Wireless communications research: The next two decades

Wireless communication, especially mobile cellular communication, has seen spectacular growth since the early 1990s. Cell phones and WiFi are now almost as indispensable as electricity in a modern society. We speculate here on key research themes that will drive wireless communication research over the next two decades, and provide examples of ongoing research motivated by these themes. Smart phones and tablets enable significant advances in the quality and quantity of content available to the mobile user, while even basic voice and text messaging has transformed lives in remote corners of the world by providing access to critical information. Wireless researchers now face the challenge of building on this promise. At one end, how can we scale cellular network capacity by several orders of magnitude in order to address the exponential growth in demand for wireless data created by smart mobile devices? At the other extreme, how do we close the digital divide, ensuring that even the most remote regions of our planet gain access to the wealth of information available online? Thus, the goal of wireless communications research over the next two decades can be simply stated as faster and farther, with orders of magnitude gains in both categories. In our presentation, we describe examples of ongoing and future research aligned with these themes.