A new center in the College of Engineering will tackle challenges in the transmission, storage, transformation, switching, and networking of digital information.

The Center for Information and Communications Technology Research (CICTR) is headed by Mohsen Kavehrad, W.L. Weiss Professor of Electrical Engineering.

"The focus of the ongoing work at CICTR is the design of broadband communications networks with fiber, wireless, twisted-pair copper, and/or coaxial cable access ports enabling telecommunications companies to offer many new broadband services, such as multimedia, to business and residential users," Kavehrad said.

The CICTR, with industrial partners such as Lockheed Martin, Ameritech, TeleBeam, and TRDC, is researching a number of issues facing the communications field:

• broadband access network systems incorporating technologies such as local multipoint distribution system (LMDS) and code-division multiple access (CDMA), which will be used in digital phones and home services;

• the future of both wireless multimedia systems and multidata-base designs, as well as improving the quality of service in mobile computing;

• optical high-speed networking and personal communications systems (PCS); and

• wireless local area networks (LANs) which have a wide range of applications--from ships and airplanes to office environments.

"The explosive growth in Internet applications such as the World Wide Web demonstrates the tremendous increase in bandwidth that the coming world of multimedia interactive applications will require from future networks," Kavehrad said. "This requires new manageable network architectures that are designed to evolve smoothly from today's networks."

The CICTR is supported through memberships of industry and government partners and can be found on the Web at http://cictr.ee.psu.edu/.

"The next several years will prove interesting as we wrap up the industrial revolution and the information age rapidly begins. No longer will it be necessary to travel around the world for business meetings or to wait for stock prices that may be hours old. The CICTR is working on the future technologies now," Kavehrad said.

Dr. Kavehrad can be reached at 814-865-7179 or by e-mail at mxk40@psu.edu.