Research

There is a considerable world-wide race to define the key requirements of the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks, develop 5G standards and perform technology trials as quickly as possible to enable commercial deployments of 5G by 2020. 5G is not meant to be an incremental improvement over its predecessors but a revolutionary leap forward in terms of data rates, latency, massive connectivity, network reliability and energy-efficiency. These performance criteria and capabilities are needed for high speed connectivity, Internet of Things (IoT), augmented virtual reality, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, etc. The requirements of 5G are expected to be met by utilizing a combination of different technologies including, but no limited to, large bandwidths (available in mm-Wave bands), increasing spatial degrees of freedom (via large antenna arrays and 3D Multi-Input-Multi-Output "MIMO"), network densification (using small cells or cell-free architectures), shared spectrum access (using Device-to-Device "D2D" and Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access "NOMA"), Full-Duplex (FD) communication and so on. I am interested in addressing the challenges involved with the integration of these technologies and at the same time realizing their full potential to improve system performance, reliability, security and economics.

SDN is the next generation networking architecture that is dynamic, manageable, cost-effective and adaptable. In SDN, network management is facilitated through software rather than low-level device configurations. The basic idea of SDN is to separate the control and data planes' functionalities of a network through the centralized management approach. Till now, my accomplished and ongoing research work is to develop centralized algorithms in order to facilitate the service provisioning (e.g., channel assignment, user association and routing) of WiFi Mesh Networks (WMNs) while targeting on the performance optimization. On the other hand, since the control plane is the heart of a network, studying the fault tolerance issues of a control plane is one of my research agenda. I am also interested to study the newly evolved security issues of a SDN-based network although this new architectural concept has solved many security issues of conventional networks to a great extent.

The ocean covers nearly two-thirds of the surface on the Earth, and there has been great interest in developing UWSNs to help us explore the ocean realm. A great deal of efforts have been devoted to it, and significant progress has been made since the beginning of 2000s. However, most of the networks are isolatedly developed currently, inherently hardware-based and application oriented with inflexible closed-form architectures, which are difficult to reconfigure, reprogram and evolve. They also lack the capability in sharing resources, and are far from service oriented networks. These limitations impair their capacity for wide range of applications. In order to propel the continued development of UWSNs, next-generation UWSNs should be robust, flexible, adaptive, programmable, support resource-feature and easily manageable and evolvable. To facilitate such enhancement, intuitively, emerging software-defined techniques and paradigms, such as software-defined radio (SDR), cognitive acoustic radio (CAR), network function virtualization (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN), Internet of underwater things (IoUTs) and sensor-cloud should be incorporated to conventional UWSNs. These software-defined technologies have the capability of softwarizing network resources and then redefining them to satisfy diverse application requirement, improve resource utilization efficiency and simplify network management. I am interested in addressing all possible challenges associated with the softwarization of UWSNs.