Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Wireless technologies today are at the heart of major applications and emerging systems essential for human productivity and entertainment. Wireless communication capabilities have become the essential requirement for ubiquitous information access, pervasive computing, and social exchange. The exponential growth of demands continuously put pressure on the wireless communication infrastructure to be operationally efficient in radio spectrum, operating cost, and energy consumption. As spectrum and other network resources are limited, this necessitates a fundamental shift in future wireless designs toward a fully cooperative and cognitive paradigm that enables intelligent communication with optimized resource efficiency. Despite the promises, fully cooperative and cognitive design faces major challenges, such as distributed implementation strategies and effective network resource management cognitive the network dynamics and needs. The proposed research program aims to investigate into distributed cooperative algorithms and cognitive network resource managing strategies for cooperative relaying. With the integrated view of network architecture, protocols, and processing algorithms, we target novel unified designs that synergize techniques and strategies across the physical (PHY), medium access (MAC) and network-layers to maximize cooperation gain in a full-fledged scale. The outcome of this research program is expected to contribute substantially to the state-of-the-art research towards establishing our fundamental understanding and insights of cooperative system design, developing foundational policies and innovative practical technologies for future wireless applications and services. The proposed research is vital to the telecommunications sector of the Canadian economy in developing innovative wireless technologies to strengthen the quality and capacity of Canada?s communications infrastructure.