Bringing Wireless Internet Connectivity to Everything

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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.