Energy Efficient Cooperative Wireless Access
As the wireless spectrum becomes ever more crowded, and the number of devices with wireless capabilities grows, the need for users to cooperate becomes inevitable. Cooperative wireless communications is a new approach to developing solutions for providing interference mitigation, increased data rates, deployment flexibility, and increasingly as a way to achieve significant energy savings. One example is in densely populated urban living environments where the density of WiFi router deployment will be high for the most part. This makes it possible for users to share access points for Internet access in a seamless manner to save energy and cost. By coordinating the wireless routers, it is possible for ISPs to dynamically determine the smallest set of wireless routers that need to be kept on to meet the combined bandwidth requirement of the households, and putting the rest in sleep mode. In the context of the Australian NBN deployment, we believe that such schemes can achieve up to 60-80% energy savings in the wireless access system without any perceptible impact to the users. When signals are cooperatively combined at the physical layer even greater savings are possible.
Iain Collings is the Research Director of the Wireless and Networking Technologies Laboratory in the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) ICT Centre where he leads a Research Program of over 65 staff. Previously he was an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney (1999-2005); a Lecturer at the University of Melbourne (1996-1999); and a Research Fellow at the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Sensor Signal and Information Processing (1995). He received the B.E. degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Melbourne in 1992, and the Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering from the Australian National University in 1995. Dr Collings has served as an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2002-2009) and the Elsevier Physical Communication Journal PHYCOM (2008-2012). He has served as the Co-Chair of Technical Program Committees for a number of international IEEE Conferences, and is a founding organizer of the annual Australian Communication Theory Workshops 2000-2013. He has served as the Chair of the IEEE NSW Section Joint Communications & Signal Processing Chapter (2008-2010), and Secretary of the IEEE NSW Section (2010). He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Sydney, the University of Queensland, and Macquarie University. He has published over 250 research papers in the area of mobile digital communications. In 2009 he was awarded the Engineers Australia IREE Neville Thiele Award for outstanding achievements in engineering, and in 2011 he was awarded the IEEE CommSoc Stephen O. Rice Award (jointly with his coauthors) for the best paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Communications in the previous three years.