This proposal is set in the context of the ever increasing demand for high data rate transmission over wireless access, underpinned by the growth of increasingly sophisticated multimedia services. This is very challenging due to the quality of service requirements and tight constraints on available radio spectrum in practical systems. The ultimate aim of our work is therefore to enable wireless systems such as WLANs and WMANs to provide seamless data transmission beyond 100Mb/s, and possibly up to 1Gb/s, as a replacement for established wire-line technology such as cable modems and ADSL. We believe that it will only be possible to support such very high speed data transmission through the exploitation spatial diversity, i.e. exploiting the plurality of paths provided by having multiple antennas at the transmitter and most probably at the receiver too.We will in particular propose advanced transmit diversity and spatial multiplexing techniques and associated resource allocation algorithms for broadband wireless access systems. The proposed diversity techniques will be based on channel state information feedback. Since such channel state information requires considerable bandwidth in the reverse link for its transmission, we will investigate various novel feedback quantization techniques and will propose Grassmannian plane (subspace) packing based matrix quantization techniques to reduce feedback overhead significantly. We will also develop space-time-frequency based statistical mean and covariance feedback techniques to further reduce the feedback overhead. The performance of all of our methods will be evaluated using in depth mathematical analysis and simulation studies (on synthetic and field datasets, with guidance from Telecom Modus) based upon error statistics such as bit error rates and block error rates. Our work will be presented at the foremost international conferences and published within the leading IEEE technical journals, such as IEEE Trans. Wireless Communications.

CommNet2 will bring together UK academics from the broad ICT space in order to derive and deliver a coherent national research programme that makes a real impact on the world stage. The increasingly complex multi-disciplinary engineering challenges associated with 5G and beyond, edge and core networking infrastructure, the Internet of Things (IOT), Data Analytics, Federated Cloud Fabric and the Tactile Internet necessitates a cross-disciplinary approach to research spanning knowledge sets from the underpinning fundamentals of materials through devices and subsystems to integrated systems, architectures and protocols. CommNet2 seeks to consolidate such an effort at the UK national scale to address the new challenges faced by society. Many of these challenges map against evolving EPSRC priorities for the IoT, Big Data Analytics, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Towards an Integrated Information Infrastructure, Complex Systems and Cognitive Computing, Security & Privacy and the emerging Research and Innovation Internet Environment. Mapped against the EPSRC ICT Theme Priorities, a three year programme of activities is proposed that include networking and training events; international research-horizon scanning; best practice challenge workshops and conferences; and opportunities for early career researchers. The overarching aim of CommNet2 is to develop a robust framework in order to streamline and facilitate the academic innovation process towards delivering coherent and ground-breaking research directions shared by the communications and computer science disciplines to tackle 21st century ICT challenges. As a community driven response, the network will bring together academics from the electrical engineering, electronics, communications, networking, mathematics and computer science disciplines to achieve enhanced coordination of these researchers. Specifically, the network will create a vehicle enabling coordinated discussions and formulations of future research bids, activities and world-leading publications that establish internationally leading research activities. CommNet2 will benefit the UK by: mobilising the UK's academic and industrial communities in the ICT space to undertake world-leading research programmes; providing younger ICT researchers with training and networking opportunities to develop into tomorrow's leaders; and building a strong, vibrant and cohesive community across the communications and computer science disciplines. The UK has long had global strength in the ICT arena. From pioneering mobile operators through to a rich heritage of start-ups and consultancies we have been at the forefront of wireless and wireline communications for decades. This reputation has led to innovation, continued inward investment from major global players and the establishment of important clusters around the UK, such as Cambridge, Shoreditch, Bristol and Northern Ireland, the Surrey 5GIC as well as the successful phases of the m-VCE. The advent of 5G, superfast broadband, the IoT, cloud computing and the Tactile Internet provides an opportunity to reinforce the UK's strengths in ICT. Through CommNet2, the academic community, by working closely with the relevant industry and organisations, will catalyse a step-change in ICT research for the benefit of society.

