Bringing Wireless Internet Connectivity to Everything

随着物联网（IoT）的出现，数十亿新的连接设备将上线，从而在非常多样化的领域实现新的应用。虽然令人兴奋，但这将创造对节能和高吞吐量无线互联网连接的前所未有的需求，这是现有无线网络无法满足的。这种限制是由于当今应用程序的需求和约束存在巨大的多样性。一些应用程序使用小型传感器，需要使用最小的能量和带宽，而另一些应用程序使用高数据速率多媒体系统，这需要每秒数千兆比特的吞吐量。这两种极端都对这些连接设备的通信和能源资源造成了压力，它们需要不同的解决方案来满足它们的需求。

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), billions of new connected devices will come online, enabling new applications in very diverse areas. While exciting, this will create unprecedented demand for energy-efficient and high-throughput wireless internet connectivity that cannot be satisfied by existing wireless networks. This limitation is due to the fact that there is huge diversity in the demands and constraints on today's applications. Some applications work with small sensors and need to operate using minimal energy and bandwidth, while others use high-data-rate multimedia systems, which require multiple-gigabit-per-second throughput. Both extremes stress the communications, and energy resources available to these connected devices, and they require different solutions to satisfy their needs. My long-term goal is to address the energy and throughput problems of today's wireless networks by re-examining the computer network stack from the physical layer all the way to the application layer. My approach is to develop software-hardware architectures for wireless networks in which algorithms, protocols, and underlying hardware are jointly designed. In support of this long-term goal, my short-term research objectives are developing a mmWave-based high-throughput wireless network; and developing a backscatter-based battery-free wireless network. The proposed research program signifies innovation on a global scale as these breakthroughs will create new wireless networks with much higher capability than today's standard networks. New wireless networks are an immediate and growing need as the world demand for higher capability continues to expand in many areas such as autonomous vehicles, virtual reality, smart homes and smart cities. The proposed research is interdisciplinary in nature, bridging computer networking with hardware and radio design. Hence, it will open up new avenues for research and a toolkit of techniques that are not possible without the integration of both areas. As a result, this research program not only enables world-class research in the area of IoT, but also it creates a great opportunity to train students in designing cutting-edge software-hardware systems. The area is an emerging research area which is needed by both top Canadian research institutes and high-tech companies.