This course addresses radio propagation challenges in moderm wireless communications systems. Inverse problems in electromagnetics and acoustics may be broadly described as problems of determining the internal structure of a system from indirect electromagnetic and acoustic measurements. Because EM and acoustic waves interact with or scatter from the inhomogeneous structure, the measurements are encoded with the information of the medium. The challenge is to extract information about system features from the measurements of scattered waves. Applications arise in nondestructive evaluation, medical imaging, remote and subsurface sensing, radar, civil and environmental engineering, ocean acoustics, and other areas.
Inverse problems are in general difficult to solve.
Two major issues complicating inverse problems are their ill-posedness and nonlinearity. The first arises because the measurements are usually sparse, rendering the solution wildly sensitive to noise in the data. The issue of nonlinearity appears because of multiple scattering within the inhomogeneous medium. This course provides a systematic discussion on various practical inverse problems in electromagnetics and acoustics from an engineering prospective. The assignments will be project oriented.