Automotive industry and the consumers are eager for smart features on new cars and more efficient vehicles. Modern cars are not considered as mere means for travelling from point A to B anymore, but rather smart systems that offer personalised services and have the capability to adapt to the user's preferences and needs. They are expected to become intelligent agents that learn from their environments and exploit various sources of information to become increasingly autonomous systems that relieve the driver from tedious tasks, such as parking, and improve safety, efficiency, and desirability of the future cars. From a wider angle, today's land transportation systems claim about 1.3 million lives and 7 million injuries in road accidents, according to a recent report by CISCO. The increasing number of cars results in traffic jams costing about 90 billion of lost hours for the drivers and the passengers. In addition, transportation accounts for about 26% of the total greenhouse gas emission from human activities. While public transport can help, cars remain to be the desired means of transport according to a recent report by the Department of Transport in 2014. These market forces in addition to the environmental, economic and social impacts of transport systems demand a timely and transformative research to rethink the automotive control systems and revolutionise vehicle design for future cars. There have been two trends towards this objective in the past decade: in the one hand the research in autonomous systems, inspired by unmanned space vehicles, gave birth to driver-less concept cars such as Google robotic car; on the other hand, modern wireless communications enabled cars to talk to each other and the roadside infrastructures, resulting in the concept of connected cars. However, driver-less cars remain to be too expensive for commercial vehicles (Google's cars cost about £100,000 only for sensing equipment) and connected vehicles can offer little if not properly integrated into smart and autonomous features. This ambitious research is defined by a number of world-class academic institutions and leading industrial partners to work with Jaguar Land Rover, a market leader in high end cars, to design and validate a framework that combines the power of connected vehicles concept with the notion of autonomous systems and build a novel platform for cost-effective deployment of autonomous features and ultimately realisation of connected and fully autonomous cars. This can be made possible thanks to modern wireless technologies and the power of cloud computing that allows sharing expensive computing resources (hence, reducing costs per vehicle) and provides access to information that are only available on the cloud. To realise the ambition of the project, a number of key challenges in the areas of ultra-low-latency wireless technologies, cloud computing, distributed control systems, and human interaction issues will be addressed in this project. In addition, potential security threats will be identified and analysed to assess the potential risks for the public and reputational damage for car manufacturers should such technologies be commercialised. At the end of the project, the technical solutions will be integrated into a single framework and will be validated by example applications, characterising technical and service-level performance of the framework, and providing a basis for the future direction of enhanced automated services. While the objective here is to ultimately enable affordable driver-less cars, in the short term, this project aims to enable a number of demonstrable autonomous features in a test environment.

This is an extension of the Fellowship: 'Tackling the looming spectrum crisis in Wireless Communication'. Future economic success is inevitably tied to advancements in digital technologies. An essential component in the mix of digital technologies is digital communications, as also reflected in the EPSRC delivery plan under the heading of 'Connected Nation'. Wireless networking is fundamental to the achievement of 'connectivity'. According to a Cisco White Paper ("Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2016-2021, White Paper", February 09, 2017), mobile data traffic has increased 18 times in the last 5 years alone. This corresponds to a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 78% with a further sevenfold increase expected between 2016 and 2021, reaching 49.0 exabytes per month by 2021. This growth is fueled by new wireless services on smartphones such as augmented and virtual reality and mobile TV. In addition, new networking paradigms such as the Internet of Things or more generally machine type communication will become increasingly important, especially to support operation of autonomous systems. This means that by assuming an average CAGR of 60% of global mobile data traffic, in 20 years from now a 500 MHz radio frequency (RF) channel allocated to a current RF system would need a bandwidth of 6 THz in 2037. The entire RF spectrum, which is currently used for wireless communications, only amounts to 0.3 THz. LiFi adds to the RF spectrum the nm-wave infrared and visible light spectrum with a combined bandwidth of 780 THz. This unregulated spectrum has the potential to make wireless communications future-proof. While the current Fellowship enabled ground-breaking research on achievable data rates using light emitting diodes (LEDs) - as the recently demonstrated 15 Gbps data rates from a single device - further substantial research efforts are required to unlock the full potential of the entire infrared and visible light spectrum, and to make LiFi an integral part of the fabric of wireless communications. Furthermore, research to date has primarily focused on advancing link level performance in static transmitter and receiver arrangements. In order to realise the vision of a world fully connected by light where car headlights, street lights, lights in offices, factories and homes including computer screens and indicator lights of home appliances, form the wireless networks of the future fundamental research is required to ensure that a terminal remains connected when it moves, and that interference generated when a large number of simultaneous transmissions are ongoing is mitigated effectively, or that random blockage does not cause link failure. Lastly, there are a number of challenges that come with the large increase in LiFi access points. Specifically, the many access points must be connected to the network backbone via suitable backhaul connections. LiFi systems that are composed of laser transmitters and solar cells as data receivers are envisaged to be a key for the backhaul challenge. It is these latter considerations which will also facilitate the eradication of the rural divide which currently prevents 60% of the world population from accessing digital communications. There are presently no viable solutions to these fundamental problems, and this is where this Fellowship extension comes in by taking the current internationally leading achievements to the next level. LiFi is now at the stage at which WiFi was 20 years ago, and the work undertaken in the next few years will be crucial in making this technology a success.

