David G Messerschmitt

 

Roger A. Strauch Professor Emeritus

Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

University of California at Berkeley

 


Visiting Researcher

SETI Institute

Contact information and supporting staff


Research statement: interstellar communication

Drawing upon my background in earthbound digital communications, I am studying the design of end-to-end communications between stellar systems separated by hundreds or thousands of light years. The outcome of my last few years of research is the report "End-to-end interstellar communication system design for power efficiency" which has been posted on arXiv.org. I am working on turning this report into a book. The abstract of this report summarizes the results:
"Interstellar radio communication accounting for known impairments due to radio propagation in the interstellar medium (attenuation, noise, dispersion, and scattering) and motion is studied. Large propagation losses and large transmitted powers motivate us to maximize the power efficiency, defined as the ratio of information rate to average signal power. The fundamental limit on power efficiency is determined. The power efficiency for narrow-bandwidth signals assumed in many current SETI searches has a penalty in power efficiency of four to five orders of magnitude. A set of five power-efficient design principles can asymptotically approach the fundamental limit, and in practice increase the power efficiency by three to four orders of magnitude. The most fundamental is to trade higher bandwidth for lower average power. In addition to improving the power efficiency, average power can be reduced by lowering the information rate. The resulting low-power signals have characteristics diametrically opposite to those currently sought, with wide bandwidth relative to the information rate and sparse distribution of energy in both time and frequency. The design of information-free beacons power-optimized for a given observation time is also undertaken. Such beacons need not have wide bandwidth, but at low powers their energy is sparsely distributed in time. The discovery of both beacons and information-bearing signals is analyzed, and shown to require a substantial number of observations (growing as power is reduced) to achieve a high probability of success. The ''false alarms'' in current searches are characteristic signatures of possible power-efficient and power-optimized signals. Although existing SETI searches will fail to discover these signals, they can be discovered using common algorithms with straightforward modification to current search methodologies."
I have several collaborators on this research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, the Hat Creek Radio Observatory of the University of California, and the Australian Center for Astrobiology in Sydney. I am hoping to influence the types of signals that are included in the SETI searches by Observatory's Allen Telescope Array (ATA) and Berkeley's SETI@home project.

Other current activities

I have been active in the teaching of our new Master of Engineering program at Berkeley, in particular working on the capstone project.

I am the Chair of the IEEE James Clerk Maxwell Award committee, and also the incoming Chair of the IEEE Medals Council for 2014.


Books

 

Software Ecosystem: Understanding an Indispensable Technology and Industry

(with Clemens Szyperski)

 

MIT Press, 2003

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Understanding Networked Applications: A First Course

 

 

Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999

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[publisher homepage]

[author homepage]

 

 

Networked Applications: A Guide to the New Computing Infrastructure

 

Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999

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[publisher homepage]

 

 

 

Third edition!

Digital Communication

(with John Barry and Edward Lee)

 

 

Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003

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[publisher homepage]

 

 

 

Adaptive Filters: Structures, Algorithms, and Applications

(with Michael Honig)

 

 

Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1984

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[publisher homepage]

 

Full publication list

Recent publications

David G. Messerschmitt, "Interstellar communication: The case for spread spectrum", Acta Astronautica, Dec. 2012. [HTML]

David G. Messerschmitt, Ian S. Morrison, Design of interstellar digital communication links: Some insights from communication engineering, Acta Astronautica, Sept-Oct 2012. [HTML]

S. K. Blair, D. G. Messerschmitt, J. Tarter, and G. R. Harp, "The Effects of the Ionized Interstellar Medium on Broadband Signals of Extraterrestrial Origin". D. Vakoch, editor, Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, State University of New York Press, 2011.

Recent talks

D.G. Messerschmitt, ''Exchanging Information with the Stars'', invited lecture at the SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA, March 11, 2011. [PDF]

D.G. Messerschmitt, ''Exchanging Information with the Stars'', invited lecture at the University of Minnesota, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Minneapolis, MN, April 14, 2011. [PDF]

D.G. Messerschmitt, "Search for intelligent life in the Milky Way: A challenge for science and engineering", Cal Day program, University of California, Berkeley, CA, April 7, 2010 [PDF]

D.G. Messerschmitt, "Communications Enginering and SETI", International Society of Astronautics Messaging Workshop, Houson, TX, April 30, 2010 [PDF]

I.S. Morrison and D.G. Messerschmitt, "Interstellar communication objectives and limitations: A roadmap to signal and receiver design", Symposium on Searching for Life Signatures, International Society of Astronautics, London, UK, Oct 6-8 2010.


Brief résumé

Brief biography from Wikipedia