Biography
Biography: Mathini Sellathurai
Abstract
Over the past decade, the Internet has transformed into the backbone connecting a variety of smart devices. The advent of the Internet of things (IoT) has been a major driver for the evolution of wireless communication technologies. The IoT scenario presents a variety of applications, whose demands can be contrasting to that of conventional human-to-human (H2H) communication. The fifth generation (5G) wireless communication technologies are focussing on extending the support for IoT through two categories – massive machine type communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC). While the mMTC categories aims to serve a large number of devices hosting delay-tolerant applications, the URLLC category mainly deals with the communication aspects of delay-sensitive, critical IoT applications. Also, new technologies like massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are being considered to further improve the 5G IoT performance. In massive MIMO, the base station employs a large number of antennas to serve the devices. The increased number of antennas provides an additional dimension domain, which can be utilized for beamforming (to improve coverage and transmit directed messages to the devices), improved channel estimation and enhanced detection of user signals. In traditional 4G technologies, each user is allocated a separate set of orthogonal resources, which limits the number of simultaneously served users. In order to support the IoT scenarios with a large number of users, new access methods like NOMA are being evaluated, where two or more users share the same set of orthogonal resources, but are either separated in the power domain or the code domain. These technologies have rekindled the interests of academics and industry researchers towards developing novel mechanisms for efficiently supporting the IoT evolution through the 5G network.