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High Altitude Platform for Remote Wireless Coverage

PI: Dr. Moazam Maqsood
Funding: PKR 15.2M (IGNITE) 

This project is aimed at providing internet services to remotely located areas within Pakistan. People nowadays consider the internet as one of the basic necessities of life. This is because internet allows them with one platform where they can socialize, exchange information, share knowledge as well as buy/sell their services and products. However, there are a lot of countries especially in the Asian and African market where people are unable to access it. This is probably because a huge investment is required for the terrestrial infrastructure deployment but since there is a huge customer base in these areas, big companies like Facebook, o3b and Google are making efforts to bring internet to these markets. HAPs are one of the platforms that can be used for fast deployment of telecom infrastructure. It is preferred over traditional terrestrial infrastructure because of larger coverage area support as well as is less affected from the hostile environment. The same is also preferred over the satellite due to less development cost.

Moreover, the same HAP can be equipped with GPS (Global Positioning System) like transmitters in order to provide a navigation solution to the users. The navigation payloads will transmit timing signals in the L-band which the receiver can decode in order to find its precise location. The constellation can also be used as a disaster management network in the absence of the primary wired network.

Small Cells-based Solution for Smart Cities

PI: Dr. Sobia Jangsher
Funding: PKR 2.8M (HEC)

Smart cities are the next big digital revolution. They promise to provide better "quality of living" to the citizen and municipalities. Small cells deployment will be a vital feature in smart cities to enable high throughput and wide coverage. Various business models and devices/application/services have been proposed for small cells. All these innovative technologies revolve around the concept of ubiquitous connectivity. In this project, we aim to study the small cell as a communication connectivity solution for smart cities. Small cells are low powered base stations to provide coverage to indoor or edge users. In smart cities data of different amount (depending on the devices/application/services) and on different location (indoor, vehicles etc.) are generated. Based on these observations, we aim to solve the problem of varying quality of service and ubiquitous connectivity. We plan to investigate the problem both theoretically and experimentally using software defined radios (SDRs). The findings of this project can provide solutions for communication infrastructure of smart cities.

Experimental Analysis of Cognitive Femtocells for 5G Networks

PI: Dr. Farrukh Bhatti
Funding: PKR 4.2M (HEC)

The demand for high data rates is on the rise. This is mainly due to the widespread of devices such as, smart phones and tablets that increasingly rely on data intensive applications to enhance end user’s quality of experience. These applications typically include high definition video streaming, video conferencing and file downloading etc. Though 4G is already operating successfully in many countries and it offers peak data rates of 100Mbps and 1Gbps for low mobility and high mobility users, respectively, however, 5G will significantly outperform 4G in all these aspects. In this project we are investigating a few technologies related to small cells that can help achieve these ambitious goals. We theoretically investigate spectrum sharing and leasing between Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) with heterogeneous network architecture (HetNets), for capacity enhancement. We explore interplay of Wi-Fi offloading and small cell cooperation to maximize per user throughput. We are also using software-radios (USRPs) to implement virtual radios using different waveforms including FBMC, for efficient utilization of radio hardware on small cell base stations.

Improved Waveform for Massive Machine Type Communication in Future Wireless Networks

PI: Dr. Adnan Zafar

Transmission of complex-valued symbols using filter bank multicarrier systems has been an issue due to the self-interference between the transmitted symbols both in the time and frequency domain (so-called intrinsic interference). In this project, we are proposing a novel low-complexity interference-free filter bank multicarrier system with QAM modulation (FBMC/QAM) using filter deconvolution. The proposed method is based on the inversion of the prototype filters which can completely removes the intrinsic interference at the receiver and allows the use of complex-valued signaling. The interference terms in FBMC/QAM with and without the proposed system will be analyzed and compared in terms of mean square error (MSE). The theoretical and simulation results will be used to demonstrate that the proposed method cancels the intrinsic interference and improves the output signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR). Since it is likely that the adjacent sub-bands in future multi-service transmissions will be out of sync since simple IoT (internet of things) devices in future wireless networks may only have coarse synchronization. Thus it is very desirable for a system to be robust against asynchronism between adjacent subbands. We will therefore evaluate the performance of the proposed system in an asynchronous multi-service scenario. We will also analyze the complexity of the proposed system since the additional baseband processing can increase the computational complexity of the system.