Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The ever-evolving wireless technologies and their ongoing convergence with massive Internet-of-Things (IoT) ecosystem constitute the critical foundation of our future connected society, which is expected to interconnect everyone and everything ubiquitously and further bring 1,000-fold increase in data traffic. With the pervasive proliferation of connected devices, dramatically growing data traffic, and wide deployment of diverse services, our future networked society will rely exclusively on the next generation wireless networks, i.e. 5th-generation (5G) and beyond, and the technical capabilities in the provisioning of massive capacity/connectivity, highly secure handling of distributed data, and diverse IoT services and applications of people, industry and society.******The fundamental goal of the proposed NSERC Discovery grant program is to develop transformative wireless technologies for 5G and beyond networks in enabling massive IoT communications through exploration of ultra-dense, highly secure wireless communications and orchestrated operation of 5G heterogeneous networks (HetNets). To achieve this goal, new 3-Dimensional transmission schemes in frequency, time and space domains will be investigated first to achieve highly efficient and ultra-dense communications. This concept will then be expanded as multi-dimensional transmission through joint design of massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) and multi-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) techniques. In achieving highly secure 5G/IoT communications, novel security enhancement techniques will be achieved through the proposed collaborative, autonomous and intelligent strategies, which feature disruptive security provisioning capabilities including comprehensive link attributes analysis, accurate authentication, and autonomous confidentiality enhancement and opportunistic risk minimization. Furthermore, novel objective-driven, application-specific and situation-aware orchestration of 5G HetNets for IoT service provisioning will be studied. The new concept of Software-Defined Orchestration (SDO) of 5G HetNets will be explored to achieve the capability of situational-aware resource sharing and security management in supporting the dynamic IoT traffic and diverse service requirements.******The proposed leading-edge program is excepted to bring profound benefits to Canada through the creation of highly innovative, efficient and secure wireless communications techniques for 5G and beyond. Research findings on situation-aware orchestration of 5G and IoT networks will provide a unified approach that effectively tackles the emerging needs of connected industry and society. Trainees involved in the program will develop solid theoretical and practical skills with high industry relevance, which will further maximize the economic impact of the Discovery program.**