Wireless communication and energy networks have enabled a plethora of novel applications in the last years. Both make use of the same and unique RF medium, but have been so far designed independently from each other. This visionary project conducted at Imperial College under the supervision of the PI Dr. Bruno Clerckx aims at challenging the current design by designing and proving the feasibility of a disruptive wireless network technology that wirelessly transfers energy jointly with information in wireless networks (shortly denoted as JWIET for Joint Wireless Information and Energy Transfer). The project will create a new paradigm shift in future capacity and energy efficient wireless communication and energy networks, by viewing them as a single network designed under a unified framework and by overcoming the energy constraint of wireless devices through the transfer of energy. Contrary to current wireless communication networks, interference is viewed as a source of energy that is to be harvested rather than mitigated. However, because interference in a wireless network influences dynamically the information rate and the amount of energy to harvest, finding the fundamental performance limits and effective interference management techniques is challenging and unexplored so far. In the last two years, Dr. Clerckx has successfully addressed this problem in a two-user and K-user narrowband MIMO interference channel and broadcast channels, under the assumption of an ideal energy harvester for which the RF-to-DC energy conversion efficiency is 100% irrespectively of the input waveforms. This project aims at extending and leveraging past achievements to solve the problem of JWIET in 1) wideband channels, and 2) in the presence of realistic RF energy harvesters accounting for actual RF circuitry and the fact that the RF-to-DC energy conversion efficiency of RF energy harvesters depends on the input waveforms. To put together this novel wireless network solution in a credible fashion, this project focuses on 1) identify theoretic rate-energy trade-offs for general wideband MIMO interference and broadcast channels accounting for realistic RF energy harvester models, 2) investigate the associated transmission strategies, 3) validate the feasibility of JWIET through experiment. The project and its experiment will be performed in partnership with National Instruments and Vodafone. The project demands an interdisciplinary study and it is to be conducted in a unique research group with strong track records in wireless communication, signal processing, numerical analysis, and JWIET. With the above and given the novelty and originality of the topic, the research outcomes will be of considerable value to design future wireless networks supplied by wireless energy transfer and give the industry a fresh and timely insight into the development of practical JWIET system, advancing UK's research profile of both RF energy transfer and communication in the world. Its success would change the broad ICT/Engineering landscape in developed but also emerging markets with applications in a large number of sectors, e.g. building automation, healthcare, telecommunications, smart grid, structural monitoring, consumer electronics, etc.

We propose a project to assess the viability of the many opportunities that are becoming available to develop innovative Internet-based services. The investigation will be carried out as a collaboration between the Imperial College Internet Centre and the Imperial College Innovation Studies Centre and will involve a range of commercial partners including Vodafone, Sun Microsystems, Transport for London, The 451 Group, the BBC, O2 and BT. The project will assess the economic and technical feasibility of a range of potential innovative Internet services, assess any generic underlying factors that need to be addressed in order to realise them, identify the most promising and determine the economic, regulatory and technical obstacles that need to be overcome to fully realise these opportunities. The outcome will be an overall assessment of these opportunities and a development and exploitation plan for those services identified as the most viable and economically important.Recent developments in computing technologies, including service oriented architectures, encapsulation, Grid computing and virtualisation have provided the opportunity to repackage many ICT processes as composable, use-on-demand services. This provides the possibility that the next-generation Internet could be refactored as a series of markets in use-on-demand, pay-per-use services. This in turn provides the opportunity to develop many new innovative services or to repackage existing services in more efficient manners. Being virtual or software-based many of these service opportunities are low-cost with very low barriers to entry and thus represent attractive opportunities for innovative enterprises.We will conduct a series of studies to assess the feasibility and viability of the above services. These studies will be carried in collaboration with our commercial partners by interviews and discussion. These studies will address the economic and technical feasibility of the ideas put forward here and seek to identify any steps: economic, regulatory or technical, that need to be overcome in order to realise these opportunities to the full. An initial assessment of the field will be made to identify any generic or underlying factors that need to be addressed. An evaluation will then be made to identify the most immediately promising opportunities. Those identified will be studied in more depth. The output of these studies will include an overall assessment of the field and, for those opportunities studied in depth, a roadmap detailing the business and technical developments needed to realise these opportunities. At the same time we will discuss with our commercial partners a potential development and exploitation plan. In this way we hope to be in a position to be able to rapidly develop and exploit the most promising opportunities thus identified.We identify service opportunities in third-party authored Web Services, Software as a Service, Virtual Facilities, Consumer Support Services, Community Services, Computational Resources Brokering and a General Service Broker.An initial assessment of the field will be made to identify any generic or underlying factors that need to be addressed. It may be that a few factors, e.g. secure payment, trust, are common among all applications and that their resolution would enable a whole family of opportunities to be realised. An evaluation will then be made to identify the most immediately promising opportunities. Those identified will be studied in more depth.The output of these studies will include an overall assessment of the field and, for those opportunities studied in depth, a roadmap detailing the business and technical developments needed to realise these opportunities. At the same time we will discuss with our commercial partners a potential development and exploitation plan. In this way we hope to be in a position to be able to rapidly develop and exploit the most promising opportunities.

