What are the hot research topics in wireless

communications in demand by top R&D companies like

Qualcomm?
I am planning to go to graduate school for my masters(thesis-based) in wireless
communications. I want to work in R&D companies like Qualcomm after my masters.
What are the research topics can I concentrate on for my thesis?
ANSWER

1.Thanks for the A2A.

A famous study recently conducted by Cisco predicts that by 2018, the global demand for
wireless data would grow anywhere between a factor of 40 to a factor of a hundred.
Consequently, one of the active research topics of the day is to increase the capacity of
cellular networks by a factor of hundred. This is not a very easy problem... otherwise, the
industry would have already done it. A flurry of research is underway in the industry and
in academia to solve this problem. While the answer is not clear yet, we do know some of
the key enabling technologies that would get us to 100X capacity. Massive MIMO,
Multiuser MIMO, cooperative communications, and dense user-deployed
small cells are some of the technologies that are popularly being considered to design
next-generation wireless networks. In each of these areas, there are many sub-problems
that need to be tackled before they can be deployed on a large scale. For example, in
Massive MIMO (use of tens or hundreds of antennae in the base station and/or mobile
terminal), antenna selection is a popular problem that the industry finds extremely
useful. When you have a hundred antennae to transmit, you wouldn't want to use all of
them for transmission. At any given time, you might only want to use a subset of those
antennae. Which subset to use? The answers are not yet known for all variants of this
problem. In the area of user-deployed small cells (also known as Heterogeneous
Networks or HetNets), interference management is a key problem. Since HetNets are
unplanned, the interference is not deterministic. How do you design algorithms and
protocols to manage interference in this case? How do you even model interference in
this case? This is one of the hottest research areas today and almost every university has
some small group working on these problems. In cooperative communications,
coordinated multipoint transmission and reception, Interference Alignment, distributed
estimation and detection are some of the trending problems. All of these problems are
pieces which when put together would get us to 100X capacity.
For future reference, say five/ten years down the line, if you want an idea of the trending
research topics of the day, the place to look is Call for Papers (CFP) of top conferences in
your field. In communications, GLOBECOM, ICC, WCNC, NCC, SPCOM are some of the
good conferences. See what areas they invite papers on and that should give you a rough
idea of what problems are hot.

2.Oh, lots.
5G is probably the "catch all term" for many of them.
Full duplex (like KUMU)
Disttributed MIMO and similar (like pCELL Is pCell, from Artemis, really "the Holy
Grail of wireless networking"?)
Cloud RAN
Non-othorgonal frequency modulation
Very efficient PAs (eg ET)
Then around IoT
Very low power
Very scalable
ultra low data rate / ultra low range wireless

Cognitive Radio
Spectrum sharing

Zahid Ghadialy has a good blog 3G and 4G Wireless Resources, Tutorials and FAQs that
touches on many of these
Sha re

3.I - ike Arne Mortenson - also have no formal degrees in wireless, but I worked on a
base station project, once. My impression of MIMO is that it is a very limited field of
impact in wireless base stations. First, at most you can squeeze a 2x2 or 4x4 mimo
solution into a tiny smartphone, and the overall capacity improvement to a base station
was maybe about 10%, for a very very complex implementation and it mainly helped
users just a couple of hundred meters from the base station - and closer. Of course, the
bandwidth they saved could be given to users farther away, but still, it's not a holy grail
for mobile wireless, although it may be incredibly useful for fixed point-to-point links.
It's important to know the context of the problem you are solving, because it governs the
usefulness of the solution to find. The most important area of wireless today is mobile
wireless handset and base station design. So if you want to have an impact, I wouldn't
focus solely on MIMO.
Mastery of Coding theory, as evidenced by publications about new types of
asymptotically optimal coding algorithms, will virtually guarantee you a job (and a
successful future) at Qualcomm.

Here's a piece of advice I hope you'll take to heart : Don't listen to Cisco about wireless.
They are highly inexperienced when it comes to wireless. If you want to work on
something important, I suggest you find a way to hook up with Qualcomm or Samsung
or Nokia or Ericsson or somebody who is a player. Cisco is not a player. Cisco is also the
company who told everybody we'd have exhausted all IPv4 addresses by 2006, and
everybody would be using IPv6 (?!?!) What's with that ????
Sha re

4.Already some good answers on this question. There are too many things going on in
wireless communications. Mobile/Cellular is just one of them. Lets not forget Wi-Fi,
Bluetooth and other Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies. While 5G will remain a
hot topic for some years to come, some researchers are moving on to Quantum
communication technologies (and they are calling it 6G :-)).
A good starting point would be to go through IEEE Communications Magazines which
contains good overview and tutorials of some of the latest research and technologies in
wireless communications.
Having said all this, I should point out that Qualcomm and any other similar
organisations are generally looking for not only some keywords but a very strong
understanding for what you do as your project and the basics. I have worked with some
people who can talk about GSM/GPRS in such a way that you would think of these
technologies on par with 5G.

5.Muni-- The hot topics to the best of my knowledge are the following,
1) Massive MIMO -Tx and Rx are equipped with the large number of antennas, which
increases the throughput of the system. But because of high number of antennas,
symbol detection would be a problem (have to come up with better search algorithms) there is so much of signal processing to be done at the receiver end.
2)Millimeter wave MIMO - This is also sometimes called 60 Ghz technology. At such
high frequencies, one could transmit data at higher raters because of bandwidth
availability. Not plausible to use at cellular level because of low penetration, and also,
signal fades much quickly. Maybe you can use this technology for device-to-device
communication (guess, you are aware of this)
3) 5G -- There is so much hype on this, but none knows what exactly it is...lol. People
claims that spectral efficiency would increase to 1000 times the current spectral
efficiency by using the mixture of above technology. But that is again not per user, but
over an area/cell.

