Advancing Wi-Fi Technology: Towards Efficient Communication and Pervasive Applications

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Advancing Wi-Fi Technology: Towards Efficient Communication and 
        Pervasive Applications"

By

Mr. LI Haochao


Abstract

Due to the popularization of smartphones, pads and laptops, mobile data 
traffic is growing exponentially and Wi-Fi based wireless communication is 
becoming an indispensable part of people's daily life. According to the 
Cisco Visual Network Index, the traffic from mobile devices will exceed 
the traffic from wired devices by 2015. Such ever-growing demands of 
mobile data traffic drive the need to not greatly enhance the Wi-Fi based 
wireless communication capacity, but also to expand its service areas, 
making Wi-Fi pervasive. Meanwhile, this trend, on the other hand, provides 
the basics to open another new era with Wi-Fi. Although Wi-Fi is 
originally designed for communication, it is not limited to communication. 
Based on the pervasiveness of Wi-Fi, a series of pervasive applications 
can be developed. In this proposal, we have conducted research on both of 
these two aspects to advance the Wi-Fi technology, i.e., towards efficient 
communication and pervasive applications. Specifically, we have first 
propose two systems, hJam and CUTS, to improve the channel efficiency of 
wireless communication in the traditional point-to-point based and MU-MIMO 
based WLANs respectively. hJam allows the data traffic and the control 
messages to be transmitted simultaneously in the same channel while CUTS 
allows effective MU-MIMO in practice for uplink traffic by providing the 
antenna information of contention nodes in channel contention. Through our 
experiments using USRP2s on a software radio testbed, we have shown these 
systems can improve the channel efficiency of the existing systems 
significantly. Meanwhile, we have also proposed two pervasive applications 
by using Wi-Fi infrastructure, i.e., Wi-Fi based people counter and human 
identification. Our preliminary results imply that they are feasible and 
have the potential to be widely deployed. We have also presented our 
research plans on completing these two works


Date:			Friday, 7 March 2014

Time:			4:00pm - 6:00pm

Venue:			Room 5501
 			Lifts 25-26

Committee Members:	Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Lionel M Ni (Supervisor)
			Prof. Bo Li
                        Dr. Qiong Luo
 			

**** ALL are Welcome ****