Latest News & Recent Events
- 24 Jan 2012: Professor Scanlon will participate in the 2012 NATO Lecture Series on Next Generation Communications (IST-105). The Lecture Series will take in Finland, Norway and Canada.
12 Dec 2011: Our body to body networking work is featured on the cover of the December 2012 issue of the Microwave Journal. The linked article is 'Using Smart People to Form Future Mobile Wireless Networks' by Simon Cotton and William Scanlon.
- 8 Dec 2011: Congratulations to Dr Nick Timmons who sucessfully defended his PhD on MAC protocols for body area networks. Well done Nick!
- 5 Dec 2011: Sean Heaney has won a prestigious student travel gant from Globecom 2012 to allow him to present his work at the IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing and Emerging Communication Networks. Sean was one of only 20 students awarded a travel grant (acceptance rate was 14%) and his paper is entitled 'Characterization of Inter-Body Interference in Context Aware Body Area Networking (CABAN).' Well done Sean!
- 17 Nov 2011: Congratulations again go to Dr. Simon Cotton who has been awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for wireless communications. The Leverhulme Trust awards these prizes annually to 'outstanding scholars' who are recognised at an 'international level'. Well done again Simon!
- 1 Nov 2011: We are pleased to welcome back Dr Gareth Conway to the group. Gareth will be working with Toumaz on a knowledge transfer secondment in the area of wearable antennas.
- 14 Oct 2011: We are pleased to host an invited seminar on short range radio at 2.00 pm in the ECIT Seminar Room. The speakers are Dr. Mark Bentum and Dr. Arjan Meijerink from the Telecommunication Engineering group at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. More details including abstract and bios here.
14 July 2011: Congratulations again go to Dr. Simon Cotton who has been awarded the prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering's Sir George Macfarlane Award for outstanding technical and scientific attainment in his work. Simon was presented the award from outgoing Academy President, Lord Browne of Madingley at a ceremony at the Academy's Carlton House Terrace, London headquarters.
- 1 July 2011: Congratulations to Dr Philip Catherwood who sucessfully defended his PhD on UWB channel characterisation in body centric applications. Well done Philip!
- 30 June 2011: Our Annual Wireless Communications Research Seminar was a resounding success and featured a range of topics from ad-hoc localisation to wideband characterisation of pedestrian related channel effects to HD video transmission in PANs.
- 12 Apr 2011: The group is honoured to be delivering three invited papers at EUCAP 2011 this week with Dr. Simon Cotton chairing one of the special sessions.
- 7 Apr 2011: Professor Scanlon gave an invited plenary talk on Short Range Radio at the at the 20th Workshop on Advances in Analog Circuit Design (AACD 2011).
- 1 Feb 2011: New PhD scholarship announced in the area of intelligent transport systems. See the opportunities page for more details. Deadline: 28 February 2011.
- 25 Nov 2010: Professor Scanlon gave an invited plenary talk on Body Area Networks at the 17th Symposium on Communications and Vehicular Technology in the Benelux (SCVT 2010).
- 9 Nov 2010: Professor Scanlon gave an invited plenary talk at LAPC 2010 entitled 'Pedestrian effects in indoor UWB off-body communication channels'.
- 28 Oct 2010: Congratulations go to Dr. Simon Cotton who has been awarded a prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering / EPSRC Research Fellowship worth more than £0.55M over 5 years. Simon will work in the broad area of next generation body centric communications and specifically on body to body networks (BBN).
- 28 Sept 2010: Professor Scanlon
gave a keynote talk at the NATO RTO IST Panel Symposium on Military Communications and Networks as part of the Military Communications and Information Systems Technology Week (MCISWeek).
The talk was entitled 'Future opportunities for dependable and secure inter-personal wireless communications'.
- 11 Sept 2010: Congratulations go to Sean Heaney who was awarded the Best Student Paper Prize at Bodynets 2010 for his paper entitled 'Context-aware body area networks (CABAN) for interactive smart environments: interference characterization'.
- 10 Sept 2010: Professor Scanlon
gave a keynote talk entitled 'Understanding and Exploiting Physical Layer Characteristics to Create New Opportunities for Bodynets' at
Bodynets 2010 in Corfu, Greece.
- 17 Aug 2010: Professor Scanlon
gave an invited talk on analytical models for on-body links at
URSI EMTS 2010 in Berlin, Germany.
- 14 July 2010: Dr Simon Cotton and
Professor William Scanlon
received the 2010 H. A. Wheeler Prize Paper Award from the IEEE Antennas & Propagation Society.
The prize was was awarded for the best applications paper in
IEEE Transactions in Antennas & Propagation during 2009.
The paper was entitled 'Measurements, modeling and simulation of the off-body radio channel for the implementation of bodyworn antenna diversity at 868 MHz'.
- 9 June 2010: Our Annual Wireless Communications Research Seminar featured a range of topics from Context Aware Body Area Networks to new flexible antennas to sports localisation.
