Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The forthcoming generations of cellular wireless communications networks will be required to support the ever-increasing number of user populations along with significant increases in data rates for various multimedia-rich applications. This will require a revolution in the way such networks are designed and implemented. In particular, two key solutions to cope with the ever-increasing user population and traffic demand are as follows: i) massive deployment of traffic hotspots, for example, through different types of small cells, relays, and radio heads, and (ii) enabling direct connectivity between devices located in the same vicinity, for example, through device-to-device communications. The network elements will use different radio access technologies and operate in licensed and/or unlicensed bands. In this way, the cellular networks will evolve to large-scale and highly complex heterogeneous systems interconnecting a massive number of intelligent radio devices. With a large-scale deployment of new network elements and functionalities, a distributed and self-organizing network operation will be essential to achieve scalability, stability, robustness, and agility. With self-organization, minimum control from an external entity and manual intervention will be required, and hence, the network operators will incur low operation expenditure. With a distributed and self-organizing cellular network architecture incorporating different types of network elements, multiple network tiers and radio access technologies, all the network functionalities and optimization techniques (e.g., for interference management, power control, admission control, channel allocation) used for the legacy/traditional cellular networks need to be revisited and adapted to the new network topology. In particular, scalable and robust distributed algorithms will need to be developed to achieve optimal network operation in terms of the spectral efficiency, power efficiency, and throughput. The short-term objective of this research is to design, evaluate, and optimize advanced techniques for distributed and robust resource allocation, traffic offloading and load balancing, cognitive and cooperative methods for self-organization, energy-efficient techniques, and economic incentive mechanisms that make future generation distributed and self-organizing wireless networks practical and commercially viable. The long-term objective of this research is to contribute to the advancement of distributed and self-organizing wireless networks technologies through the next generation and beyond. In addition to novel theoretical contributions on modeling, analysis and optimization of cellular wireless networks, the technologies resulting from the proposed research have the potential of making significant impact on the evolution of emerging technical standards for fifth generation (5G) cellular networks. The outcome of the proposed research will also provide potential commercial and technology transfer directly to the Canadian industry. The scientific approach will be based on sound research principles involving literature survey and analytical modeling combined with extensive numerical analysis and computer simulations. The research will prepare a number of highly qualified personnel to serve the needs of the growing information and communications technologies industry in Canada. The importance of the proposed research stems from: (i) the growing demand for low-cost ubiquitous wireless broadband services, (ii) the need to produce the expertise and the skilled graduates to transfer the relevant technologies to the Canadian telecom/IT industry for our economic advantage, and (iii) the goal to enhance Canada's position as a world leader in wireless/mobile networking research.