Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The dramatically increased use of wireless sensors, intelligent machines and cloud based applications, have created a paradigm shift from people-centric communications to machine-oriented communications, which is supported by Internet-of-Things (IoT) and envisioned as the fundamental enabling platform for our connected society. The main objective of this NSERC CRD application is to develop critical physical layer techniques for the next generation Wi-Fi network in meeting the key requirements of IoT applications. Specifically, the proposed research focuses on the reduction of power consumption of IoT devices, extension of communications range through adaptive beamformed transmission, and integration with the latest IEEE 802.11ax while maintaining backward compatibility. The proposed highly efficient Wi-Fi (HEW)designs can reduce the power consumption and increase the communication range by deploying multiple antenna Access Point (AP) and exploiting adaptive beamforming technique. Furthermore, to increase the number of devices served by the AP, we propose to develop new scheduling mechanism by exploring the spatial dimension of IoT devices and multiple access strategies. To reduce the cost of AP, we propose to re-design the AP by allowing RF chain sharing by more than one antennas through new antenna selection strategy. Further, we propose novel low complexity cloud based machine learning (ML) based beamforming and scheduling algorithms. Lastly, new frame structures for Wi-Fi will be developed with user-defined preambles and varying payload to support backward compatibility with legacy Wi-Fi devices. The funds from the NSERC CRD program will be mainly used to support the development team involved at Western University, which includes one postdoctoral fellow and two graduate students to carry out the proposed research and development activities, as well as the interaction activities with Huawei Canada. The research will help the Canadian ICT industries develop battery efficient and low cost Wi-Fi based IoT devices, which will directly benefit the Internet and IoT enabled economy.