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Research

Following is a high level summary of my recent research projects (2010-present). Information for prospective PhD students is available at the bottom of this page.

7. Machine Learning in Wireless Networks (2018-present)

Machine learning is expected to play a key role in 6G wireless networks. I have one PhD student working in this area. A number of existing PhD students are also planning to consider future works in this area. I am keen to recruit more PhD students in this area.

  • Journals: [1] (draft)
  • Conference: To do

6. UAV Communications (2018-present)

UAVs as aerial base stations or as aerial users are expected to play a key part in 5G and beyond 5G communications.

Specific contributions include: Stadium use case for UAV base station,  UAV to support rapid information dissemination in a public safety scenario and trajectory modelling or cellular connected UAVs.

  • Journals: [4] (draft), [3], [2], [1]
  • Conference: [2] (under review), [1] (invited paper)

5. Wireless Power Transfer, Energy Harvesting and Backscatter Communications (2013-present)

Radio frequency (RF) enabled simultaneous information and power transfer (SWIPT) has emerged as an attractive solution to power future wireless networks. There are three main architectures for SWIPT: (i) integrated SWIPT enables information and power to be extracted from the same signal transmitted by a base station, (ii) closed-loop SWIPT utilizes downlink from base station to users for power transfer (PT) and uplink for information transmission (IT), and (iii) decoupled SWIPT overlays traditional cellular networks with special power beacons (PBs), which do not require a backhaul link, to provide dedicated PT.

Specific contributions include (i) SWIPT for relaying, cooperative, ad hoc, physical layer security and sensor network scenarios, (ii) decoupled SWIPT (i.e., power beacons) for ad hoc and millimeter wave networks and (iii) Backscatter communications for ultra low power communications in Internet of Things (IoT).

4. Device to Device (D2D) and Machine to Machine (M2M) Communication (2015-present)

D2D communication allowing direct communication between nearby users has been envisaged in 3GPP standards. In D2D-enabled cellular networks, the cellular and D2D users can share the spectrum resources in two ways: in-band where D2D communications utilizes the cellular spectrum and out-of-band where D2D communications utilizes the unlicensed spectrum. In-band D2D can be further divided into two categories: overlay where the cellular and D2D communications use orthogonal (i.e., dedicated) spectrum resources and underlay where D2D users share the same spectrum resources occupied by the cellular users

Machine type communication (MTC) is also envisaged to play a key role within future fifth generation networks. MTC can be classified intotwo types:massive machine type communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable machine type communication(uMTC).

Specific contributions include D2D mode selection, resource allocation and stochastic analysis and massive MTC solutions.

3. Distance Distributions and Modelling of Finite Wireless Networks (2012-2019)

Distance distributions can be applied to study important wireless network characteristics such as interference, outage probability, connectivity, routing, and energy consumption. They can also be applied in other branches of science, such as forestry, mathematics, operations research and material sciences. When a fixed and finite number of nodes are uniformly and independently distributed over a finite region such as a square or hexagon (polygon in general), the two important distance distributions are: 1) the pdf of the Euclidean distance between two nodes uniformly and independently distributed inside a polygon and 2) the pdf of the Euclidean distance between any arbitrary reference point and its nth neighbor node when N nodes are uniformly and independently distributed inside a polygon.

Specific contributions include modelling of the nth neighbour distance distributions in concave and convex polygons with arbitrary location of the reference point, modelling of connectivity in ad hoc networks and modelling of finite area wireless ad hoc, cognitive networks and D2D networks.

2. Synchronization (2009-2019)

Timing and carrier synchronization is a fundamental requirement for any wireless communications system to work properly. Timing synchronization is the process by which a receiver node determines the correct instants of time at which to sample the incoming signal. Carrier synchronization is the process by which a receiver adapts the frequency and phase of its local carrier oscillator with those of the received signal.

Specific contributions include both blind and pilot based algorithms for timing and carrier synchronization and channel estimation in OFDM, coperative, distributed, multi-way, mmwave and full duplex networks.

1. Spherical Signal Processing (2010-2015)

Signals that are inherently defined on the unit sphere appear in various fields of science and engineering such as medical image analysis, geodesy, computer graphics, planetary science, electromagnetic inverse problems, cosmology, 3D beamforming and wireless channel modeling.

Specific contributions include extension of Euclidean signal processing techniques to the sphere and development of new spatio-spectral signal transformation and filtering techniques.


PhD @ ANU (Updated: 20-11-2019)


Advice for international students

I have a page with advice for international students and students from Pakistan, who are looking for PhD opportunities at ANU.


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Author: Salman Durrani.
Last Updated: 8 Jan. 2020.