Enabling High-Speed Microwave and Millimetre Wave Links (MiMiWaveS)

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Wireless communications has been shaping the planet in an unprecedented way as we live in an increasingly connected, automated, and globalised society of smart environments where the physical world is connected with the information world. Looking 10-20 years ahead, multi-gigabit wireless communications will play an even more prominent role in the evolution and development of our unwired networked society. This project is proposed at a time when gigabit per second wireless communications is envisioned to bring a fundamental shift to the design of future smart environments. The results of this project will trigger the emerging concept of smart environments, ranging from smart materials controlled or manipulated at the nanoscale, to smart cities with massive deployment of sensors and monitoring systems. In particular, the widespread availability and demand for multimedia capable devices and multimedia content have fuelled the need for high-speed wireless connectivity beyond the capabilities of existing commercial standards. The technologies developed in this project will address practical issues concerning the design and implementation of next generation multi-gigabit wireless applications enabling low cost fibre replacement mobile backhauls, last mile wireless broadband access, ultra-dense small cells, low latency uncompressed high-definition media transfers, and wireless access to the cloud. The challenges and fundamental limits of future networked societies can only be mastered by exploring the disruptive potential of low-interference high-speed wireless links for smart and sustainable environments.The results of this project will have immediate impact on advancing the state-of-the-art in mobile and ubiquitous computing for multi-gigabit-per-second data rates, supporting new wireless platforms such as cloud computing and tactile Internet to handle large quantities of data and thus to underpin the Internet of Everything (IoE) as a truly networked society connecting hundreds of billions of people, objects, and services. In particular, the concepts, algorithms, and theory developed in this project will address practical issues concerning the unbalanced temporal and geographical variations of the spectrum, along with the rapid proliferation of bandwidth-hungry mobile applications, such as video streaming with high definition television (HDTV) and ultra-high definition video (UHDV). Even though wireless channel impairments greatly impact the bandwidth efficiency of wireless networks, their effects have not been taken into consideration in the recent research carried out in this discipline, especially in the microwave and millimetre-wave bands for fifth generation (5G) cellular. The objective of this project is to improve the bandwidth efficiency of next generation 5G operating in the microwave and millimetre-wave bands through effective transmitter and receiver designs that exploit massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and heterogeneous small cell deployment, while taking into account the effects of impairments, such as channel estimation error, phase noise, and carrier frequency offset. As a result, this project is not based on any idealistic assumptions regarding the wireless channel, which compared to existing work in this field is unique. The proposed research certainly raises several fundamental design challenges far from trivial, that have their roots in diverse disciplines, including information theory, stochastic control theory, sequential statistics, large system analysis, automated decision making, and pervasive computing. Industrial partners will be engaged throughout the project to ensure industrial relevance of our work.