Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

By 2016, mobile connection speeds will increase 9-fold, aggregate smartphone traffic will be 50 times greater than it is today, and mobile video will increase 25-fold [Cisco Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast]. Breakthroughs are desperately needed to keep up with this phenomenal growth. In spite of this need, breakthroughs with immediate practical implications have been scarce. MIMO antenna systems, developed in late 90's, resulted in a significant improvement and soon found its way in wireless products. After MIMO, a more recent breakthrough, Interference Alignment (IA) was introduced by the PI's team in 2006. IA has attracted significant attention, however, its practical implementation remains challenging. To address the future needs, three interrelated areas need attention: ""transmission rate"", ""networking"" and ""security"". The proposed research addresses these areas relying on a cross layer strategy. The problems of ""transmission rate"" and ""networking"" are primarily handled relying on ""full-duplex wireless"", while a novel technique called ""media-based modulation"" is applied to increase the throughput and deal with channel fading. Full-duplex wireless uses the same bandwidth to simultaneously transmit and receive. This is in contrast to legacy half-duplex systems which function similar to walkie-talkies. In addition to doubling the rate, full-duplex simplifies many of the networking issues. Media-based modulation, introduced by the PI's team, is based on embedding part of the information in varying the communication medium. This approach significantly increases the rate and enhances the reliability. The research will also address a novel approach for physical layer security based on using a wireless channel to establish a secret key (one-time pad) between two legitimate parties. The shared key depends on the propagation environment between legitimate parties and will be impossible to guess. Relying on a multi-disciplinary team, which spans complementary areas of physical layer, networking, RF structures, and software, the findings of the proposed research are expected to have a profound impact on the development of 5G systems.