Aims

The proposed research programme is fully inter-disciplinary and aims to provide a complete understanding of the MIMO technology. Specifically, UCY and UTM study MIMO from an information theoretic and decentralized optimization standpoint with the focus on the fundamental limits of this technology; UoY and UoP study security from a communication theory standpoint and investigate new PHY techniques; ULANC and CIIT investigate MIMO channels for appropriate characterisation of interference in the network and developing secure communication schemes by exploiting the dynamics at the physical layer; UPM and UTM adopt a more practical approach and investigate hardware implementations of MIMO concepts. The close interaction between the different host institutes through staff exchange, visits, network events, and tutorial courses provides a comprehensive set of complementary technical skills to the researchers. In addition, the ATOM project is a promising combination of inter-disciplinary expertise in order to comprehensively understand the potential benefits of MIMO technology for new services, applications, and products.

Objective

Particularly the overall objective of ATOM is to accelerate the transfer and deployment of research knowledge between European countries and third-country partners in order to provide a framework of advanced MIMO solutions for realizing green, secure and high data throughput wireless communications. The novelty of this project is here:

• The project brings together two advanced MIMO technologies, massive MIMO and cloud radio access networks (C-RAN), where a novel heterogeneous network architecture is proposed to boost network capacity by effectively exploiting the advantages of massive MIMO and C-RAN.

• A rigorous algorithm-theoretic framework for maximizing energy efficiency is developed for the proposed heterogeneous architecture, whereby energy harvesting is realized by applying the novel concept of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT).

• Dynamic physical layer conditions in wireless environments are used to develop comprehensive security solutions for implementing keyless secure transmissions as well as key establishment, which will bridge the gap between physical layer security and conventional cryptography.

• We will extend the existing wireless network testbed available at the consortium and carry out experimental evaluations for closing the gap between theory and practice.