Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The wireless telecommunications sector is critical to the Canadian economy, accounting for 25,000 jobs, over $9.5B in revenue, and a $4.1B investment in infrastructure. This sector also has a key role in slowing climate change, as it can reduce travel and enable remote environmental monitoring. In recent years, wireless subscribers have increased at a compound annual growth rate exceeding 17% to reach 14.9M while revenue has grown at a rate of 14%. Worldwide, the subscriber base has been exploding. This demand is accelerating research and development into new generations of high-rate wireless telecommunication systems that can support both fixed and mobile users, achieve high spectral efficiency, enable new multimedia services, as well as lower infrastructure cost, particularly in areas of low population density. The proposed research will seek novel solutions to increase both coverage and rate while constraining infrastructure cost, bandwidth and mobile terminal power. This includes investigating multiple antenna systems that are either co-located or distributed for cooperative relaying and hopping. In most existing cooperative system studies, the arrangement of nodes in a network is assumed known and fixed, which may not be practical. Important studies are needed, including capacity, performance, and implementation issues. In the shorter term, we investigate (i) the utilization of imprecise/imperfect transmitter knowledge in communication, and (ii) cross-layer wireless network optimization. In the longer-term, we address performance optimization of cooperative networks with multiple source-destination pairs, as well as relay topology selection. These themes will be pursued, where feasible, within the context of specific applications, e.g., multicasting, military decision support, and wireless e-health. Six doctoral students will be trained over the grant period.