Prof. Michael Rice, and his co-author Erik Perrins (PhD '05) won the best paper award at the 2015 International Telemetering Conference for the paper entitled ""Maximum Likelihood Detection from Multiple Bit Sources"". The paper was presented at the 2015 International Telemetering Conference on Thursday 29 October 2015 in Las Vegas, NV.
The paper describes a generalization of what the industry calls ""best source selection"". Many test ranges emply a number of widely spaced receive antennas to ""cover"" the range. Because the receive anteannas are too far apart to perform traditional waveform combining, a receiver/demodulator is located with each receive antenna and the demdoulated bits are transported via fiber to a central location. The paper describes the optimum (in the maximum likelihood sense) bit detection algorithm.