Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

The commercially available wireless infrastructures, e.g., cellular phone network, have played a remarkable role in our everyday lives. However, these infrastructures have appeared to be inefficient in keeping up with the ever increasing demand of reliable and fast wireless communication. For instance, under traditional technologies, the scarce frequency spectrum cannot support the demands for Giga- or Tera-bps throughput for live multi-media communications. As another example, the power consumption in cellular networks was estimated to be about 60 TWh in 2007 and keeps growing. These indicate that the available technologies are too expensive and inefficient to sustainably operate at an affordable price. Therefore, more bandwidth efficient, power-efficient, and dynamic infrastructures are required to ensure the seamless communications of anything at anytime to anyone. To design the next generation of Ubiquitous Network, fundamental innovative ideas for the physical layer communication and truly dynamic network structures, which can address the aforementioned problems, are required. In this NSERC Strategic Project Grant proposal, under the topic Ubiquitous Networks, we envision a mesh relay network where distributed nodes adaptively cooperate to establish wireless connections between one or more pairs of source-destinations. While mesh infrastructure has been well studied, we propose a dynamic and decentralized physical layer cooperation framework based on distributed beamforming and consider physical layer designs jointly with medium access control techniques. We aim to design a relay mesh network with high bandwidth-efficiency to fulfill the increasing throughput demand, high power-efficiency to move toward the green concept, but minimal overload to facilitate practical applications. We focus on linear schemes, which have great potential in performance while can ensure the helper nodes remain simple to reduce hardware complexity and processing power. We target at truly distributed algorithms that require only local information at each node and a minimal amount of common information throughout the network. These goals will help us to materialize the concept of future green Ubiquitous Networks.