A team of ECE researchers will be working to make fifth generation (5G) wireless networks ready to face the massive growth in wireless communication predicted in the next five years.
Professors Vincent Wong, Vijay Bhargava, Lutz Lampe and Sudip Shekhar received an NSERC Strategic Project Grant to study technologies that will improve the network’s spectral efficiency. Future networks will need to be able to support more users who are accessing the network more often and requesting content that requires more bandwidth. The research team will be finding ways to support this growth within the available spectrum by increasing the transmission rate. Over the next three years, the research team will collaborate with Bell Mobility Inc., Sierra Wireless Inc., TELUS Corporation, and Intel Corporation in exploring how 5G technical standards can best be employed to support increased use of wireless networks.
The Cisco Visual Networking Index predicts a huge increase in wireless traffic in the next few years. Allot of this new traffic will be video: over two-thirds of the world’s mobile traffic will be video in 2018. Wireless networks will also need to support more machine-to-machine traffic being incorporated into smart technologies.
 | By 2018 total, global IP traffic will be 3 times larger than in 2013 and mobile IP traffic will be 11 times what it was in 2013.During the period of 2013-2018 the Middle East and Africa will have the strongest mobile data traffic growth. Canada will grow more moderately; total traffic will be 2 times larger than in 2013 in Canada. |
 | Globally, mobile video will increase 14-fold between 2013 and 2018, accounting for 69 percent of total mobile data traffic. In 2018, Consumer-Online Gaming IP traffic will be 4 times what it was in 2013. Graphs and prediction summaries provided by CISCO VNI. |
There are a number of potential ways of improving transmission speed to support this increase in wireless traffic. The ECE team chose to focus on three technologies based on expertise within the department: massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO), full duplexing and software-defined networks. The team will devise novel algorithms and circuit implementations for 5G wireless communication systems using these three technologies.
Massive MIMO
Massive MIMO refers to the use of a large number of antennas in base stations. The ECE team will design practical algorithms using multiple antennas to increase network capacity. To physically test the effectiveness of the algorithms the team is hoping to collaborate with the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg where researchers will be setting up a test site for massive MIMO.
Full Duplex
Using current technology, transmission via WiFi is half duplex. At any given time, your transceiver can either transmit or receive, it cannot do both at the same time. In the past few years the research community has found ways to support full duplex in WiFi. This would allow an increase in throughput.
This image shows some of the Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits used by Prof. Shekhar in the lab.
Software defined networks
Currently, customers pay a single fee for a standard Internet pipe into their homes and all of their traffic travels through that pipe: video, web and other data, file sharing etc. One advantage of software-defined networks is that they would allow users to prioritize traffic, allocating more bandwidth to crucial home business traffic than to video streaming, for example. It also facilitates sharing of network resources in different granularities.
Find out more:
Data Communications Research Group
NSEREC Strategic Project Grants:Technologies for 5G Wireless Systems: Software-defined Networks, Massive MIMO, and Full Duplexing