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Research at Communication Systems

Current projects led by the Division of Communication Systems

  • Holistic energy efficiency optimization in cellular networks
    • Funded by: Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) (2015-2018)
    • Project leader: Emil Björnson.
    • Project summary: This project takes a "clean-slate" look at wireless communication networks and investigate how these should be designed for maximal energy efficiency. This is a broad question that cannot be fully analyzed and answered in a single research project. The main purpose and unique edge of this project is to utilize communication theoretic models to analyze mathematically how the energy efficiency is affected by a variety of key design parameters; to identify the interplay between these parameters and fundamental design tradeoffs. This will enable new ways of optimizing the networks with respect to these design parameters, using both analytical and numerical tools. The methodical foundation of the project lies in the fields of communication/information theory, signal processing, and applied mathematics. The focus is on the energy efficiency of cellular networks, which cover the data traffic demand over a large area by having an infrastructure of access points and letting each user terminal connect to the closest one. The reason is that cellular networks exist almost everywhere and can be carefully organized and planned by the network operators, which gives the means to quickly apply the optimization and technological insights from this project in practice.
  • Radio Resource Management in Massive MIMO Communication Systems
    • Funded by: Center for Industrial and Information Technology (CENIIT) (2015-)
    • Project leader: Emil Björnson.
    • Project summary: The ambitious but necessary goal for 5G networks is to handle a 1000x increase in wireless data traffic. The key to handling such an orders-of-magnitude increase is efficient radio resource management; that is, how to best utilize the available time and frequency resources for wireless data transmission. To reach up to 1000x, one needs to investigate techniques that reuse a given amount of spectrum in the spatial domain. One of the most promising techniques to improve the area data throughput is massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output), where wireless access points (APs) are equipped with arrays with hundreds of active antenna elements. These antennas are phase-synchronized and can thus steer each data signal by beamforming towards its intended user terminal, instead of spreading the signal energy blindly over the coverage area. The academic research on massive MIMO has so far focused on physical-layer aspects. In contrast, the resource management that takes place in the media access control (MAC) layer of wireless systems has received little attention in the context of massive MIMO. This leaves the door open for major research contributions, because the large gains in area throughput offered by massive MIMO physical-layer techniques need to be canalized by novel resource management schemes that can exploit the unique system characteristics. This project considers three different research directions in the MAC layer.
    • Detailed project description
  • High-end performance with low-end devices
    • Funded by: Swedish Research Council (VR) (2014-2018)
    • Project leader: Prof. Erik G. Larsson.
    • Project summary: The vision of massive MIMO (MaMi) is to build wireless base stations with hundreds of coherently operating antennas. The potential impact of MaMi is enormous---and includes improvements in capacity by a factor 10-50 and in radiated energy-efficiency by up to a thousand times. A fundamental question is whether the combined effect of hardware impairments (such as non-linearities and variations due to the manufacturing process) will aggregate unfavorably or not when the number of antennas is large. The answer will determine whether it is feasible to build high-end MaMi base stations using inexpensive (low-end) RF devices. We believe that with proper design of waveforms and signal processing algorithms, this is possible. This proposal presents interdisciplinary research towards realizing this vision.

European projects where we are partner

  • FP7-MAMMOET
    • Funded by: The European Union (EU) (2014-2016)
    • Project leader: Dr.-Ing. Klaus-Michael Koch Technikon Forschungs- und Planungsgesellschaft mbH. Partners: Technikon Forschungs- und Planungsgesellschaft mbH (AT), Interuniversitair Micro-Electronica Centrum VZW (BE), Eriksson AB (SE), Infineon Technologies Austria AG (AT), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (BE), Lunds Universitet (SE), Linköpings Universitet (SE), Telefonica Investigacion Y Desarrollo SA (ES)
    • Project summary: MAMMOET will advance the development of Massive MIMO (MaMi), a new and most promising direction in mobile access. MaMi makes a clean break with current technology by using several hundreds of base station antennas that operate phase-coherently together, simultaneously serving many tens of low-complexity single-antenna terminals in the same time-frequency resource.

      The goals of the MAMMOET project are:
      • to demonstrate that MaMi can increase both data rates and the overall spectral efficiency by up to ten times, while decreasing the transmitted radiofrequency (RF) power by many orders of magnitude;
      • the extensive use of inexpensive low-power components, reduced latency, simplification of the multiple-access layer, and robustness to interference;
      • to drastically reduce emitted RF power so that the total energy consumption of a mobile network is lowered when implemented with simple, low power hardware developed in MAMMOET.
    • More details on the FP7-MAMMOET project webpage

Nationally funded projects where we are partner


Page responsible: Erik G. Larsson
Last updated: 2016 02 23   18:56


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