Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The explosive growths of wireless devices (smart-phones, tablets, machines, sensors, etc.) and mobile data traffic are driving demand for wireless access far beyond the capabilities of the current generation of wireless networks. Future wireless networks (5G and beyond) are expected to dramatically increase data rate, network capacity and energy efficiency and lower the latency. To meet these expectations, significant technological innovations will be required. Today, there is no single technology representing 5G networks and beyond. Instead, there are several promising candidate technologies, including in-band full-duplex (FD) radio, massive MIMO, millimeter-wave communications (mmWave), new multicarrier modulation, and relaying. The general consensus is that the integration of these candidate technologies will be required in future wireless networks. Among these emerging technologies, FD communication is very promising since it offers the potential to double the spectral efficiency relative to the conventional half-duplex systems by allowing a node to conduct simultaneous transmission and reception over the same frequency band. The concept of FD communication is not new but was long considered impractical given the very high level of self-interference that an FD device's transmitter causes to its own receiver. The renewed interests in FD are largely due to the fact that network providers have shrunk cell sizes to enable increased spatial reuse. Such architectural change towards shorter-range links permits reduced transmission power, thereby lessening the self-interference problem and making practical FD communications closer to reality. The long-term objectives of the proposed research program are to use tools and insights from information theory, communications, signal processing and optimization to advance understanding and innovations in providing more efficient communication services over wireless networks. The research program will be advanced to such long-term objectives through the pursuit of several short-term objectives concerning the design and analysis of FD communications with new multicarrier waveforms, namely generalized frequency-division multiplexing (GFDM) and circular filter-bank multicarrier (C-FBMC). These multicarrier waveforms are being seriously considered as the air interface in 5G networks and to replace the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) waveform widely used in 4G networks. This is because GFDM and C-FBMC can resolve the major limitations of OFDM in requiring strict synchronization and generating high out-of-band emission. The outcomes of the proposed research program, both in research innovations and HQP training, will continue to help Canada remain internationally competitive and influential in the rapidly growing wireless communication industry.