Spectrum Overlay through Aggregation of Heterogeneous Dispersed Bands
Description
Wireless access is becoming the dominant way of connecting to the Internet due to the high data rates that several radio access technologies (RATs) provide. Such success is a result of several advances in wireless communications over the last two decades. A key enabling technique which promises further improvement in data rates is carrier aggregation (CA). Intra-band and inter-band carrier aggregation, in a continuous or a non-continuous fashion, have been proposed within the 3GPP standardization body for LTE-Advanced (LTE-A). Cross-carrier scheduling is also specified through dynamic scheduling on different component carriers. LTE-A has been specified to support all types of CA using several transmission bandwidths for all band combinations. A future enhancement would be the assumption of CA operating over heterogeneous networks (HetNets) and heterogeneous radio access technologies (h-RATs), considering the fact that both HetNets and h-RATs are key aspects of beyond 4G communications. However, CA has not been designed for HetNets and h-RATs so far
The FP7 funded project SOLDER (starting November 2013) aims to develop a spectrum overlay technology that will be able to manage aggregated heterogeneous bands (HetBands) efficiently, which are licensed to HetNets and h-RATs or even based on unlicensed or opportunistic spectrum access, in order to deliver higher data rates to future multi-standard handset devices in a flexible way based on cognitive radio technology.
The current PhD position is funded by the project SOLDER and will support its development by solving some of the underlying fundamental research questions such as the design of appropriate physical layer techniques exploiting frequency and subcarrier diversity, multi-channel link adaptation and multidimensional radio resource and inter-carrier interference management, and radio impairments mitigation techniques, such as reduction of power fluctuation and linearization. To this end, proof of concept prototypes will be developed to demonstrate and validate the soundness of the innovative concepts proposed by SOLDER.
The project has a strong experimental aspect and will make heavy use of Eurecom's OpenAirInterface platform (www.openairinterface.org). The OpenAirInterface platform is an open-source software defined radio (SDR) development platform targeting 4th generation wireless systems such as LTE and WiMAX (MIMO OFDMA). The platform uses all-IP wireless networking and implements the PHY and MAC layer completely in software and in real-time. The candidate is expected to use this platform for experimentation as well as contribute to the platform development.
Requirements
We are looking for a highly motivated person with a master degree in electrical engineering or applied mathematics (signal processing or communications engineering) with strong mathematical and communication skills, keen to operate in a multidisciplinary team. The candidate should further have good programming skills in C. The candidate should be fluent in English.
Application
Screening of applications will begin immediately, and the search will continue until the position is filled. Applicants should send, to the address below (i) a one page statement of research interests and motivation, (ii) your CV and (iii) contact details for three referees (preferably one from your PhD or most recent research supervisor).
Applications should be submitted by e-mail to secretariat [at] eurecom [dot] fr with the reference PhD_CM_FK_08_2013
