Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

This research project in Advanced Communications for Broadband Channels targets fundamental questions of information transport and system organization to enable high-capacity broadband services in future 4th generation cell-based communications networks. Basic challenges regarding the efficient transport of data at the physical layer within cellular networks with multiple users are addresses to streamline broadband access as envisioned in the industry's long-term evolution (LTE) paradigm. Resource efficient information and signal processing approaches will be studied with the target to identify promising receiver structures, access control protocols, and signaling methods. The impact of new methodologies with be quantified with state-of-the art system models and their potential incorporation into the emerging LTE standards will be studied. This research work is composed of three focus areas: (i) Efficient downlink high-speed access, (ii) efficient uplink access (iii) adaptive signal processing to provide methodologies to operate systems in time-varying transmission environments and link configurations. Under (i) various forms of beam-steering are investigated as a key technology to enhance capacity. Comparison with information theoretic benchmarks are drawn to quantify the potential of these methods. This work also requires results from activity (iii) which will determine the feasibility of effective beam-forming given terminal mobility and system latency, and quantifies the complexity requirements for given performance targets. In (ii), effective uplink strategies are considered. Apart from beam-steering, joint detection is a promising methodology which is rapidly becoming feasible technologically. Joint detection in the form of various cancellation methods will be studied for best complexity/performance results. Both uplink and downlink results are carefully tested in accepted 4th generation channel and network models, in particular using the 3GPP spatial channel model for MIMO simulation universally accepted by industry.