The Ph.D. Research Program

This page attempts to give some general guidance for a new graduate student on how to get started on a research program leading to a Ph.D. dissertation. This can also be used by an interested doctoral candidate to get an idea of what is involved in the Ph.D. program.

Suggested courses

The following are some of the key courses which provide the necessary background for the research topics conducted in my program

• Statistical Signal Processing - Detection and Estimation
• Principles of Digital Communications
• Wireless Mobile Communications
• Digital Signal Processing

Background material

The following are some books and tutorial papers which provide background material for the research. There are many other books/papers covering these topics, which can used instead.

Array Processing

Array signal processing : concepts and techniques , Don H. Johnson, Dan E. Dudgeon. Englewood Cliffs, NJ : P T R Prentice Hall, 1993.

Krim, H.; Viberg, M. Two decades of array signal processing research: the parametric approach. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol.13, (no.4), IEEE, July 1996. p.67-94.

Digital communications

Proakis, John G.. Digital communications, McGraw-Hill, 2001

Wireless communications

Paulraj, A.J.; Papadias, C.B. Space-time processing for wireless communications. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol.14, (no.6), IEEE, Nov. 1997. p.49-83.

Wireless Communications: Principles & Practice (10th printing) T. S. Rappaport, Prentice Hall, 1996

Other

Introduction to adaptive filters , Simon Haykin. New York : Macmillan ; 1984

How do I get started?

Getting started on Ph.D. program is often a difficult process, which varies a lot from student to student. Here are a few suggestions which you may find helpful.

• Make a reading program and stick to it! You need to do a lot of reading initially to get up-to-speed. It is a good idea to keep notes as you read.
• Get hold of one or more Ph.D. theses in your research area. Such theses often have useful background material and they give you a better idea of what may be involved in your own thesis.
• Define a few simple projects and carry them out. A good project is to replicate some key simulation results you read about. For example: Simulate the array response and the beam patterns of various arrays; Simulate a QPSK communication system, generate BER plots, and compare them to analytical results; Repeat for a Rayleigh fading channel.
• Select a few key papers and read/understand them in complete detail. Prepare a seminar style presentation of the paper and present it to other graduate students. You do not really understand a paper until you know it well enough so that you can explain it to someone else!
• Meet with your advisor frequently and prepare questions to ask him or material you want to discuss with him.

To do your research you will need to be able to use various software tools such as

• MATLAB - to do the simulations
• TeX or LaTeX - to write the papers and thesis
• PowerPoint - to prepare presentations

If you do not already know how to use these tools spend time to learn them as soon as possible.

What is expected of me in order to finish my Ph.D. program?

The scope of a Ph.D. dissertation depends on the specific research topic and is not easy to define in advance. However, a simple guideline which has worked well in the past is the following. I expect my Ph.D. students to prepare two or three research papers of a scope and quality suitable for publication in scientific journals such as the various IEEE Transactions. Once the agreed upon papers are finished (i.e. submitted or ready for submission), you are done with your research. You still need to prepare and submit the thesis, but that will generally involve compiling and editing the material you have already generated in the process of preparing the papers, and not any new research.