Abstract: Modern network technologies have greatly revolutionized our way of working, learning, and entertainment. Yet, the growing demand for massive connectivity and green communications (i.e., the prevalence of Internet of Things) has posed new and great challenges to the future network design. The past years of research efforts that optimize network operations under limited resources have almost stretched the network performance to its maximum potential. To fuel the continued network innovations, it calls for novel research methodologies that can unleash and utilize new network resources.

This talk will provide a new research angel showing that network devices’ data errors (occurred during data communications and storage) that were widely deemed harmful can be tamed as a new degree of freedom and turned into network performance gains. Specifically, I will first present a system design that introduces and encodes “silence symbols” – artificial symbol errors – to OFDMA-based network devices for increased throughput and reduced transmit power. To further assist low-end devices to tame data errors for their performance gains, I will then present a network-design work that let edge network establish collaborative reception (like virtual MIMO) and multi-hop transmissions using opportunistic spectrum to assist low-end devices to delivery their data. I will conclude this talk by briefly discussing other ongoing research works and outlining future teaching and research plans.

 

Short Bio: Dr. Jianqing Liu has been with the ECE Department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville since 2018. He received PhD degree from the University of Florida in 2018. Dr. Liu’s research interests include wireless communications, computer networking, network security, and data privacy. Dr. Liu has published over 50 technical papers in top-tier journal and conference venues such as IEEE TWC, JSAC, ToN, TMC, TIFS, and ICDCS. He is the recipient of four Best Paper Awards including the 2018 Best Journal Paper Award from the IEEE Technical Committee on Green Communications and Computing (TCGCC). Dr. Liu is also the recipient of NSF CAREER Award in 2021 and Aspiring PI Award from the NSF Smart and Connected Health program in 2020. He has been actively participating in journal editorship and conference organizations, such as serving as the associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and publication chair for EAI MobiQuitous 2019.