Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The proposed research will investigate into resource, mobility and traffic management issues in hybrid wireless/wireline networks (e.g., wireless LANs, cellular and Internet) and interworked wireless mesh networks such as WiFi (IEEE 802.11 series) and WiMAX (IEEE 802.16 series). The long term objective is to develop in-depth knowledge towards the construction of a flexible and robust cross-domain internetworking architecutre, i.e., an information transport platform, for handling multimedia services in fixed and mobile environments. The short term objectives are to (i) investigate cooperative diversity with partial channel state information, to be acquired via channel estimation, (ii) investigate dynamic spectral access in cognitive radio, (iii) investigate cross-layer design and optimization for interworked wireless mesh networks, and (iv) develop modeling and analysis methods for wireless Internet. The results from the short term objectives will form the building blocks toward fulfillment of the long term objective. Communication over wireless interconnected networks has a number of challenging issues, chief among which is the bottleneck created by the wireless propagation channel, the dynamics induced by user mobility. The research program laid out by the above four objectives addresses very challenging issues, each of which embodies a rich paradigm for contributions of new knowledge, novel signaling techniques, enabling networking technology, etc., and a rich environment for the training of highly qualified personnel. Protocol design making efficient use of elements and traffic profiles across adjacent layers can lead to flexibility and robustness. A flexible and robust information transport platform that allows for information transmission from anywhere at anytime with user QoS satisfaction will indeed have a great impact on the social and economic welfare of Canada.