This is an extension of the Fellowship: 'Tackling the looming spectrum crisis in Wireless Communication'. Future economic success is inevitably tied to advancements in digital technologies. An essential component in the mix of digital technologies is digital communications, as also reflected in the EPSRC delivery plan under the heading of 'Connected Nation'. Wireless networking is fundamental to the achievement of 'connectivity'. According to a Cisco White Paper ("Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2016-2021, White Paper", February 09, 2017), mobile data traffic has increased 18 times in the last 5 years alone. This corresponds to a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 78% with a further sevenfold increase expected between 2016 and 2021, reaching 49.0 exabytes per month by 2021. This growth is fueled by new wireless services on smartphones such as augmented and virtual reality and mobile TV. In addition, new networking paradigms such as the Internet of Things or more generally machine type communication will become increasingly important, especially to support operation of autonomous systems. This means that by assuming an average CAGR of 60% of global mobile data traffic, in 20 years from now a 500 MHz radio frequency (RF) channel allocated to a current RF system would need a bandwidth of 6 THz in 2037. The entire RF spectrum, which is currently used for wireless communications, only amounts to 0.3 THz. LiFi adds to the RF spectrum the nm-wave infrared and visible light spectrum with a combined bandwidth of 780 THz. This unregulated spectrum has the potential to make wireless communications future-proof. While the current Fellowship enabled ground-breaking research on achievable data rates using light emitting diodes (LEDs) - as the recently demonstrated 15 Gbps data rates from a single device - further substantial research efforts are required to unlock the full potential of the entire infrared and visible light spectrum, and to make LiFi an integral part of the fabric of wireless communications. Furthermore, research to date has primarily focused on advancing link level performance in static transmitter and receiver arrangements. In order to realise the vision of a world fully connected by light where car headlights, street lights, lights in offices, factories and homes including computer screens and indicator lights of home appliances, form the wireless networks of the future fundamental research is required to ensure that a terminal remains connected when it moves, and that interference generated when a large number of simultaneous transmissions are ongoing is mitigated effectively, or that random blockage does not cause link failure. Lastly, there are a number of challenges that come with the large increase in LiFi access points. Specifically, the many access points must be connected to the network backbone via suitable backhaul connections. LiFi systems that are composed of laser transmitters and solar cells as data receivers are envisaged to be a key for the backhaul challenge. It is these latter considerations which will also facilitate the eradication of the rural divide which currently prevents 60% of the world population from accessing digital communications. There are presently no viable solutions to these fundamental problems, and this is where this Fellowship extension comes in by taking the current internationally leading achievements to the next level. LiFi is now at the stage at which WiFi was 20 years ago, and the work undertaken in the next few years will be crucial in making this technology a success.

