Welcome
On behalf of the ICC 2004 Organizing Committee, it is my pleasure to welcome you to Paris, France for the next IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2004) on 20-24 June 2004.
The technical program will feature a unique set of technical symposia disseminating the latest research and development results in communications and networking, and Executive and Expert Panels, where industry leaders will address the hottest topics in telecommunications and the future evolutions of this field. In addition, the program will include tutorials by internationally recognized experts, where engineers can learn about new technologies of their choice.
After Amsterdam in 1984, Geneva in 1993 and Helsinki in 2001, this is the fourth time that ICC is coming to Europe. Paris is the world's premier tourist destination city, which has everything to satisfy everyone's taste, be it for fashion, arts, shopping, city walks, gourmet dining, or entertainment.
Paris has also a privileged situation in the heart of Europe and is at the crossroads of a hi-tech region, which has its fair share of the world's most significant innovations and developments. Its engineering schools, universities, research centers, and industries have played a pioneering role in many recent technologies ranging from the Minitel (the ancestor of the Internet), to the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), and Digital Audio and Video Broadcasting (DAB, DVB) standards, just to mention a few. It is in this dynamic environment that ICC 2004 will bring together researchers, developers, and practitioners from all over the world, and disseminate the latest results in communications.
We urge you to take advantage of your travel to Paris and hope you will be able to stay long enough to see some of its wonders. The conference is at the beginning of the tourist season, when all facilities are available, and still not crowded. Come and enjoy this fabulous city, which enchants tens of millions of visitors every year.
I look forward to welcoming you to Paris!
Pascal Viginier
ICC 2004 General Chair
On behalf on the Technical Program Committee, it is my great pleasure to invite you to join us in Paris for the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2004). I am certain that you will enjoy the excellent quality of the technical program and that you will be thrilled to visit or revisit Paris, one of the world’s finest cities.
Paper submission to ICC 2004 has gone much beyond our expectations. We received 2946 papers from 63 countries, which is an absolute record in the conference’s history. The Technical Program Committee carefully reviewed all submissions and selected 864 high-quality papers for presentation in one of the 9 symposia organized in 18 parallel sessions. The paper acceptance ratio is thus less than 30%, which ensures a high-quality technical program. The ICC 2004 technical symposia are:
• Access and Home Networks Symposium
• Communication Theory Symposium
• High-Speed Networks Symposium
• Multimedia Technologies and Services Symposium
• Optical Networking Symposium
• QoS and Performance Modeling Symposium
• Signal Processing in Communications Symposium
• Wireless Communications Symposium
• Wireless Networking Symposium
In addition to the technical symposia, in which attendees can hear about the latest research results, the ICC 2004 Technical Program also features a track of Executive and Expert Panels, where top experts and executives, mostly from industry and network operators, will discuss the current trends in communications and networking and give their vision on the evolution of this field in the coming years. We have organized 12 Executive and Expert Panels devoted to very hot topics, which should be of strong interest to a broad audience from both industry and academia.
Finally, the Technical Program features 27 Tutorials by internationally recognized experts on very timely topics. These tutorials on Sunday, 20 June, and Thursday, 24 June are an excellent opportunity for engineers and researchers to learn about new topics and keep technically up-to-date in a fast changing world.
Obviously, setting up such an ambitious technical program could not have been possible without the hard work of many volunteers. Unfortunately, the space limitations do not allow us to list all of them in the Program. The ICC 2004 Technical Program Committee alone has more than 350 members, and thousands of Reviewers were needed to review the papers. I would like to thank all of these volunteers for the time that they generously spent on the ICC 2004 Technical Program.
I look forward to welcoming you to Paris!
Hikmet Sari
Technical Program Chair