- Funding:
- EPSRC
The Team
Southampton Wireless Visible Light Communications (SW-VLC) team has been focusing on the networking aspect of VLC research, with worldwide collaborations spanning from both academia and industry. This project will be conducted by the PI, one post-doctoral RA and one PhD student.
The Idea
 Conventional Design When adopting the conventional design principle, one may partition the room into four square-shaped cells having 16 APs per cell. However, constructing conventional cells by restricting users within a pre-defined boundary will lead to tele-traffic overload in crowded cells and to underload in cells only supporting a few users, resulting in an unbalanced loading problem. A typical example can be seen as in the left figure having a highly unbalanced user-loading, where a cluster of users are in the `northern' half of the room, while only few users are in the `south-west' corner. |
 User-centric Design Distinctively, by taking into account the users' geo-locations, the novel user-centric design flow is based on grouping the users together and then associating the APs with them. Hence, the resultant cells are of amorphous shape. It is easy to see that the amorphous cells are capable of breaking the fixed boundaries of conventional design and of avoiding the unbalanced loading problem, since more APs are associated with the crowded areas, whilst assigning less APs to the areas supporting only a few users. |
 Moving Amorphous Cells Animation As further advances, amorphous cells are capable of forming user-centric `breathing' cells evolving upon users' movement, where new APs may join in the cell formation with the resigning of old APs. The left figure animation shows how the amorphous cells are adapted corresponding to the movement of a particular user, where both the amorphous cell shape and the total number of amorphous cells are evolving. |
The Demo
The Vision
Publications
- Simeng, Feng; Li, Xuan; Zhang, Rong; Ming Jiang and Hanzo, Lajos (2016) Hybrid Positioning for the Amorphous-Cell Assisted User-Centric Visible Light Downlink. IEEE Photonics Journal (submitted)
- Li, Xuan; Yongkai Huo; Zhang, Rong and Hanzo, Lajos (2016) User-Centric Visible Light Communications for Energy-Efficient Scalable Video Streaming. [in special issue: Green Communications and Networking Series 3 ] IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (submitted)
- Zhang, Rong; Claussen, Holger; Haas, Harald and Hanzo, Lajos (2016) Energy Efficient Visible Light Communications Relying on Amorphous Cells. [in special issue: Energy-Efficient Techniques for 5G Wireless Communication Systems] IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
- Zhang, Rong; Wang, Jiaheng; Wang, Zhaocheng; Xu, Zhengyuan; Zhao, Chunming and Hanzo, Lajos (2015) Visible light communications in heterogeneous networks: pave the way for user-centric design. [in special issue: Visible Light Communications] IEEE Wireless Communications
- Li, Xuan; Zhang, Rong; Wang, Jiaheng; Xu, Zhengyuan and Hanzo, Lajos (2015) Users First: User-Centric Cluster Formation for Interference Mitigation in Visible Light Networks. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
- Li, Xuan; Jin, Fan; Zhang, Rong and Hanzo, Lajos (2015) Cooperative load balancing in hybrid visible light communications and WiFi. IEEE Transactions on Communications
- Jiang, Junyi; Zhang, Rong and Hanzo, Lajos (2015) Analysis and design of three-stage concatenated color-shift keying. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
- Li, Baolong; Wang, Jiaheng; Zhang, Rong; Shen, Hong; Zhao, Chunming and Hanzo, Lajos (2015) Multiuser MISO transceiver design for indoor visible light communication with Per-LED optical power constraints. IEEE Photonics Journal
- Jin, Fan; Zhang, Rong and Hanzo, Lajos (2014) Resource allocation under delay guarantee constraints for heterogeneous visible light and RF femtocells. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Primary investigator
- rz
Partners
- Bell Labs
- BT
Associated research group
- Next Generation Wireless
- Date:
- 2014-
- Themes:
- Accessible Technologies, Educational Enhancement, ELearning, Platforms and Tools
- Funding:
- EU
A pan-european Erasmus+ project aiming to provide an online course authored by accessibility experts in nine universities. The introductory MOOC aims to highlight the barriers experienced by those who have a range of sensory, physical and cognitive disabilities and impairments when accessing online content or some general technologies and how strategies can be introduced to provide digital accessibility. The five week programme will be introduced with strategies being presented as ââ¬Ëstepsââ¬â¢ through the process. The steps will cover access to mobile and web services, online multimedia such as videos etc., documentation and technology used in daily living such as Self -Service Terminals (e.g. cash machines), smart homes and cities. Every step of the course will be authored by one group within the partnership and reviewed by another before receiving its final evaluation from the hosting MOOC platform partnership.
