Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Recently, software-defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization have received tremendous interests from both academia and industry. Compared to traditional paradigms, software-defined and virtualized wireless networks enable direct programmability of wireless network controls and abstraction of the underlying radio spectrum and infrastructure, simplify network management and configuration, improve spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency, reduce the capital expenses (CapEx) and operation expenses (OpEx), and facilitate network evolution. Several standardization organizations, including ETSI and 3GPP, are paving the way for the realization of software-defined and virtualized wireless networks in the 5th generation (5G) and beyond cellular networks. Despite the potential vision of software-defined and virtualized wireless networks, several significant research challenges remain to be addressed before widespread deployment of software-defined and virtualized wireless networks become practical. The overall goal of this project is to contribute to the development of the network architectures and protocols, virtual resources management and orchestration schemes, and cross-layer designs for new services that will make software-defined and virtualized wireless networks more efficient and effective; and thereby make their widespread deployment practical and commercially viable. Developing these techniques will require significant interdisciplinary, collaborative research involving academia, industry, and government research laboratories. Under the proposed project, a synergistic team of researchers from Carleton University, the University of Manitoba, Huawei Technologies Canada, and Remotronic will work with, and transfer promising results to, Canadian industry. The project will prepare a large number of highly qualified personnel at the postgraduate and undergraduate level to serve the needs of the growing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry in Canada.