Gerard Joseph Foschini (born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1940), is an American telecommunications engineer who has worked for Bell Laboratories since 1961. His research has covered many kinds of data communications, particularly wireless communications and optical communications. Foschini has also worked on point-to-point systems and networks.
Foschini received the B.S.E.E. degree from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the M.E.E. degree from New York University and a Ph.D. from the Stevens Institute of Technology. He has also taught at Princeton University and Rutgers University.
Within the telecommunications engineering field, he is best known for his invention of Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time (BLAST). This is a scheme for use in wireless communications which recommends the use of multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver. By careful allocation of the data to be transmitted to the transmitting antennas, multiple data streams can be transmitted simultaneously within a single frequency band — the data capacity of the system then grows directly in line with the number of antennas. This represents a significant advance on current, single-antenna systems.
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