There are similarities between the UK and Indian end-users in terms of availability of interactive technologies, their skills in interacting with technology and desire for better interactive services, there are also differences in the type of services demanded by end-users in the two countries and the usage scenarios and context of the end-user technology. For example, touch and gesture based interaction techniques are being explored both within the UK and India as they potentially empower the user to perform eyes-free interaction. However, the context of the interaction may be very different in both these countries. The context in the UK may be to enable simple tasks when the visual channel is occupied (like setting the waypoint on a GPS when walking down a flight of stairs), while in India the context may be to empower the illiterate in performing basic interactive tasks without the need to read (like using gesture based systems for text-to-speech interaction). These similarities and differences make it worthwhile for the UK and Indian researchers to collaborate.The aim of this network is to unify past efforts and develop an agenda of activities within the context of Interactive Technologies for the end-user and to encourage the development of research collaboration that is internationally outstanding and economically relevant while being real and meaningful to both countries. A driving goal of the Network is to bring together various distinct collaborations in related research topics under a unified network and harness the strength of these individual collaborations to create a synergy which no single institution will be able to achieve on its own.The proposed network will consider three inter-related themes that will contribute to the development of Interactive Technologies for the end-user. The themes build on the network members' strengths in designing, implementing and evaluating interactive technologies for various applications and services. The three themes are - Interactive Technology Enablers, Interactive Services and Applications, and Sustainable Interaction Designs.

We propose a Research Cluster to explore the opportunities and challenges of the Digital Economy. The Internet is driving many powerful convergences in media, devices and infrastructure provision. These convergences hold the promise that the next-generation Internet could be a very powerful and universal platform where a great deal of economic and social activity could take place. Given the universal nature of the Internet this platform would break down the traditional distinctions between, say business and the general public, and anyone from any sector could be a provider or a user of these services.If properly realised the benefits from these developments could be considerable. However, they will not happen automatically, there are many issues that need to be tackled before they can be fully achieved. Given the nature of the Internet these issues are as much economic, social, legal and regulatory as they are technical and, critically, these issues have been tackled together to provide an holistic and complete solution.We have assembled a multi-disciplinary consortium that includes talented and experienced research workers in all the fields necessary to address these issues and have established relationships with major stakeholders in the next-generation Internet. The Cluster is led by Imperial College, the University of Oxford and the University of Southampton. The Research Cluster would conduct an open investigation to identify the topics that need to be addressed and produce a roadmap or research and development agenda to tackle them. The Cluster proposes to hold two open workshops at the beginning and end of the one year study to involve the community as much as possible and to create expert Working Groups to address the critical issues. All these deliberations will be conducted in an open manner using Web 2.0 community networking techniques.The outputs of these deliberations will a programme of linked actions to drive forward the development of the Digital Economy. These will comprise multi-disciplinary research programmes, commercial exploitations, social or legal actions or regulatory recommendations. The Reserch Cluster will also be used to identify the coalitions, again both research and commercial, best suited to take forward these proposals.

In response to the growing demands for delivery of content-rich and delay-sensitive services, network architectures for 5th generation and beyond wireless communication systems are becoming more and more dense. This illustrated through the ever increasing deployment of small cell networks as well as machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. This trend, whilst improving network capacity, will still necessitate reuse of available resources such as frequency spectrum within smaller areas by larger number of nodes/cells, which in turn would adversely affect the quality of service. On the other hand, by allowing simultaneous transmission and reception in the same frequency band, In-band Full-Duplex Communication (IFDC) technology potentially enhances the spectral efficiency of a single point-to-point (P2P) channel by 100% over the conventional half-duplex communication. IFDC also enables the nodes, e.g. in P2P scenarios, to receive channel feedback or sense other channels whilst transmitting data, which shortens the latency compared to conventional half duplex communication with time-division-duplexing. Moreover, using full duplex relay nodes in multi-hop scenarios can potentially reduce the end-to-end latency by enabling simultaneous receiving and relaying. Practical implementation of this technology requires rigorous interference cancellation methods at each node to suppress the strong self-interference imposed on the receiver by the transmitter of the same node. The major bulk of research on IFDC has focused on self interference cancellation (SIC), and the respective state-of-the-art technology can achieve a high level of SIC at full duplex terminals; hence the IFDC technology has become closer to commercial deployment by industry. Deploying IFDC in realistic dense settings entails new range of technical challenges, and opportunities alike. IFDC can yield substantially greater network throughputs and delay reductions over half duplex networking by deploying the technology in denser networks. However, attaining such gains demands for efficient scalable resource allocation and multi-node interference control methods. This great potential of 'full-duplex dense networks' in 'scalable service provisioning' has not been addressed to date by the research community in sufficient depth. At physical-layer, new resource allocation challenges arise in IFDC networks; for instance, in the design of concurrent channel sensing and data transmission, and in adapting transmit power of the nodes to their variable self-interference. Also, using IFDC in dense scenarios will affect design of the protocols in the higher layers; for instance IFDC would entail greater chance of packet collisions and multi-node interference, which demands for new medium access control (MAC) protocols suited to the emerging dense full duplex networks. Furthermore, IFDC will enable full duplex relaying in multi-hop communication, hence requires new Forwarding-layer/Network-layer protocols to deal with the new full-duplex forwarding paradigms. For conventional half duplex scenarios it is known that network throughput and quality of services can be improved through cross-layer methods, particularly with co-design of physical and MAC layers or MAC and Network/Forwarding layers. In fact for optimal scalability of heterogeneous services in full duplex dense networks, cross-layer approaches are inevitable. This project aims to propose systematic design of resource allocation and interference suppression techniques and algorithms at physical, MAC and Forwarding layers in order to enable substantial throughput gain and delay reduction by deploying full-duplex communication in dense wireless networks. These new methods will pave the way for deploying scalable service provisioning in the emerging dense wireless networks.