Peter J. Schreier

Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering
The University of Newcastle, Australia

Externally funded research projects


Most of my research funding comes from the Australian Research Council (ARC) under its National Competitive Grants Program. I am/have been a Chief Investigator on the following Discovery Projects. 

DP0986916: Iterative subspace expansions for space-time adaptive wireless communications, radar and sonar ($270,000 for 2009-11)
Project Leader and Chief Investigator: Peter Schreier
Second Chief Investigator: Steve Weller
Partner Investigator:
Louis Scharf
Summary: This project addresses the fundamental challenge of high computational complexity in receivers for bandwidth-efficient, high data-rate wireless communications, radar and sonar. We study conjugate gradient Wiener filters that enable effective low complexity approximation if the signal correlation matrix has a small number of distinct or clustered eigenvalues. In this case, these filters converge with warp speed. Hence, by properly designing signal transmissions in multi-access communications, we can build receivers that rapidly adapt. A critical question is the sensitivity of repeated/clustered eigenvalues to perturbations, e.g., in time-varying communication channels. We analyse this question from the point of view of feedback control.
DP0986391: Novel time-frequency techniques for analysing and modeling non-stationary physical and engineering data ($260,000 for 2009-11)
Project Leader and Chief Investigator: Peter Schreier
Summary: This project aims at developing tools for analysing and modeling nonstationary time-series in the physical sciences and engineering. Our unconventional point of view that time-frequency distributions are distributions of coherence over time and frequency, as opposed to the common view of "time-varying power distributions", enables us to establish a close connection between time-frequency analysis and rotary-component and polarisation analysis. This will lead to a cross-fertilisation between techniques used in geography, oceanography, meteorology, optics, and signal processing, thus creating new tools to classify and detect features of nonstationary data that were unrecognisable using conventional methods.
DP0664365: Space-time and time-frequency applications of improper complex processes ($250,515 for 2006-08)
Project Leader and Chief Investigator: Peter Schreier
Summary: Complex random signals are widely used in many areas of science and engineering, such as communications, electromagnetics, optics, and acoustics. In this project, we will explore applications of an important special class of complex random signals, called improper, in time-frequency analysis and space-time processing. It is expected that the results in time-frequency analysis will find broad application in the characterisation and classification of nonstationary signals and time-varying systems (such as communication channels). The results in space-time processing will lead to a significantly improved tradeoff between spectral efficiency and power consumption in mobile communications.
DP0665656: The interplay of feedback control and digital communications ($336,000 for 2006-08)
Project Leader and Chief Investigator: Minyue Fu
Second Chief Investigator: Peter Schreier

Summary: This project conducts interdisciplinary research in two important areas of control and digital communications. In the first area, we consider the control of dynamical systems using feedback communication links. Our research is expected to produce reliable and practical design methods for network-based control and automation. In the second area, we apply systems and control theory to stochastic modelling, analysis, and feedback control design of iterative algorithms. Iterative algorithms are a powerful class of decoding and detection systems in digital communications. Our research will produce a new theoretical foundation for these systems and provide faster iterative algorithms for digital communications.