Primary investigators
- Gottfried Zimmerman
- Mike Wald
Partners
- Høgskolen i Oslo og Akershus
- HdM Stuttgart
- Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis
- University of York
- Dublin Institute of Technology
- Technische Universität Dresden
- Johannes Kepler Universität Linz
- àñýõÃâ¬Ã¹ÃÆÃâîüùÿ ÃâùóñïÿÃ⦠(University of the Aegean)
Associated research group
- Web and Internet Science
- Funding:
- EPSRC
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.
- WP A: Copper Channel and Interference Modelling (ALL)
- WP B: Constellation Shaping (NCL+BT)
- WP C: Advanced Transceiver (SOTON+BT)
- WP D: Full Duplex (NCL+BT)
- WP E: Cooperative Backhaul (SOTON+BT)
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.
Primary investigators
- Lajos Hanzo
- rz
- Dr Charalampos Tsimenidis
Partner
- BT
Associated research group
- Next Generation Wireless
- Date:
- 2013-2016
- Funding:
- EUFP7
IoT Lab is a European Research project which aims at researching the potential of crowdsourcing to extend IoT testbed infrastructure for multidisciplinary experiments with more end-user interactions.
Primary investigator
- Prof. Frank McGroarty
Secondary investigator
Associated research group
- Web and Internet Science
- Date:
- 2014-2017
- Theme:
- Web Observatory
- Funding:
- EU
VOICE is a virtual business incubator for startups. Its uniqueness is that it is globally accessible around the clock, open to anyone with an interesting idea, unlimited in space, open and practically boundless in providing services, information and practical guidance, in contrast to the traditional ââ¬â physical ââ¬â incubators.
Primary investigators
Secondary investigator
- xw4g08
Associated research group
- Web and Internet Science
- Date:
- 2012-2015
- Date:
- 2012-2015
- Theme:
- Internet Science
- Funding:
- EUFP7
The Network of Excellence in Internet Science aims to strengthen scientific and technological excellence by developing an integrated and interdisciplinary scientific understanding of Internet networks and their co-evolution with society, and also by addressing the fragmentation of European research in this area. Its main objective is to enable an open and productive dialogue between all disciplines which study Internet systems from any technological or humanistic perspective, and which in turn are being transformed by continuous advances in Internet functionality. The network brings together over thirty research institutions across Europe that are focusing on network engineering, computation, complexity, networking, security, mathematics, physics, sociology, game theory, economics, political sciences, humanities, and law, as well as other relevant social and life sciences. The network's main deliverable will be a durable shaping and structuring of the way that this research is carried out, by gathering together a critical mass of resources, gathering the expertise needed to provide European leadership in this area, and by spreading excellence beyond the partnership. The network is funded under the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme: Information and Communication Technologies.
Primary investigators
- Dr Mike Surridge
- Thanassis Tiropanis
- Wendy Hall
Secondary investigator
- xw4g08
Associated research groups
- IT Innovation Centre
- Web and Internet Science
- Date:
- 2014-2017
- Theme:
- Accessibility
- Funding:
- (erasmus+)
MOOCAP - Massive Open Online Course Accessibility Partnership funded as an Erasmus+ project. The goal of this project is to provide education on accessible design in ICT. Several aspects will be covered including how to develop accessible text and media for web sites, documents, mobile apps, and daily living aids that use technology from ATMs to washing machines). There are several partners across Europe, participating in the project, taking different roles, while providing a joint introductory set of activities and then separate specialist activities over five weeks.
Primary investigators
Secondary investigator
Partners
- Høgskolen i Oslo og Akershus
- HdM Stuttgart
- Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis
- Dublin Institute of Technology
- Technische Universität Dresden
- Johannes Kepler Universität Linz
- àñýõÃâ¬Ã¹ÃÆÃâîüùÿ ÃâùóñïÿÃ⦠(University of the Aegean)
Associated research group
- Web and Internet Science
- Date:
- 2014-2015
- Theme:
- Multimedia
- Funding:
- _other (WSI)
This project will produce a pilot framework for accessible annotation of streamed video and other multimedia content and evaluate its impact and potential for enrichment of research and learning resources.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- Graeme Earl
- Adam Procter
Associated research group
- Web and Internet Science