4)People are also working on energy harvesting, which is grey area to me. I have no
knowledge of it. Also, too much fuss on cognitive radios.
An another interesting area is this:
Convex optimization, it has been recognized as a powerful tool for solving various
challenging problems on signal processing and communications engineering! You might
want to look into this..!
I do not have very good exposure on industry at the moment, so I cannot say definitely
whether having prior experience on the above would help you for R&D in companies
such as Qualcomm. But I can confidently say that both are completely different beasts!

6.I am a poor choice for answers to this question, having no formal credentials in
communications, but I received a request for an answer so here goes ... Caveat Emptor.
After ten years away from the field, I am unlikely to give you any apropos leads to a
currently useful topic. With that in mind, here are my off the cuff thoughts:
>> for my old ears, the current vocoder technology makes typical conversations over cell
phones unpleasant. Just do a POTS phone to POTS phone call and you'll see (actually
hear) what I mean. Better vocoder adaptive algorithms may help here. If nothing else,
the softening of plosives makes it hard for old ears to understand voice. Maybe you can
look at the old Globalstar vocoder and see what was done there; that vocoder was
significantly better than the then deployed vocoder on cell systems.
>> I always have been impressed with FEC. I saw in Jacobs' and Wozencraft's book a
sequential decoder (if I recall correctly) and I played around a bit doing an
implementation (for fun). Back then, compute power for a sequential decoder was a
problem and I never heard of a real implementation. Maybe a good study and
consequent implementation would prove instructive as we as useful

7.Originally Answered: What are the new "Hot-Topics" in wireless communications?

Fifth Generation Wireless currently is the hottest topic in wireless communications. It is
speculated that next year a definitive standards document is going to be released for the
5th Generation of Communication Technologies. So, I would say that topics related to 5G
are the ones that people should be keeping an eye out for.

8..Originally Answered: What are the new "Hot-Topics" in wireless communications?

Lots of new low power protocols for M2M and IoT as well as new features of existing
protocols for the same reason. LiFi, GigWiFi, and the next generation of cellular aka 5G
also make the list.
Sha re

9.Some of the hot research topics in wireless communication these days are:
1. Smart Antennas
2. Antennas for future 5G Devices (mmWave antennas with Massive MIMO capability)
3. Metamaterials in defense and space applications.
4. Once 5G specifications and standards is released then topics like FQAM, small cell,
macro cell will be good for carrying out research.
5. RF Energy harvesting is also getting much attention these days. Researchers are
working on devices and circuits which can harvest RF energy around us which can be
used to power small wireless devices.
6. Cognitive Radio
7. Spectrum Sensing

9.Myfocus in wireless comm. is on the Massive MIMO and mm-Wave.

Based on ComSoc report [1] and my personal experience, the leading society in
communication theory, the hot topics of wireless communications are:

5G : the hot topics within 5G are

a. Massive MIMO
b. mm-Wave
c. while also people are looking at the following, while they are less
popular
energy harvesting,
full duplex communications
HetNet and multi-tier communications
Green Communications

EVERYWHERE CONNECTIVITY FOR IoT & IoE
COGNITIVE NETWORKS, BIG DATA
CYBERSECURITY
VIRTUALIZATION, SDN & NFV

10.Hi...I am not a research scholar like many of the people who have answered your
question. I am working in LTE domain from last 5 years. If you are targeting for

Qualcomm then target your research in WLAN 802.11d and 802.11p standards. If you
wish to do research on network side in LTE check out Optimization algorithms in Self
Organizing networks SON or RRM. MIMO and many other phy algos are already well
developed with Qualcomm. WLAN phy is still under development and research.

What is the current research topics in wireless

communication?

1.The hottest 'new' areas in wireless tech have been around for some time in theory,
but are picking up attention now that they have the potential and infrastructure to
generate money:
1. Device to device and Internet of things: connect machines to each other and the
internet wirelessly, now that we have super-small chips available.
2. Body Area Networks/ Personal Area Networks - Wearable sensors have just started
being marketed by big firms in earnest
3. Indoor Positioning - using wifi routers/bluetooth/cellphones (just about anything
wireless) to find out your location within a mall/complex and then sell targeted ads.
In the traditional world of cellular communication, these (and more) technologies
are being intensely explored for 5G:
1. Massive MIMO: Place hundreds of antennas at the base station to form narrow signal
'beams' towards your mobile device, minimizing interference and saving energy.
2. Single Frequency Full Duplex: Transmit and receive at the same time, smartly
cancelling the self-interference of your transmitted signal.
3. Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP): Collect and combine signal from multiple base
stations, which was till now rejected as interference. (Already part of 4G+).
4. Cognitive Radio: Allow several wireless technologies to share the spectrum by
adaptively finding unused frequency resources. Filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) is a key
enabler
5. mmWave: ultra high frequencies (30-300GHz) that contain humungous amount of
unused spectrum right now.

2.Some of the current research topics are:

Body wearable sensors/systems for on-body or off-body communication

5G Communication (Antennas Supporting adaptive Beamforming & Massive
MIMO, New or modified Modulation schemes, protocols etc.)
Microwave imaging for medical & military applications
RF energy harvesting & wireless power transmission
Spectrum sensing
Using TV white space in the channels for providing Broadband internet in
rural or remote areas.