Automotive industry and the consumers are eager for smart features on new cars and more efficient vehicles. Modern cars are not considered as mere means for travelling from point A to B anymore, but rather smart systems that offer personalised services and have the capability to adapt to the user's preferences and needs. They are expected to become intelligent agents that learn from their environments and exploit various sources of information to become increasingly autonomous systems that relieve the driver from tedious tasks, such as parking, and improve safety, efficiency, and desirability of the future cars. From a wider angle, today's land transportation systems claim about 1.3 million lives and 7 million injuries in road accidents, according to a recent report by CISCO. The increasing number of cars results in traffic jams costing about 90 billion of lost hours for the drivers and the passengers. In addition, transportation accounts for about 26% of the total greenhouse gas emission from human activities. While public transport can help, cars remain to be the desired means of transport according to a recent report by the Department of Transport in 2014. These market forces in addition to the environmental, economic and social impacts of transport systems demand a timely and transformative research to rethink the automotive control systems and revolutionise vehicle design for future cars. There have been two trends towards this objective in the past decade: in the one hand the research in autonomous systems, inspired by unmanned space vehicles, gave birth to driver-less concept cars such as Google robotic car; on the other hand, modern wireless communications enabled cars to talk to each other and the roadside infrastructures, resulting in the concept of connected cars. However, driver-less cars remain to be too expensive for commercial vehicles (Google's cars cost about £100,000 only for sensing equipment) and connected vehicles can offer little if not properly integrated into smart and autonomous features. This ambitious research is defined by a number of world-class academic institutions and leading industrial partners to work with Jaguar Land Rover, a market leader in high end cars, to design and validate a framework that combines the power of connected vehicles concept with the notion of autonomous systems and build a novel platform for cost-effective deployment of autonomous features and ultimately realisation of connected and fully autonomous cars. This can be made possible thanks to modern wireless technologies and the power of cloud computing that allows sharing expensive computing resources (hence, reducing costs per vehicle) and provides access to information that are only available on the cloud. To realise the ambition of the project, a number of key challenges in the areas of ultra-low-latency wireless technologies, cloud computing, distributed control systems, and human interaction issues will be addressed in this project. In addition, potential security threats will be identified and analysed to assess the potential risks for the public and reputational damage for car manufacturers should such technologies be commercialised. At the end of the project, the technical solutions will be integrated into a single framework and will be validated by example applications, characterising technical and service-level performance of the framework, and providing a basis for the future direction of enhanced automated services. While the objective here is to ultimately enable affordable driver-less cars, in the short term, this project aims to enable a number of demonstrable autonomous features in a test environment.

An 8-fold increase in global mobile data traffic is predicted from 2015 to 2020, and it is expected that 50 billion devices will be connected through the mobile networks by 2020, given the expected surge in mobile connectivity and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. A combination of multiple approaches would be required to satisfy ever-growing demand of mobile data traffic, i.e., significant enhancement in spectrum efficiency, extension of available spectrum to higher frequency bands, and network densification using small cells. The design of novel radio access technologies is an important aspect in improving spectrum efficiency in a cost-effective manner for future mobile networks. Radio access technologies are typically characterised by orthogonal multiple access schemes, e.g., frequency division multiple access (FDMA), time division multiple access (TDMA), code division multiple access (CDMA), and orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA) that provide the means for multiple users to access and share the radio resources simultaneously. One of the key issues with the orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes, for example, OFDMA used by 3GPP-LTE, is that when some bandwidth resources, such as subcarrier channels, are allocated to users with poor channel condition, it results in lower spectrum efficiency. Motivated by the spectral inefficiency of OMA techniques, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been recognised recently as a promising multiple access technique to significantly enhance the spectral efficiency and is envisioned to be a key component of the next generation mobile networks. The dominant NOMA schemes are grouped in two categories: power-domain or code-domain NOMA. In power-domain NOMA, users are allocated different power levels according to their channel conditions to obtain the maximum gain in system performance whereas in code-domain NOMA, different users are assigned different codes, and are then multiplexed over the same time-frequency resources. However, NOMA techniques still involve several critical challenges such as lack of insightful understanding of the performance limits of NOMA and a large gap in the performance evaluation of NOMA transceivers under single-/multiple antennas, single-/multi-cell cases, which makes their immediate deployment prohibitive. This visionary project tackles the issue of NOMA techniques' deployment in next generation mobile networks by establishing a unified theoretical framework and developing sophisticated digital signal processing algorithms to realise the concept of NOMA in single-/multiple antenna, single-/multi-cell scenarios. The novelty of this project lies in a) information theoretical analysis with practical constraints, b) less-computationally complex transceiver design for power-domain and code-domain NOMA c) joint precoding design for single- and multi-cell NOMA networks, d) NOMA applications in cognitive radio and IoT systems and e) system level performance evaluations in next generation mobile network scenarios. The project will be performed in partnership with leaders in future mobile network research and standardisation (Samsung, Nokia Bell Labs, MobileVCE) and in defence and emergency services (QinetiQ). The project consortium maintains a very strong track record in wireless communications, MIMO signal processing, and information theory with a right mix of theoretical and practical skills. Given the novelty and originality of the topic, the research outcomes will be of considerable value to transform the future of mobile networks and give the industry a fresh and timely insight into the development of NOMA based radio access in next generation mobile networks, advancing UK's research profile of wireless communication in the world. It is further believed that the successful completion of this project will lead to radically changes in the design of the physical layer of wireless communication systems and have a tremendous impact on standardisation.