- 3 June 2010: Professor Scanlon
delivered his Inaugural Professorial Lecture at Queen's University, Belfast entitled 'True freedom is provided by interconnectivity -
a vision for the next revolution in personal communications'.

- 14 Apr 2010: Professor Scanlon
gave an invited talk on simulation of mm-wave body-body communication channels at
EuCAP 2010
(European Conference on Antennas and Propagation) in Barcelona, Spain.
- 28 Mar 2010: Michael Smith of the Sunday Times has written an article on our mm-wave body-to-body communication networks research in today's edition.
Click here for the online version.
- 2 Mar 2010: Simulation Project Demonstrates Covert Applications - An article in the SIGNAL magazine
highlights our work on soldier-to-soldier communications at mm-wave.
See the online version here.
- 1 Mar 2010: Professor Scanlon
gave an invited talk on dual-band wearable antennas at
iWAT 2010
(Intl. Workshop on Antenna Technology) in Lisbon, Portugal.
- 1 Feb 2010: WirelessLAB,
the first all-island innovation network for Ireland's wireless technology community,
was formally launched at an event held at NovaUCD, Dublin.
ECIT is a member of WirelessLAB and
Professor Scanlon
is pleased to be one of its founding Directors.
More info on the launch here.
- 16 Nov 2009: Along with Dr. Ivor Morrow (Cranfield),
Professor Scanlon
co-chaired the popular Loughborough Antennas and Propagation Conference (LAPC 2009).
- 6 Nov 2009:
Futuristic communication for troops
(article on Dr Simon Cotton's work on mm-wave body-body networks, also picked up
here and here and extensively covered elsewhere).
- 27 Oct 2009: Professor Scanlon
gave an IET technical talk entitled 'You are at the centre of your wireless future!'.
- 6 Oct 2009: Our mm-wave body to body communications work has been highlighted in the IEEE Communications Magazine
annual feature on Military Communications.
Notably our paper is the only one from outside of the US.
- 28 Sep 2009: This year looks set to be our best yet for high quality research output!
Since the start of 2009, we have already published seven highly-ranked IEEE journal papers, one IEEE Communications Magazine
article (one of five articles in the Military Communications section) and an IET journal paper.
In particular, most of those publications are on body-centric communications and involve a small number of key authors from the group,
so thanks to all involved for a truly 'world-class' achievement.
- 20 May 2009: Professor Scanlon
chaired a special session on 'Wireless Control and Sensor Newtorks for Emerging Applications' at
Wireless VITAE 2009
(Wireless Communications, Vehicular Technology, Information Theory and Aerospace & Electronic Systems Technology)
held in Aalborg, Denmark.
- 11 May 2009: are pleased to welcome Dr Arjan Meijerink to the group and to Belfast. Arjan is from the
University of Twente in the Netherlands
and he joins us as a visiting academic until the end of August 2009. Arjan will be working on short range radio research.
- 3 Mar 2009: Professor Scanlon
gave an invited talk on mode-switched wearable antennas at
iWAT 2009
(Intl. Workshop on Antenna Technology) in Santa Monica, CA, USA.
- 8 Jan 2009: We are extremely happy to report that some of our recent work has been selected to appear in the
Jan. 2009 issue of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.
This issue is dedicated to
Body Area Networking: Technology and Applications and more details on
our paper (authored by Conway, Cotton and Scanlon)
can be found on the IEEE ComSoc website or on our publications page.
- 20 Nov 2008: The Radio Communications Research Group is pleased to announce that we will participate
in the new
Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT) to be established at Queen's. This will feature our most recent work on secure RFID, real time location systems
and secure medical device communications.
- 27 Oct 2008: Professor Scanlon
gave an invited talk on body-to-body networks at
ISABEL 2008 held in Aalborg, Denmark.
- 24 Oct 2008: Congratulations to Gareth Conway who successfully defended his PhD thesis
"Wearable antennas for on-body wireless communications" at a viva held earlier this week.
Well done Gareth!
- 13 July 2008:
Queen’s develops remote healthcare monitoring - Sunday Times article.
- 12 June 2008: Our Annual Radio Communications Seminar
featured 9 technical presentations covering a wide range of topics from a wearable UWB MIMO test system to mm-wave ad-hoc networking to cross-layer protocols for wireless network control.
- 6 June 2008:
'Skin-tenna' wireless signals creep over human skin - New Scientist article on our wearable integrated antennas.
- 3 June 2008: Queen's Radio Comms PhD student
Gareth Conway scoops top prize in the
SEMCAD Student Research Award 2007. Prize details are here.
Picked up by BBC here.
- 29 May 2008:
New approach helps monitor patients remotely
(Irish Times report on our wearable antennas work).
- 14 May 2008:
Innovative Antennas may Signal a ‘New Wave’ in Healthcare Provision
(EPSRC press release - also picked up
here and here. For a slightly different
perspective listen to this radio interview on Sheffield Live! - 11 min 10 secs in)
Upcoming Events
- April and May 2012: Professor Scanlon will participate in a NATO Lecture Series on Next Generation Communications in Finland, Sweden and Canada.
For more information about these news items or events, please contact us.