Sustainable Wireless Communication Network Lab

Contact Info: Lin Cai Associate Professor

Chicago, IL 60616

Email: lincai@iit.edu

Office Phone: 312-567-5863

[Research Interests]

My research interests lie in the area of wireless communications and networking with topics including

· Modeling and performance analysis of distributed communication networks

· Medium access control and resource management

· Wireless networks with energy harvesting

· Internet of Things

· Deep reinforcement learning based radio resource management

[Research ]

Dr. Lin Cai’s research is in the area of wireless communication and networking, with focus on protocol design and performance modeling of sustainable wireless networks with energy harvesting. The next generation wireless network is expected to integrate heterogeneous radio access technologies in a dense environment to provision ubiquitous wireless access for mobile users and massive Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Yet it is also recognized that densely deployed heterogeneous networks (HetNets) will cause significant increase in the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emission. Facing the challenges in reducing energy consumption in the next generation densely deployed HetNets, green radio communication has been emerging to achieve an environmentally sustainable and energy efficient wireless communications. The long term objective of Dr. Cai’s research is to contribute toward a fully energy sustainable wireless network by exploiting both renewable energy sources and energy transfer technologies to power network infrastructure, mobile terminals, and wireless IoT devices. The short term objective is to design and optimize cross layer protocols and algorithms to enable energy sustainable network operation with network capacity planning, topology control, and radio resource management. The proposed green communication technologies will further enable ubiquitous information infrastructure that lead to future sustainable societies.

Research project 1: Sustainable Wireless Communication System Powered by Renewable Energy

Summary: In a renewable energy powered communication system, the fundamental design criterion and main performance metric have shifted from energy efficiency to energy sustainability. In other words, it is more important to ensure the harvested energy can sustain the user demands with satisfactory quality of service provisioning than minimizing the energy consumption of the communication system. The main objective of the proposed research is to optimize the use of the harvested energy for sustainable operation of communication systems. Specifically, the proposed research investigates three tasks including: a) energy sustainability modeling and analysis, b) energy sustainable capacity planning and topology control; and c) energy sustainable resource management. The fundamental study of the energy sustainability will be leveraged to investigate a series of relevant research issues on sustainable communication and networking, including energy management, optimal network deployment, distributed admission control, adaptive resource allocation, and energy sustainable medium access control.

Research project 2: Energy efficient wireless communication networks: Modeling, Algorithms, and Applications

Summary: This project studies energy efficiency optimization in a generic network setting and develop energy efficient techniques and low complexity algorithm for practical scenarios in 5G cellular networks. We first propose a uniformed multidimensional optimization framework for capacity or energy efficiency optimization. Decomposition techniques with multi-objective optimization, which by nature involved in energy efficiency 1 optimization, will be studied. Energy efficient solutions in a couple of important 5G cellular scenarios will be enabled through innovative modeling and algorithms in our uniformed multidimensional framework including heterogeneous networks, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), and device to device (D2D) communications.

Research project 3: Radio Resource Management for 5G Wireless Communication Networks over Unlicensed Bands

Summary: In this project, we investigate cross layer communication and protocol design and performance optimization to enable next generation 5G long term evolution (LTE) network over unlicensed band. Specifically, we exploit advanced mmWave and cooperative communication technologies in the design of new medium access control protocols and resource management schemes to enhance the network capacity. Both theoretical and experimental contributions and cross-layer optimization tools are offered to maximize the utilization of network resources in support of diverse multimedia services with quality of service guarantee. Our research activities have been mainly devoted to the following three research topics including, a) Radio access management of unlicensed wireless network; b) Traffic offloading in unlicensed network; and c) Wireless network over unlicensed mmWave band.

Research project 4: Intelligent Cognitive IoT Networks

Summary: IoT applications are growing so fast that every electronic device will soon need a wireless connection to the Internet. Besides the green energy sources, another green solution is to utilize the energy in radio frequency (RF) signals over the air to charge low power wireless IoT devices. We explore feasible solutions to enable a fully energy sustainable cognitive wireless IoT network by intelligently and opportunistically utilizing available network resources to provision services for massive IoT devices with energy harvesting. In a cloud radio access network, small cell base stations harvest energy from green sources such as solar or wind, and then wirelessly charge massive IoT devices through radio frequency communications. Thus, it is crucial to optimize the use of available spectrum and the harvested energy and appropriately distribute them to IoT devices with energy transfer technology. We apply deep reinforcement learning to enable distributed data and energy transfer for future sustainable massive IoT networks.

Publications available at google scholar

[Teaching]

· Undergraduate Courses:

o ECE 407 (Introduction to Computer Networks with Laboratory) (Spring and Fall)

o ECE 408 (Introduction to Computer Networks) (Spring and Fall)

· Graduate Course:

o ECE 517 Modern Wireless Network Protocols and Standards (Spring)

[Professional Activities]

Editorship

Executive Editorial Committee member

– IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2021-present)

Associate Editor for

– IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technologies (2021-present)

– IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2018-2021)

– China Communications journal, (2018 – 2020)

– IEEE Network Magazine (2012-2017)

Conference organization committee member for

– Wireless Networks: Protocols, Security and Services, IEEE VTC Fall 2019.

– The 27th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, IEEE ICNP, 2019.

– Green Networks and Sustainable Computing (GREEN) track, IEEE ICCCN, 2016.

– Green Computing, Communications and Networking symposium, IEEE ICNC 2016.

– Next Generation Networking track, IEEE ICCC 2015.

– Mobile Computing and Wireless Communications symposium, IEEE CSE, 2014.

– Cognitive Radio and Networks Symposium, IEEE ICC, 2014.

Technical Program Committee member for

– IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing

– IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on Wireless and Mobile (APWiMob)

– IEEE International Workshop on Cognitive Cellular Systems (CCS)

– IEEE International Conference on Selected Topics in Mobile and Wireless Networking (MoWNet)

– IEEE International Conference on Connected Vehicles and Expo (ICCVE)

– IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)

– IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC)

– IEEE International Conference on Communications in China (ICCC)

– IEEE International Conference on Wireless Communications and Signal Processing (WCSP)

– IEEE International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC)

– International Conference on Smart Homes and Health Telematics (ICOST)

– IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM)

– International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN)

– IEEE International Conference on Ultra Modern Telecommunications (ICUMT)

– IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing and Networking Technologies (WMCNT)

– IEEE Workshop on MultiMedia Applications over Wireless Networks (MediaWiN)

– IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC)

– IEEE Cognitive Wireless Communications and Networking (CWCN) Workshop

– IEEE Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology (ISSPIT)

Reviewer for journals and conferences

– IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technologies, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE Wireless Communications, Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, Computer Networks, Wireless Networks, Elsevier Ad Hoc Networks, EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, Wiley International Journal of Network Management (IJNM), IEEE Intelligent Systems.

– IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE GLOBECOM, IEEE ICC, IEEE WCNC, IEEE IWCMC, IEEE ICUMT, IEEE ICOST, IEEE MoWNet, IEEE ICCC, IEEE WCSP, IEEE WMCNT, IEEE MediaWiN, IEEE PIMRC, IEEE ISSPIT, IEEE CWCN.