The Communications sector is a vital component within the UK economy, with revenues in this area totalling around 129B. Recognised as a key enabler of telecommunications, broadcasting and ICT, communications is also poised to be a transformational technology in areas such as energy, the environment, health and transport. The UK is well placed to reap the full economic and social benefits enabled by communications and investment in a CDT, embracing the breath and reach of the discipline, will help to facilitate our economic recovery and growth and enhance our global standing.There is a serious and growing concern over the future availability of suitably skilled staff to work in the communications sector in the UK. International competition is fierce, with large investments being made by competitor countries in research and in the training of personnel. IT and telecoms companies in the UK are reporting difficulties in attracting candidates with the right skills. In this context, the National Microelectronics Institute and the IET have warned that the ICT sector is facing a growing recruitment crisis with little confidence that the problem will improve in the short or medium term. Various organisations (eg DC-KTN and Royal Academy of Engineering) with support from industry are addressing this issue but acknowledge that it cannot be achieved without relevant high quality under- and postgraduate degrees through which specialist skills can be obtained.To address this shortage, a new Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in 'Future Communication' is proposed. The University of Bristol has a world leading reputation in this field, focused on its Centre for Communications Research (CCR), but built on close collaboration between colleagues from Mathematics, Computer Science, Safety Systems and industry. Our vision is to establish a world-leading research partnership which is focused on demand and firmly footed in a commercial context, but with freedom to conduct academically lead blue skies research.The Bristol CDT will be focused on people: not just as research providers, but also as technology consumers and, importantly, as solutions to the UK skills shortage. It will develop the skilled entrepreneurial engineers of the future, provide a coherent advanced training network for the communications community that will be recognised internationally and produce innovative solutions to key emerging research challenges. Over the next eight years, the CDT will build on Bristol's core expertise in Efficient Systems and Enabling Technologies to engineer novel solutions, offering enhanced performance, lower cost and reduced environmental impact. The taught component of the Programme will build on our MSc programme in Communication Systems & Signal Processing, acknowledged as leading in the UK, complemented by additional advanced material in statistics, optimisation and Human-Computer Interaction. This approach will leverage existing commitment and teaching expertise. Enterprise will form a core part of the programme, including: Project Management, Entrepreneurship, Public Communication, Marketing and Research Methods. Through its research programme and some 50 new PhD students, the CDT will undertake fundamental work in communication theory, optimisation and reliability. This will be guided by the commercial imperatives from our industry partners, and motivated by application drivers in Smart Grid, transport, healthcare, military/homeland security, safety critical systems and multimedia delivery. While communications technology is the enabler it is humans that are the consumers, users and beneficiaries in terms of its broader applications. In this respect we will focus our research programme on the challenges within and interactions between the key domains of People, Power and Performance.

The achievements of modern research and their rapid progress from theory to application are increasingly underpinned by computation. Computational approaches are often hailed as a new third pillar of science - in addition to empirical and theoretical work. While its breadth makes computation almost as ubiquitous as mathematics as a key tool in science and engineering, it is a much younger discipline and stands to benefit enormously from building increased capacity and increased efforts towards integration, standardization, and professionalism. The development of new ideas and techniques in computing is extremely rapid, the progress enabled by these breakthroughs is enormous, and their impact on society is substantial: modern technologies ranging from the Airbus 380, MRI scans and smartphone CPUs could not have been developed without computer simulation; progress on major scientific questions from climate change to astronomy are driven by the results from computational models; major investment decisions are underwritten by computational modelling. Furthermore, simulation modelling is emerging as a key tool within domains experiencing a data revolution such as biomedicine and finance. This progress has been enabled through the rapid increase of computational power, and was based in the past on an increased rate at which computing instructions in the processor can be carried out. However, this clock rate cannot be increased much further and in recent computational architectures (such as GPU, Intel Phi) additional computational power is now provided through having (of the order of) hundreds of computational cores in the same unit. This opens up potential for new order of magnitude performance improvements but requires additional specialist training in parallel programming and computational methods to be able to tap into and exploit this opportunity. Computational advances are enabled by new hardware, and innovations in algorithms, numerical methods and simulation techniques, and application of best practice in scientific computational modelling. The most effective progress and highest impact can be obtained by combining, linking and simultaneously exploiting step changes in hardware, software, methods and skills. However, good computational science training is scarce, especially at post-graduate level. The Centre for Doctoral Training in Next Generation Computational Modelling will develop 55+ graduate students to address this skills gap. Trained as future leaders in Computational Modelling, they will form the core of a community of computational modellers crossing disciplinary boundaries, constantly working to transfer the latest computational advances to related fields. By tackling cutting-edge research from fields such as Computational Engineering, Advanced Materials, Autonomous Systems and Health, whilst communicating their advances and working together with a world-leading group of academic and industrial computational modellers, the students will be perfectly equipped to drive advanced computing over the coming decades.

