My research has concentrations of effort in the areas of souce coding/data compression, forward error correction coding, digital communications theory and MAC protocol design. The overall theme is the design and performance analysis of wireless systems which will maximize geographical coverage at data reates of T3 and higher. At such high data rates, wide -area coverage becomes very difficult from a mobile unit, because, for a multiplicity of reasons a mobile unit can only transmit at a relatively low power level, and, at a high data rate, the energy-per-bit that can be transmitted is thus necessarily low. For a terrestrial mobile system, the range of transmission is correspondingly limited; for a satellite system, where spot beams become the equivalent of cells, the footprints of each spot beam will have to shrink, due to the need for more directional antennas to compensate for the energy loss.