Subventions et des contributions :

Subvention ou bourse octroyée s'appliquant à plus d'un exercice financier. (2017-2018 à 2022-2023)

The demand for high data rate, reliable wireless communications continues to grow rapidly. The number of connected devices is expected to explode in the near future as the use of of smartphones, the Internet of Things' devices such as health and fitness wearables will vastly increase (10s of billions for 5G). As the radio frequency (RF) spectrum is becoming very crowded, alternative and complementary technologies, such as visible light communications (VLC) have recently become very appealing. The advantages of using VLC are its inherent safety, the lack of interference, because VLC does not penetrate walls, and the huge free bandwidth. However, VLC has its drawbacks such as limited indoor coverage and limited mobility, and has to be used in a hybrid manner with RF links. Despite the recent interest in VLC and the availability of some commercial products such as LiFi, there remain many open problems to be addressed in order to fully exploit the huge available bandwidth with practical schemes. For example, the development of efficient coding and modulation scheme s and their associated practical decoding algorithms . In the proposed program, we will consider efficient transceiver techniques for hybrid RF/VLC links with applications to 5G systems and the Internet of Things. For 5G systems, we will consider load balancing across WiFi, VLC, and cellular networks. After studying the degrees of freedom in such links, we will investigate the use of modified lattice codes that satisfy the modulated light intensity model in order to achieve all the degrees of freedom available. At the receiver side, we will also investigate the potential modification and enhancement of lattice decoding techniques for the non-coherent intensity detection. The studied schemes are expected to offer better alternatives to existing ones such as on-off keying or pulse position modulations when used in realistic indoor environments. We will also consider short code design for short-range communication that can have some interesting applications such as the data transfer between health and fitness wearable sensors, and smartphones and smart homes hubs. The long term objectives of this program are to make fundamental contributions to the design and test of practical communications protocols that can work in heterogenous networks, which can have a wide range of emerging applications including 5G systems, the Internet of Things and eHealth. The intellectual property resulting from this program, as well as the large number of highly qualified personnel who will be trained in 5G systems and heterogenous communications protocols, will greatly benefit these rapidly growing sectors in Canada. This is especially true for 5G systems: the 5G infrastructure rollout is expected to coincide with the time at which students will be graduating from this program, making them highly employable, and providing an advantage to Canada’s workforce.