication networks that provide simultaneous multiple access to a multitude of users. Spectrum sharing is achieved by spread spectrum modulation and powerful digital signal processing and coding techniques. Also known as code-division multiple access, this permits reuse of the spectrum among a large population of users and multiple cells throughout an arbitrarily large region, thus achieving high overall capacity.