Future wireless communication networks are expected to address unprecedented challenges to cope with a high degree of heterogeneity in terms of devices, deployment types, environments, carrier frequency, etc. Moreover, they are expected to provide orders of magnitude improvement to such heterogeneous networks in key technical requirements including throughput, number of connected devices, latency and reliability. With such diverse services and diverging requirements, it is cumbersome to design a unified all-in-one radio system to meet the technical needs for all types of services. In addition, designing separate systems that run on separate infrastructures make the operation and management of the system highly complex, expensive and spirally inefficient. The scope of the project is to establish a radio ecosystem on a common infrastructure that efficiently accommodates communication services for all vertical sections from manufacturing, entertainment, public safety, public transport, healthcare, financial services, automotive and energy utilities. This can be enabled by an algorithmic framework orchestrating all radio slices that are individually customised and optimally designed. Network slicing is an overarching feature towards 5G-and-beyond to support all scenarios efficiently. Core network slicing has attracted much attention through network functions virtualisation. However, from the radio level, an algorithmic framework for spectrum- and cost-efficient air-interface to achieve the true potential of end-to-end network slicing for the future diverse radio systems is still an open problem yet to be solved. To guarantee the required performance for each individual user case efficiently, the physical layer (PHY) configurations should be delicately optimised and medium access control layer (MAC) radio resource should be allocated on-demand. For instance, subcarrier spacing is one of the paramount importance parameters for modern multicarrier communication systems (e.g., LTE, WiFi, etc.), the service for future massive machine type communications (mMTC) might require smaller subcarrier spacing (thus larger symbol duration) to support massive delay-tolerant devices. While vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications, on the other hand, have more stringent latency requirements, thus, symbol duration should be significantly reduced compared to mMTC. However, cohabitation of the individually optimised services in one system may bring several technical challenges from both PHY and MAC. It will destroy the system orthogonality and PHY algorithm framework that the state-of-the-art telecommunication systems built on. From the resource allocation perspective, one of the challenges is that not only the multi-slice system forests a complex multiple layers resource structure, but also technical requirement of each slice can be significantly different. Thus, a cross-layer and cross-slice optimisation is envisioned to maximise the overall air-inference performance. The aim of REORDER is to address the abovementioned challenges, by establishing the framework of air-interface heterogeneous signal orchestration and efficient resource allocation. The proposed work fills in the last piece of the puzzle for realistic and efficient end-to-end network slicing. From this sense, REORDER will "reorder" the radio resource allocation caused by slice configuration disorders. The project will be undertaken in the Communication, Sensing and Imaging research group (CSI) in the University of Glasgow, by the PI, a PDRA and a PhD student based at the University of Glasgow. Our industrial partners include NEC Telecom MODUS (UK), Mathworks Research Centre Glasgow, and VIAVI Solutions (UK). The radical approaches proposed in this project will be verified though both state-of-the-art standard compatible system-level simulation and software defined radio (SDR) based over-the-air experimentations.

The recent advent of killer applications such as content distribution, cloud computing and Internet of things (IoT), all require for the underlying network to be able to understand specific service contexts. In this project we propose the Knowledge Centric Networking (KCN) paradigm, in which knowledge is positioned at the centre of the networking landscape. The objective is to enable in-network knowledge generation and distribution in order to develop necessary network control intelligence for handling complexity and uncertainty. In order to achieve this, specific algorithms and mechanisms/protocols will be developed for knowledge acquisition, processing, dissemination and organisation both within single and across homogeneous/heterogeneous administrative domains in the Internet. The project will investigate three styles of knowledge exchange based on Software Defined Networking (SDN) principles: Knowledge as a Tool (KaaT), Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) and Knowledge as a Cloud (KaaC). KaaT will enable intelligent network operations in dynamic network environments driven by knowledge gathered at different vantage points. We advocate a hierarchical knowledge framework in which knowledge and control functions are distributed at the right places within the network for fulfilling specific control tasks. In addition, we will invetigate knowledge sharing between different players in the Internet marketplace. This can be achieved either through explicit knowledge transfer from a knowledge provider to a knowledge consumer (KaaS), or based on open knowledge clouds where knowledge prosumers may publish or subscribe to information through an open but controlled knowledge ecosystem (KaaS). The proposed KCN architecture will be validated through two complementary use cases. KCN-driven content traffic offloading between heterogeneous radio access technologies for the future mobile Internet aims to achieve adaptive resource control by taking into account a wide variety of knowledge associated with content, users and network conditions. In addition, KCN-driven energy management targets cross-layer energy saving techniques at both the IP and the physical optical layer according to the derived knowledge and dynamically changing context information. The project provides direct contributions to the TI3 sub-challenges 1, 2, 3 and 4. First of all, the KCN-based knowledge ecosystem will equip the next generation Internet with necessary intelligence for handling complex requirements under dynamic conditions. Such an ecosystem, seamlessly coupled with the SDN architecture, will be able to gracefully support the ever increasing complexity and heterogeneity of future networked services and multitude of users. The two complementary use cases demonstrate how the proposed KCN framework will be instantiated in two different application domains, content traffic offloading in mobile/wireless access networks and energy efficiency in IP/optical transport networks. Use case 1 contributes to the 3rd sub-challenge, with knowledge-based content caching and traffic offloading techniques for the future content-oriented mobile Internet. Use case 2, on the other hand, contributes to the 2nd sub-challenge with intelligent energy saving mechanisms at both the IP and optical layer. Finally, with in-network knowledge inference and learning based on raw context information, the project also addresses the 4th sub-challenge of extracting understanding from data. In summary, context information captured during network/service operation will be used to derive systematic in-network knowledge and intelligence in order to deal adaptively with both complexity and uncertainty and enable near-optimal network operation.

