Position
PhD Student
Background
Zubia earned a BE degree in Telecommunications from Pakistan and had a few years working experience in wireless telecom industry. She completed her postgraduate certification from University of Canterbury, contributing in a major project associated with Wireless Research Centre. She is working towards a PhD degree with Wireless Research Centre under the supervision of Dr Graeme Woodward and Prof Philippa Martin.
Her research addresses the system design and analysis of a narrowband mission critical infrastructure for a smart grid Field Area Network. The central concern for the utility companies is low expenditure, high capacity and reliability with the relaxed requirement of data rate and latency.
Zubia’s research is supported by MimoMax which is looking to have a more efficient network for complex terrains by employing smarter frequency reuse techniques, uplifting the signal to noise and interference ratio (SINRs) and maximizing spectral efficiency. To fulfil the demand of extensive service area, large number of fixed terminal users, and limited bandwidth resources, a two-hop relay network is being investigated where base stations and relays are both fixed and equipped with directional antennas.
Some smart frequency reuse schemes have been proposed which show enhancement of overall throughput and system capacity by utilising directionality effect. Zubia’s research aims to extend towards the real-world scenarios where implementation of these schemes is more challenging. A possible solution is to develop dynamic networks which can operate in real-time and adapt to changes in the underlying network architecture more quickly.
