To meet the demand of exponentially growing tele-traffic and to sustain the current level of economical growth, a high-quality digital infrastructure based on innovative and cost efficient solutions is required. The current geo-economics and building-preservation of historic cities do not favour the pervasive penetration of fibre. Hence, a lower-cost solution based on the improved exploitation of the existing copper network is essential to facilitate transformation of the digital infrastructure to support the next evolutionary step to Giga bits/s data rates. However, experts from our industrial partner BT believe that the throughput achieved with the aid of the state-of-the-art copper technology may only represent less than 30% of its ultimate capacity, when we exploit the hitherto unexploited high-frequency band. Hence, the research of next-generation ultra-high-throughput DSL systems beyond G.fast becomes of crucial importance and timely, where radically new signal processing techniques have to be conceived.
The challenge is to conquer the entire Very High Frequency (VHF) band and to holistically design the amalgamated wire-line and wireless system considered. Our proposed research starts from the fundamental understanding of the DSL channel over the entire VHF and beyond into UHF (up to 500 MHz) bands to the design of radical signal processing techniques for tackling the critical challenges. Holistic system optimisation is proposed for exploiting the full potential of copper. Thanks to BT's huge support, our proposed research has a high immediate engineering impact and a long-term scientific adventure.
Academic Investigators
The Principal Investigator (PI) Professor Lajos Hanzo Wolfson Fellow of the RS, FREng, FIEEE, FIET, Fellow of EURASIP, DSc, received his degree in electronics in 1976 and his doctorate in 1983. In 2009 he was awarded the honorary doctorate "Doctor Honoris Causa" by the Technical University of Budapest. During his 37-year career in telecommunications, he has held various research and academic posts in Hungary, Germany and the UK. Since 1986 he has been with the school of ECS, where he heads the SW team. He has successfully supervised about 100 PhD students, co-authored 20 John Wiley/IEEE Press books on mobile radio communications totalling in excess of 10 000 pages, published 1400+ research entries at IEEE Xplore, acted both as TPC and General Chair of several IEEE conferences, presented keynote lectures and has been awarded a number of distinctions. Currently he is directing a 60-strong academic research team, working on a range of research projects in the field of wireless multimedia communications sponsored by industry, the EPSRC UK and the European FP7 Programme. He is an enthusiastic supporter of industrial and academic liaison. He is also a Governor of the IEEE VTS. During 2008 - 2012 he was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Press and a Chaired Professor also at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He has 20 000+ GS citations and an H-index of 55.
The Co-Investigator (CoI) Dr Charalampos Tsimenidis is a Senior Lecturer in CSSP group in the school of EEE at NCL, UK. He received his MSc (with distinction) and PhD in communications and signal processing from NCL in 1999 and 2002, respectively. His main research interests are in the area of adaptive and iterative receivers for wireless communications. During the last 12 years, he has published over 150 conference and journal papers, successfully supervised 3 MPhil and 26 PhD students and made contributions to several European funded research projects and industrial projects. He has served as TPC member for over 80 international conferences and presented professional tutorials at various major conferences. He is a member of the IET and a senior member of the IEEE.
The Co-Investigator (CoI) Dr Rong Zhang is a Lecturer in SW team in the school of ECS at UoS, UK. He received his PhD in wireless communications from the UoS in 2009. During his post-doctoral period in ECS, he contributed to a number of international projects, including the India-UK Advanced Technology Centre of excellence (IU-ATC), the UK-China Science Bridges: R&D on 4G Wireless Mobile Communications (UC4G) as well as the EU OPTIMIX projects and the EU CONCERTO projects. He has a total of 70+ IEEE and OSA publications, including 40+ journals (20 of which as first author). He has acted as TPC member/invited session chair at major conferences. He is a member of the IET, of the IEEE and of the OSA.
Industrial Experts
Dr Anas Al Rawi received his M.Sc. (with distinction) and PhD degrees in communications and signal processing from Newcastle University, U.K., in 2007 and 2011, respectively. Currently, Anas is a senior researcher with the Access Network Research team, Research & Innovation, BT. His primary role focuses on the modelling of the current G.fast technology and its future generations. His research interests include copper based cross-layer optimisation, cooperative networks and multi-mode MIMO systems modelling.
Les Humphrey obtained B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, and ACGI, from Imperial College London University, 1970, M.Sc. in Telecom Switching from Aston University Birmingham 1974. Joined ITT/STL in 1970 working on modulation for digital microwave links and very high speed baseband digital transmission on coax for trunk applications. Worked on DSP and A to D aspects including Si implementation from 1978 till 2001 for ITT/STL/STC/Nortel. Was technical lead for projects including Trans-Multiplexer, various speech and image processing projects, software defined radio, A to D and D to A technology, formal methods for Si design, EMC aspects of digital transmission, and digital transmission on copper pairs from ISDN basic rate access to VDSL. Joined BT in 2001 as Chief Researcher with responsibility for leading DSL Research and Standards activities related to DSL, including work on ADSL, VDSL2, and in the past 5 years focusing on the G.fast concept both DSP and systems aspects.
Dr Paul Botham, Senior Research Engineer, Research & Innovation, BT. Paul Botham joined BT with a D.Phil. in theoretical physics from Oxford University. Within Research and Innovation, he has worked in a variety of network modelling roles, applying mathematical techniques to develop software tools for designing least-cost, resilient BT networks. This has involved a wide range of technologies in both core-transport and access environments. Paul is currently working on optimised deployment of next-generation network technology, incorporating both modelling of high-frequency propagation in copper cables and risk analysis for BT business cases.
Work Plan
If you cannot see our work plan, please download it here.