Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets) have become a commodity in our daily lives. While these devices already support many different types of applications, it is expected that there will be a continual increase in mobile data traffic demand due to real-time and streaming video traffic, as well as machine-to-machine applications. Meeting these demands with future wireless systems, in particular the fifth generation (5G) wireless cellular systems, requires fundamental improvements to how these systems communicate and network data for cost-efficient network operation. In the network infrastructure side, software-defined networks (SDNs) will play an important role. SDN can efficiently support virtualization, modular design, and network sharing in heterogeneous networks. In the network elements side, new enabling techniques such as full duplexing and massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) are expected to significantly improve spectral efficiency in the future 5G wireless systems. The throughput gain in full duplexing is achieved via novel self-interference cancellation techniques, while massive MIMO builds on large-scale antenna arrays deployed at base stations. The overall goal of this project is to advance SDN, massive MIMO and full duplex technologies and to contribute to the development of adaptive scalable, and robust 5G wireless mobile communication networks. To achieve this goal, we have assembled a team of outstanding researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) and several Canadian companies with a keen interest in the results of this project. We will: (a) develop novel network sharing, interference management, and dynamic resource allocation schemes across heterogeneous network setting in an SDN-based 5G wireless system; (b) design novel joint mobility management and load balancing algorithms to better utilize the network resources and improve system performance; (c) develop full duplex radio algorithms for efficient spectrum sharing in 5G systems; (d) design practical massive MIMO algorithms to increase network capacity in a scalable manner. The outcomes of the proposed project will be novel algorithms and circuit implementations for 5G wireless communication systems.