Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The next-generation communication systems are envisioned to revolutionize throughout every aspect of human society by providing anywhere and anytime connectivity to not only mobile communication users, but also almost all physical things. New network architecture, operation, and optimization solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies represent a worldwide mobile network evolution paradigm, to support the exponential growth of wireless data traffic and new wireless use cases and services. In this project, we will investigate and develop cost-effective network deployment strategies, adaptive network protocols, and proactive resource management mechanisms for next-generation wireless communication systems, leveraging advanced tools in machine learning and big data informatics. The research aims at engineering solutions for flexible deployment of wireless network resources, adaptive to the predicted data traffic and service demands, and for facilitating network self-learning, self-diagnosing, and self-healing, to make the network more responsive and less erroneous, while reducing human involvement in the network management. The realization of network intelligence will be an essential step for developing more efficient, scalable, fully programmable, and automated wireless networks, to achieve agile customized services at low cost. The global market for AI in telecommunication will propel vigorously at a compound annual growth rate of over forty percent. As a result, the race towards developing innovative AI-based next-generation wireless communication systems will undoubtedly be undertaken by research groups worldwide. This project will generate new ideas and techniques that will provide significant benefits to Canadian users, and will foster a vital competitive edge to Canadian ICT industries in the international market place. Five PhD students and five postdoctoral fellows, together with nine co-op students, will participate in the project to develop the latest innovations in wireless communication systems, emerging as expert additions to the Canadian high technology industry labor force.