Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Next generation broadband wireless access (BWA) systems are evolving towards distributed architectures as a promising solution to meet the ever increasing demand for wireless connectivity. Distribution architectures, exemplified by femto- and pico-cell base-stations/access points deployments and mesh networking solutions, can reduce power consumption and enhancing spectrum utilization by shortening the links, exploiting cooperative schemes and utilizing cognitive mechanisms but may incur large overhead for co-ordinations. We propose a novel distributed wireless architecture for next generation broadband wireless access with fibre-connected massively distributed antennas (BWA-FMDA), which employs a large number of distributed antennas connected via optical fibres to a centralized processing entity to minimize the communication overheads of system co-ordination. The coverage area of the proposed BWA-FMDA system can range from a few tens of meters in homes and office environments, delivered via IEEE 802.11a/g/n and femto-cell hotspot solutions, to several kilometers supporting last-mile technologies such as WiMAX, LTE, LTE-A. Our goal is to understand and characterize the fundamental performance limits of such a centrally-controlled distributed antenna system, develop practical resource allocation techniques that approach the performance limits, and deliver low-cost practical implementation solutions to facilitate timely market adaptation of BWA-FMDA. To achieve this goal, we propose to investigate the fundamental performance limits of massively distributed antenna systems, and develop (a) improved measurement-based channel models involving massively distributed antennas, (b) advanced radio resource management and access control schemes that approach the performance limits in realistic propagation environments, and (c) improved opto-electronic transceivers designs for low cost active optical cables suitable for RFoF applications. We shall develop a testbed and implement the above results over the testbed for experimental evaluations and proof-of-concept demonstrations to our industry partners to facilitate commercialization of the research results.