Future wireless systems are expected to constitute an ultra dense wireless network, which supports billions of smart wireless devices (or machines) to provide a wide varieties of services for smart homes, smart cities, smart transportation systems, smart healthcare, and smart environments, etc., in addition to supporting conventional human-initiated mobile communications. Therefore, the communication technologies employed in future wireless communication systems are expected to be capable of coping with highly diverse service requirements and communication environments, both of which also have time-varying nature. However, the legacy wireless systems, such as LTE/LTE-A, have been primarily designed for human-initiated mobile communications, which rely on strict synchronisation guaranteed by a substantial signalling overhead. Explicitly, due to this overhead legacy systems are inefficient for device-centric mMTC. Furthermore, they are unable to support the massive connectivity required by the future mMTC networks, where devices heavily contend for the limited resources available for communications. This project is proposed at the time, when myriads of smart wireless devices of different types are being deployed and connected via the Internet, which is expected to be the next revolution in the mobile ecosystem. To fulfil these objectives, a new design paradigm is required for supporting the massive number of wireless devices having diverse service requirements and unique traffic characteristics. In this project, we propose to meet the challenges of future mMTC by investigating and designing novel non-orthogonal multiple access, flexible duplexing, and adaptive coherent-noncoherent transmission schemes, as well as new waveforms that are tailored for the future mMTC systems. We aim for alleviating the strict synchronism demanded by the legacy wireless systems, and for significantly improving their capabilities, network performance as well as the lifetime of autonomous mMTC nodes. The novelties of this project are summarized as follows. 1. New non-orthogonal sparse code multiple access (SCMA) schemes will be developed for mMTC systems, where the number of devices exceeds the number of available resource-slots, resulting in an over-loaded or a generalized rank-deficient condition. 2. Novel multicarrier waveforms will be designed for future mMTC in order to maximize spectrum efficiency by minimizing the overhead for achieving synchronisation as well as for reducing the out-of-band radiation. 3. By jointly exploiting the resources available in the time, frequency and spatial domains, we will design noncoherent, partially-coherent and adaptive coherent-noncoherent transmission schemes, in order to strike the best possible trade-off among overhead reduction, energy and spectral efficiency, latency and implementation complexity in practical mMTC scenarios. 4. We will investigate the full potential of the multicarrier-division duplex (MDD) scheme and, especially, its applications to future mMTC by synergistically combining it with novel multicarrier waveforms, non-orthogonal SCMA techniques and other high-efficiency transmission schemes developed within the project. 5. Furthermore, the key techniques developed in the project will be prototyped and integrated into the 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) test bed facilities at the University of Surrey. This will allow us to demonstrate the viability of our new design approaches, as well as to accelerate knowledge transfer and commercialisation. The proposed research will be conducted jointly by the 5GIC at the University of Surrey and Southampton Wireless (SW) at the University of Southampton, led by Xiao, Tafazolli, Yang & Hanzo. The research and commercial exploitation of the project will be further consolidated by our partnership with experienced academic and industrial partners.