Mahmoud H. Ismail

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) of the United Nations has defined system requirements for 4^thgeneration (4G) wireless systems in what is known as IMT-advanced. These requirements are very challenging to satisfy by today’s current technologies. This research project focuses on a subset of the core technologies needed for evolving current wireless systems, as realized in the third generation partnership project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) system, towards 4^thgeneration system as defined in the ITU IMT-advanced. LTE is currently being evolved to LTE-Advanced as the core response of 3GPP to meet the requirements of the ITU IMT-advanced system.

We tackle three inter-related research areas in the 4G++ project: 1) channel-aware radio resource management/scheduling particularly for the LTE uplink. This area alsoincludes coordinated multipoint transmission/reception (CoMP) and Carrier Aggregation (CA) RRM, 2) inter-cell interference coordination including autonomous power control, interference alignment, andautonomous radio resource management in femto-cells, and 3) exploitation of relays and network coding for capacity and coverage enhancement.The chosen focus areas are essential for the successful realization of 4G wireless systems in terms of the expected high capacity spectral efficiency in the vicinity of 10 bits/sec/Hz. The explored autonomous and self-organizing network (SON) concepts are also important for reduced system operational expenses (OPEX) for operators.

This research project is funded by the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) of Egypt. For more detailed information on the project, please visit our webpage: http://www.4gpp-project.net/

Performance Evaluation Studies over the α-μ Fading Channel (2012 - 2014):

The α-μ distribution is a commonly used generalized small-scale fading model that has been recently introduced. This model subsumes many of the classical models such as the Rayleigh and Nakagami-m as well as more recent ones such as the Weibull. In this study, we are interested in evaluating the performance of different scenarios operating over the α-μ fading model. This includes capacity studies assuming different diversity reception techniques as well as BER and outage probability studies.

Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Systems (2013 - 2014):

We investigate various issues in the context of SS in cognitive radio systems. This includes: non-ideal feedback channels and delay considerations in cooperative sensing, the use of reconfigurable antennas as an alternative to cooperation, performance evaluation of cooperative SS over the α-μ and Extended-K fading models.

The H-function Fading Channel (2014 - 2015):

In this study, we propose a unified framework for calculating closed-form exact expressions for the probability of error and channel capacity of the H-function fading model. This model can be used to describe small-scale fading in millimeter-wave communications,free-space optical (FSO) communications, and cognitive radios.