To support a wide range of envisioned applications, including autonomous vehicles, the Internet of Things, and immersive technologies, future wireless technologies must meet demanding requirements for higher spectral and energy efficiency, lower end-to-end latency and massive connectivity as well as uniform user experience. Given the constraints on the available resources, the current inflexible, network-centric cellular networks cannot fulfil those disparate performance objectives. Even in massive MIMO cellular systems there remains an inherent bottleneck for cell-edge users. The recently emerged cell-free massive MIMO (CF-mMIMO) concept is a game changer and represents a paradigm shift in the network architecture. In CF-mMIMO, cell boundaries are removed by distributing a large number of centrally connected access points over a wide service area: the resulting global network becomes fully user-centric and flexible. This provides important potential benefits, including: 1) high quality uniform user experience due to the user-centric approach; 2) superior spectral and energy efficiency through joint processing; 3) reduced latency due to distributed processing; 4) exceptional coverage probability due to distributed access points. However, there are key challenges that need to be addressed to realise these underlying benefits of CF-MaMIMO. These challenges constitute major obstacles to keep CFmMIMO from being practically deployable. This research project aims to address those fundamental challenges. The proposed techniques will transform CF-MaMIMO into a fully user-centric, scalable, flexible system to embrace emerging AI-empowered technologies. This will enable CF-MaMIMO to support the wide range of envisioned applications in 6G and beyond. This project will benefit from strong industrial support from BT and ZTE as well as from world-leading international advisory group.

Modern wireless communications rapidly approach the verge of the spectrum availability and new disruptive technologies are urgently needed to meet the projected capabilities and demands for efficiency and privacy of 5G communications and beyond. We will exercise an original holistic design approach to build and test novel integrated digital/RF wireless architectures exploiting the full potential of unconventional degrees of freedom and enabling dramatically increased information capacity in small-cell networks. Our cross-disciplinary studies will inform and influence future wireless technologies, help address the societal demand for 'green' and intelligent communications, and create a body of scholarship to promote the UK's unique blend of innovative engineering, free spirit of entrepreneurialism and educational rigour.

We, human beings, acquire information from our surroundings through our sensory receptors of vision, sound, smell, touch and taste -the five senses. The sensory stimulus is converted to electrical signals as nerve impulse data communicated with our brain. What is really intriguing is the communication network. When one or more senses fail (impairment), we are able to reestablish communication and improve our other senses to protect us from incoming dangers. Furthermore, we have developed the mechanism of "reasoning", effectively analyzing the present data and generating a vision of the future, which we might call our 6th Sense (6S). Is it possible to develop a 6S technology to predict a catastrophic disaster? Industrial processes are already equipped with five senses: "hearing" from acoustic sensors, "smelling" from gas and liquid sensors, "seeing" from camera, "touching" from vibration sensors and "tasting" from composition monitors. 6S could be achieved by forming a sensing network which is self-adaptive and self-repairing, carrying out deep-thinking analysis with even limited data, and predicting the sequence of events via integrated system modelling. This project is the first step towards developing a 6S technology for industrial processes by bringing together research expertise in process systems engineering, wireless communication network, robotic and autonomous systems. The 6S technology developed in this project could be further explored to a wide range of industrial and manufacturing processes.