RAWCON 2004 Sets Attendance, Presentation, Exhibit Records
By Jim Pomager
Senior Editor
By all accounts, the 9th IEEE Radio and Wireless Conference (RAWCON) was the most successful RAWCON to date. Held at the OMNI Hotel at CNN Center in Atlanta last week, the event set records across the board, drawing 344 attendees from around the world, an improvement of 37% over 2003, and garnering 235 paper submissions, up 58% from last year (see table below). General co-chairs J. Stevenson Kenny (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Ke Wu (Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal), along with the RAWCON steering committee and other volunteers, should be commended for putting together a very busy and engaging conference.
Cosponsored by the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) and the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc), RAWCON focuses on the junction of RF component development and wireless system design. To accommodate engineers from both camps, the technical program has a dual-track format -- with concurrent presentations on technology design and system issues -- which encourages attendees to hear lectures outside their technical specialties.
RAWCON 2004 featured 190 presentations on a wide range of topics, including wireless sensors and sensor networks, software defined radio, ultra wideband (UWB) technology, cellular networks, and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Dr. Al Javed, VP of wireless networks technology for Nortel Networks, kicked off the conference Monday afternoon with a keynote address on the future of wireless networks, exploring the design challenges faced by systems beyond 3G, as well as potential technology solutions. David McLaughlin, director of the NSF Center for Collaborative Sensing of the Atmosphere, gave a banquet address Monday night on distributed collaborative adaptive sensing for hazardous weather tracking. On Tuesday night, a panel of software experts engaged in a lively discussion about CAD software for wireless technology. Seventeen technical sessions, held over the course of three days, were very well attended, with audience size sometimes exceeding room capacity.
The RAWCON 2004 vendor exhibit was also the largest in history, with 19 booths attended by 56 exhibitors. An array of technologies from antennas to software to components was on display. For more on the exhibition, see "RAWCON 2004: Notes (And Pictures) From The Vendor Exhibit".
Tuesday's Poster Session at RAWCON 2004
During the conference, MTT-S announced that the biggest RAWCON would also be the last -- or at least the last under the RAWCON name. After a one-year hiatus (the show will not be held in 2005), RAWCON will be renamed the IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium (RWS) and will join the Topical Meeting on Silicon Monolithic Integrated Circuits in RF Systems (SiRF) and the IEEE Topical Workshop on Power Amplifiers for Wireless Communications to form MTT Wireless, a new trade show dedicated to wireless systems and technologies. The inaugural MTT Wireless will be held January 15-20, 2006 in San Diego.