Towards delay, energy And spectrum-efficient Next Generation wireless netwOrks (TangO)
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Essex
Department Name: Computer Sci and Electronic Engineering
Abstract
Higher rates, lower latencies, and lower energy consumptions: Future communications systems and most of their applications rely on significant improvement in these three directions which are conflicting in nature. Fast and reliable communication infrastructure is essential for advancements of various industries: from mobile broadband to intelligent automotive cars, from smart cities to smart grids, or from telemedicine to haptic communications. These applications are vital for higher human life quality and rapid economic growth. The prospect of fast future communications will not be possible unless a fine tuning between all of the above three conflicting requirements is achieved, which has proved to be challenging over the past years.
Adaptive radio resource allocation (RRA) techniques that efficiently manage the system resources have shown promising improvements when considering only one or two of these directions. On the other hand, energy harvesting technologies are emerging as a promising solution for reducing energy consumption of the communication devices, while maintaining the system throughput. Despite the challenging nature of improving the system performance in all of the above three directions, because of the recent progress in the adaptive RRA techniques and energy harvesting technologies, it is now the time to tackle this challenge. Coupling the RRA techniques and energy harvesting technologies has a great scope to significantly improve the overall system performance, which is yet to be exploited. This project aims at developing novel cross-layer RRA techniques that benefit from energy harvesting technologies and optimally tune the system parameters to flexibly optimize the trading between rate, delay and energy consumption.
Adaptive radio resource allocation (RRA) techniques that efficiently manage the system resources have shown promising improvements when considering only one or two of these directions. On the other hand, energy harvesting technologies are emerging as a promising solution for reducing energy consumption of the communication devices, while maintaining the system throughput. Despite the challenging nature of improving the system performance in all of the above three directions, because of the recent progress in the adaptive RRA techniques and energy harvesting technologies, it is now the time to tackle this challenge. Coupling the RRA techniques and energy harvesting technologies has a great scope to significantly improve the overall system performance, which is yet to be exploited. This project aims at developing novel cross-layer RRA techniques that benefit from energy harvesting technologies and optimally tune the system parameters to flexibly optimize the trading between rate, delay and energy consumption.
Planned Impact
The project impact plan is designed to maximize the impacts of the project results on the potential beneficiaries, listed as
1: Academia: Academic and research communities across different disciplines can benefit from the gained knowledge of this project. Researchers concerned with theoretical and practical aspects of wireless communications and networking, signal processing and low-power communications devices can benefit from the gained knowledge of this project. The project results will be published in several well-known journals and conferences. The PI will present a keynote in CROWN workshop at Lancaster University and will also apply for tutorials in ICC and GlobeCom. Two research visits will be planned to further extend the project's academic impacts.
2: Telecommunication industries: Since the project deals with fundamental requirements of future wireless networks, the project outcomes will be useful for UK and international Telecommunications industries. The results of WP1 provide fundamental and useful understanding of the system performance that is critical for communication systems design and developments. The proposed transmission techniques of WP2-WP4 also provide a foundation for design of future transmission protocols. We utilize our industry link with Rinicom to validate and assess the applicability of our results for practical situations that are concerns of the communication industries. Rinicom will provide us with access to its testbed and platform at its Lancaster location. We will utilize the locality of the company and plan to either visit the company every three months, or invite a member of the company to our meetings at the university. The PhD student will be encouraged to take the intern-ship offer of the company, which will help her/him to gain experience of applying the proposed algorithms of WP2 and WP4 in practical networks settings.
3: Other industries: The merger of different disciplines is bringing into picture possibility of exciting new applications. The transfer of skills through communication links, also coined as haptic communications, requires robotics and communications industries and researchers to work together. The possibilities of very low-power communications devices through energy harvesting is appealing to healthcare services. The sustainable sensor networks through energy harvesting are useful in military applications. The various industries involved with these technologies can indirectly benefit from the outcomes of the project.
4: General public: The ultimate beneficiaries of the project outcomes will be the general public. There are countless applications that can emerge if the communication networks can overcome the current inadequate performance shortfalls. These applications, for example, smart cities, can improve the quality of human life. A project website at Lancaster University domain will be created to provide timely updates of the project news and outcomes to public access. Short technology news will be distributed through Lancaster University news website. We use social media to announce the outcomes, news and events related to the project.
5: Project staff: The project will be an excellent opportunity for the RA who can build on his/her research background and gain valuable research training during the work of the project, interaction with Rinicom, and also through the planned academic visit. The project is also a good opportunity for the PhD student, who will be hired through studentship offered by the SCC as a support for this EPSRC first grant proposal, to gain research and practical skills as working part of a group and through Rinicom intern-ship. Finally, the PI will benefit from the project through gaining experience in project management and preparing a foundation for a longer research program that aims at facilitating a cross-discipline research framework that will focus on enabling new applications for communication systems.
1: Academia: Academic and research communities across different disciplines can benefit from the gained knowledge of this project. Researchers concerned with theoretical and practical aspects of wireless communications and networking, signal processing and low-power communications devices can benefit from the gained knowledge of this project. The project results will be published in several well-known journals and conferences. The PI will present a keynote in CROWN workshop at Lancaster University and will also apply for tutorials in ICC and GlobeCom. Two research visits will be planned to further extend the project's academic impacts.
