Vodafone, the world’s biggest carrier by revenues this week announced the appointment of Siavash Alamouti as its group research and development director, effective March 1, 2010.

Alamouti joins Vodafone from US chip vendor Intel, where he worked in its mobility group.

A recognised expert in wireless communications, with over 20 patents under his belt, Alamouti is recognised as the inventor of space–time block coding – a technique used to transmit multiple copies of a data stream across a number of antennas, combining all the received copies of the data to improve the reliability of data transfer.

Alamouti will replace Mike Walker, who recently retired as head of R&D after 25 years. Walker currently holds the position of chair of the board of European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI), as well as being a part-time professor.