Guest editorial) Special issue on wireless information technology and networks

E ARE delighted to share with you the progress made and some of the results from the Wireless Information Technology and Networks initiative announced by the National Science Foundation (NFS) in 1999. Program Directors from the Electrical and Communications Systems (ECS) Division in the Engineering Directorate joined colleagues from the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate in lauching this multidisciplinary initiative that promoted team efforts and collaborative research in addressing the technology challenges for enabling the next-generation wireless communications systems. With envisioned data rates in the hundreds of megabits per second, it is essential that concurrent research and joint development be implemented that includes the physical and algorithmic layers of wireless systems and it is anticipated that a multidisciplinary look may result in simpler, cheaper, and optimized designs. To this end, it is not only justifiable but also commendable that a strong engineering component be included in this initiative with focus on device technologies, antennas, propagation, and development of CAD tools that would facilitate the integrative design of wireless systems. As a result of this initiative, NSF received over 160 proposals and half of them were related to engineering issues and hardware/device technologies. Since the start of this program in 1998 and through the initiative announcement in 1999, as well as the continued support of these activities in the Electronics, Photonics, and Device Technologies (EPDT) Program in ECS, more than 70 projects in the wireless communications area have been funded by NSF. With the high-quality research and innovative advances displayed by the elctromagnetics community at NSF, it is anticipated that the support for this program will continue for the foreseeable future. In March 2001, the wireless program in the ECS Division held its first “Wireless Grantees Workshop” at the National Academy of Science, in Washington D.C. All Principal Investigators (PIs) of wireless-related projects were invited and over 40 presentations were scheduled during the two-day workshop held at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. In addition, a Conference Proceedings CD-ROM was also published and PIs of presented papers were invited to submit papers for a special issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ONANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION. We would like to thank the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Ad Com for approving our request to publish this special issue. We are also most grateful to Dr. Allen Glisson, Editor-inChief, and Ms. Sharon Martinez for an outstanding job in helping us prepare this special issue and in expediting the review process of the 33 papers originally submitted for possible publication. For all of you who helped in the review process, we wholeheartedly thank you for your effort. As for the organization of the papers in this issue, we decided to start by a group of six papers that deals with multidisciplinary research activities in wireless communications. The first paper on ultra-wide-band communications discusses a new and evolving technology that requires participation by a large research team to help address the challenging ultra-wide-band needs of this novel communication system. The other five papers in this group describe work that is certainly taking the right steps toward the development of a multidisciplinary and team