2: Telecommunication industries: Since the project deals with fundamental requirements of future wireless networks, the project outcomes will be useful for UK and international Telecommunications industries. The results of WP1 provide fundamental and useful understanding of the system performance that is critical for communication systems design and developments. The proposed transmission techniques of WP2-WP4 also provide a foundation for design of future transmission protocols. We utilize our industry link with Rinicom to validate and assess the applicability of our results for practical situations that are concerns of the communication industries. Rinicom will provide us with access to its testbed and platform at its Lancaster location. We will utilize the locality of the company and plan to either visit the company every three months, or invite a member of the company to our meetings at the university. The PhD student will be encouraged to take the intern-ship offer of the company, which will help her/him to gain experience of applying the proposed algorithms of WP2 and WP4 in practical networks settings.
3: Other industries: The merger of different disciplines is bringing into picture possibility of exciting new applications. The transfer of skills through communication links, also coined as haptic communications, requires robotics and communications industries and researchers to work together. The possibilities of very low-power communications devices through energy harvesting is appealing to healthcare services. The sustainable sensor networks through energy harvesting are useful in military applications. The various industries involved with these technologies can indirectly benefit from the outcomes of the project.
4: General public: The ultimate beneficiaries of the project outcomes will be the general public. There are countless applications that can emerge if the communication networks can overcome the current inadequate performance shortfalls. These applications, for example, smart cities, can improve the quality of human life. A project website at Lancaster University domain will be created to provide timely updates of the project news and outcomes to public access. Short technology news will be distributed through Lancaster University news website. We use social media to announce the outcomes, news and events related to the project.
5: Project staff: The project will be an excellent opportunity for the RA who can build on his/her research background and gain valuable research training during the work of the project, interaction with Rinicom, and also through the planned academic visit. The project is also a good opportunity for the PhD student, who will be hired through studentship offered by the SCC as a support for this EPSRC first grant proposal, to gain research and practical skills as working part of a group and through Rinicom intern-ship. Finally, the PI will benefit from the project through gaining experience in project management and preparing a foundation for a longer research program that aims at facilitating a cross-discipline research framework that will focus on enabling new applications for communication systems.
Publications
Khakurel S
(2018)
QoS-Aware Utility-Based Resource Allocation in Mixed-Traffic Multi-User OFDM Systems
in IEEE Access
Mili M
(2017)
Interference Efficiency: A New Metric to Analyze the Performance of Cognitive Radio Networks
in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Omar M
(2018)
Multiobjective Optimization in 5G Hybrid Networks
in IEEE Internet of Things Journal
Robat Mili M
(2017)
Rate-Power-Interference Optimization in Underlay OFDMA CRNs with Imperfect CSI
in IEEE Communications Letters
Salem A
(2019)
Wireless Power Transfer in Distributed Antenna Systems
in IEEE Transactions on Communications
Salem A
(2021)
NOMA in Cooperative Communication Systems With Energy-Harvesting Nodes and Wireless Secure Transmission
in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Salem A
(2020)
Secrecy Outage Probability of Energy-Harvesting Cooperative NOMA Transmissions With Relay Selection
in IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking
| Description | The first key finding of this project was further understanding of (and deriving) the rate-energy-delay achievable performance region for a point to point communication system, which was later expanded to several more complex systems, e.g. in an uplink system using Orthogonal multiple access techniques. Simple resource allocation technique to achieve the best balance (based on the system requirements) in the performance region was found. Also, further understanding of the benefits of using large deviation theorem for the resource allocation problem in low latency communications were obtained (An IEEE survey paper on Effective Capacity as a result of this work was published in 2019). Later, the effects of energy harvesting on the achievable performance of a point-to-point and multi-user systems were investigated in different settings, e.g., when non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Techniques are used at base station. The performance of the system were derived and close-to-optimum resource allocation techniques were found. A more though analysis on the achievable performance of time-switching energy harvesting communications were later obtained (by the work of a PhD student that was financially funded by SCC) that found the conditions under which energy harvesting can benefit the system performance in terms of achieving higher spectral efficiency of higher energy efficiency. Later the further understanding of the benefits of using large deviation theorem in analysing the performance of communication systems (that was developed from the work of this project) was applied to analysing the energy outage probably in time switching energy harvesting networks as part of a PhD work that started at the time of this project work. That work is currently under submission for publication at an IEEE Transactions. The outcomes of this project are published in several IEEE Transactions, e.g., at IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and IEEE Transactions on Communications, and is presented as invited talk in several conferences and universities (e.g., at Nanyang University of Technology or as part of CommNet+ conference (NextGwin 2018)). |
| Exploitation Route | The PI is engaged with creative industries through a project proposal submission on how to improve the productivity of freelancers and micro-businesses using digital connectivity. The project proposal has gone through the first stage. Further the results and understanding developed of the work of this project was a major background for an EU project (RECENT) that was successful and was granted in 2018. |
| Sectors | Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Energy,Healthcare,Transport |