In view of the rapid increase in demand for mobile data services, next generation wireless access networks will have to provide greatly increased capacity density, up to 10 Gbps per square kilometre. This will require a much larger density of very small, cheap and energy-efficient base stations, and will place increasing demand on the bandwidth and energy efficiency of the network, and especially the backhaul network. Recent work on network MIMO, or coordinated multipoint (CoMP) has shown that by ensuring base stations cooperate to serve users, especially those close to cell edge, rather than interferring with one another, inter-user interference can be effectively eliminated, greatly increasing the efficiency of the network, in terms of both spectrum and energy. However this tends to greatly increase the backhaul load. This work proposes a form of wireless network coding, called network coded modulation, as an alternative to conventional CoMP. This also enables base station cooperation, but instead of sending multiple separate information flows to each base station, flows are combined using network coding, which in principle allows cooperation with no increase in backhaul load compared to non-cooperative transmission, while gaining very similar advantages to CoMP in terms of bandwidth and energy efficiency. The objective of the proposed work is to establish the practical feasibility of this approach, and evaluate its benefits, as applied to next generation wireless access networks. To this end it will develop practical signalling schemes, network coordination and management protocols, and, with the help of industrial collaborators, will ensure compatibility with developing wireless standards.

The Internet is expanding towards mobile wireless connectivity rapidly. However, to enable this for increasing numbers of users and connected devices, and increasingly bandwidth-, processing power- and energy-hungry applications, will require a transformation in the way in which current mobile and wireless networks perform. Shorter wireless distances (small cells, picocells, femtocells) and different network types for the connection (WiFi, 3G, 4G, 5G) depending on the availability and suitability for different applications, is a process that is already happening and expected to continue. This will manifest itself with simpler remote radio heads providing coverage in otherwise difficult to penetrate locations (and the main processing functions gathered together in a centralised pool of base station baseband units), and with the appearance of new wireless standards. NIRVANA takes this evolution and proposes a transformative step: the incorporation of fast, hardware-based, network monitoring, and intelligence (using the monitoring/gathered information) close to the pool of base stations. The proximity of the intelligence enables low-overhead control of a range of operational functions, which allow users to be moved from one connection type to another, according to their application and the load on the network, and to match the network's resources precisely to user needs. It allows energy efficiency to be optimised throughout the network and in the mobile device, too. The latter is augmented by locating the computing resources for a "mobile cloud" near the base station pool. Some processing is offloaded to the mobile cloud instead of being done on the mobile, and even some mobile-to- mobile communication may be done within this cloud - saving the mobile device (and the network) energy that would have been used in radio transmissions. Finally, among the new wireless connection types to be investigated, millimetre-wave communications, using the most up-to-date releases of the wireless local area network standard (802.11ad/j), will be fashioned into a device-to-device mesh network, for mobile distributed caching, which will be shown to further enhance the capacity of the network and its energy efficiency.

As recently discussed by the Wall Street Journal, the remarkable success of the internet may be attributed to the tremendous capacity of unseen underground and undersea optical fibre cables and the technologies associated with them. Indeed, the initial surge in web usage in the mid 1990s coincides with the commissioning of the first optically amplified transatlantic cable network, TAT12/13 allowing ready access to information otherwise inaccessible. Tremendous progress has been made since then, with the introduction of wavelength division multiplexing, where multiple colours of light are used to establish independent connections through the same fibre and coherent detection, the optical analogue of an advanced radio receiver able to detect both amplitude and frequency (or phase) modulation simultaneously enabling the information carrying capacity to be doubled and the required signal power to be reduced. To manage the costs, communication networks typically aggregate connections between many users onto a single communications link within the core of the network, avoiding the tremendous costs associated with dedicated links for all users across vast distances. Typically the trade of between cost and reliability has resulted in traffic from several thousand customers being aggregated onto a single fibre resulting in bit rates in the region of 100 Gbit/s per wavelength channel to support broadband connections of around 10 Mbit/s. However, this has resulted in intensities in optical fibres that are a million times greater than sunlight at the surface of the Earth's atmosphere and so the signal is significantly distorted by nonlinearly (a similar effect to overdriving load speakers). This distortion limits the maximum amount of information which may be transmitted across and optical fibre link, and unless combated, the nonlinear response will result in a capacity crunch, limiting access to the internet to today's levels. This project aims to allow the continued increase of the bandwidth of these fibre networks underpinning modern communications, including 17.6 million UK mobile internet connections and 70% penetration of home broadband connections. To increase capacity we will maximise spectral use, by adapting techniques found in mobile phones for use in fibre networks, resolving the significant issues associated with processing data with 1,000,000 times greater bandwidth using a balance of digital and analogue electronic and optical processing. This will reduce cost, size and power consumption associated with producing Tb/s capacities per wavelength. Critically, the project will develop techniques to understand and mitigate the nonlinear signal distortions. Nonlinear distortions occur within a channel, between channels and between each channels and noise originating in the optical amplifiers. By transforming the signal mid way along the link, we will exploit the nonlinear response of the second half of the fibre link to cancel the nonlinear distortion of the first to minimise the impact of nonlinear distortion associated with the channels themselves, and optimise the configuration of the system to minimise the nonlinear interaction with the noise, resulting in orders of magnitude increases in the maximum capacity of the optical fibre system.