Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Next time you pull out your mobile phone to watch an online video or to have a voice or video call with your family or friends, what if the wireless network is too slow or the phone runs out of power? With the increasing penetration of smart phones and visual communication services, such scenarios may occur more often, as wireless service providers scramble to add more base stations, ask for more radio spectrum, and consume more energy to serve more customers with a higher demand. This trend not only brings high costs to service providers, but also has a huge impact on the environment: According to statistics by Ericsson, a large percentage of electric energy is consumed by mobile communication systems (especially the radio access networks), and battery technologies for portable devices are far behind the power consumption increase of smart phones. This project aims to reduce power consumption in existing wireless communication networks by improving their energy and spectrum efficiency. Since most performance metrics in such networks are nonlinear functions of the distances among transceivers, this research extends latest advances in stochastic geometry to achieve a precise topology characterization of smartphone cellular networks, and to facilitate accurate transmission power control for high signal strength and low interference. The project will leverage the topology information to develop scalable and cooperative modulation schemes to carry information over the air more efficiently, and hybrid and cognitive media access control schemes to utilize the shared transmission medium more effectively for a wide variety of multimedia applications. The research outcomes will reduce the per-bit energy and spectrum consumption, and benefit all upper-layer functions and protocols. This project will result in significant benefits to Canadian society and our economy in generating new ideas and techniques for more efficient and effective mobile communication systems and services, in collaboration with the supporting organizations on the transfer of knowledge, prototyping, technology development, and training of highly-qualified personnel.