Abstract: Today, it is difficult not to have come across the term nanotechnology because the term has spread into popular culture. In reality, what is entailed is the utilisation of very small devices (at the nanometre scale) to perform socially useful tasks such as targeted medical treatments and gathering data for climate change monitoring. To date, the design and manipulation of entities at the nanoscale has captured the headlines. However, the full impact of this technology will not be realised unless such devices are able to communicate with each other. Thus a new field is emerging that entails nanocommunications and nanonetworking – the interconnection of nanoscale devices to perform useful functions. As would be expected for such a novel and recent topic, there is a only a small quantity of published results on communications between very small devices. The time is thus opportune for this issue to be addressed to enable progress to be made on applications such as those mentioned above. This talk will begin with a brief review of the methods currently under consideration for nanocommunications, such as molecular diffusion and nanotube radio. The technologies will be illustrated by means of predictions of their likely performance. Following this, recent work in the area of optimised transmission, network coding and cooperation will be presented. The final section will consider the future prospects for and challenges of nanoscale communications. In particular, there will be consideration of the areas of channel characterisation, system modelling, the encoding of information and the types of communication protocols needed.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Mark S. Leeson received the degrees of B.Sc. and B.Eng. with First Class Honors in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Nottingham, UK, in 1986. He then obtained a PhD in Engineering from the University of Cambridge, UK, in 1990. From 1990 to 1992 he worked as a Network Analyst for National Westminster Bank in London. After holding academic posts in London and Manchester, in 2000 he joined the School of Engineering at Warwick, where he is now an Associate Professor and also holds the post of Director of Graduate Studies. His major research interests are coding, modulation, ad hoc networking, nanoscale communications, optical communication systems, network security and evolutionary optimization. To date Dr Leeson has over 180 publications and has supervised nine successful research students. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Chartered Member of the UK Institute of Physics and a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. During the academic year 2010-11 he has been a Royal Academy of Engineering Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow studying Information Theory at the Nanoscale.