Wireless technology is currently experiencing a transformative revolution fueled mainly by the staggering amount of data traffic and massive number of critical services (e.g., healthcare and education) offered over the wireless medium. A central role in this wireless revolution is played by relaying technologies, whereby data is transferred from a sender to a receiver by having information hop through a pool of relays (i.e., intermediate nodes). Relaying is foreseen to be a key component for enabling the evolving 5G architecture, and supporting next generation Internet of Things networks. This project seeks to develop a comprehensive analysis of several theoretical and practical aspects of wireless relay networks. The research and its outcomes will be integrated into education, and will promote undergraduate and graduate research.
This project focuses on half-duplex mode of operation at the relays whereby each relay uses different time slots/frequency bands for transmission and reception. The proposed research seeks to derive theoretical foundations that shed light on how to operate these relay networks in a provably (information-theoretic) close-to-optimal, yet simple way, and to develop low-complexity algorithms for efficiently achieving the theoretical limits. Special emphasis will be put on devising solutions to schedule the relays for reception/transmission in a simple and efficient way. This will require that several challenges be overcome, including achieving high performance in computationally-constrained networks, and providing robustness against channel variations. Our ultimate goal is to identify solutions that can be implemented in a distributive fashion across the relay nodes, and that require a minimum communication overhead for exchanging the channel state information.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
