Hi Amodh,

I hope you're having a fantastic start with the new semester.

In physical layer wireless communications, there are many good names in north american universities. Wireless groups at Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, UT Austin, EPFL, etc. are doing great work. There are also quite a few individual researchers at somewhat less well-known universities doing ground-breaking research. I would suggest you to look at research profiles of the professors whose work align with your interests. Sample a few recent papers from their groups to see what kinds of problems they are working on. To give you specific names off top of my head, Prof. Goldsmith, Prof. Caire, Prof. Shamai, Prof. Verdu, Prof. Tse, Prof. Jafar, Prof. Health, Prof. Andrews, etc. are quite well-known in the wireless community. It's hard to list all the names as the kind of problems wireless community is currently dealing with has grown considerably diverse. There are experts in different areas in communications. Broadly speaking, there are core information and coding theorists, pure wireless/signal processing researchers (who don't focus much on information theoretic considerations), and those who do a mix of both. Correspondingly, these researchers are more active in IT society, Com./SP societies, or somewhat in both. My advice to you is to consider your interests and liking, the career directions you would want to pursue after your graduation, kind of places you'd like to spend as a grad student, etc. to arrive at a list of universities to apply to.

At University of Toronto, Prof. Kschischang, Prof. Yu, Prof. Adve, Prof. Khisti, Prof. Draper work in wireless. Prof. Kschischang's research is in coding theoretic problems (he has recently been looking into fiber-optic communications). Prof. Khisti focuses more on information theoretic problems for streaming and physical layer security. Prof. Draper does a mix of coding theory, information theory. Prof. Yu's research is in information theory applied to practical wireless problems, and optimization techniques therein. Prof. Adve deals with wireless problem from more practical point of view. As you've already spent some time in Toronto, you are familiar with the life-style here.

The whole application process takes a lot of time and can be very tiring sometimes. But in the end, the efforts pays of very well. So try not to get demotivated in the process. Generally nothing good in life comes easily!

Let me know if you have any other questions. I will try to give you my opinions.