Category: Award

Three collaborative National Science Foundation grants to electrical and computer engineer Ashu Sabharwal promise to make the coming months very productive as his Rice University lab invents tools and techniques to improve next-generation wireless communications.

Sabharwal will join colleagues at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver) to pursue wireless remote sensing platforms, better power efficiency and advanced resilience in the event of natural or “human-induced” disasters.

“Wireless internet is the backbone of modern society and the driver of major economic activity,” said Sabharwal, the Ernest Dell Butcher Professor of Engineering and chair of electrical and computer engineering at the George R. Brown School of Engineering.

“These three NSF projects will help us address the biggest open problems for next-generation networks: how to simultaneously make them faster and more resilient while enabling new applications,” he said.

The first grant for $1.2 million supports a project called 4D100, a collaboration with UCSB. The researchers plan to develop the capability for next-generation networks to use large-scale wireless networks for “4D-imaging” in radio frequency bandwidths of 100 gigahertz and more. When adapted to urban scale, the four dimensions of interest — range, Doppler, azimuth and elevation angles — have the potential to empower yet-unseen wireless internet applications.

“The goal is to give wireless networks abilities beyond just transporting bits,” Sabharwal said. “We plan to use the same electromagnetic spectrum for imaging the physical world, thereby providing new information. These could be used for civilian applications like spotting people trapped in buildings, measuring traffic conditions and more.”

A grant for $1.1 million with UCSD and CU Denver aims to develop a programmable computational antenna, CompTenna, to speed up and efficiently combine sensing and communications. Taiyun Chi, a Rice assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, will lead the project.

CompTenna will aim to solve the hardware energy efficiency challenge, one of the hardest issues facing the use of higher bands, specifically the 100-plus gigahertz bands to be used in 4D100. “With CompTenna, we believe we can enable high-efficiency sensing and communications on mobile handsets to realize the vision of multifunction wireless networks,” Sabharwal said.

A simulation by Rice University engineers uses a 2D grid-like CompTenna array to show the large degrees of control on radiation patterns the system will enable. The programmable computational antenna will be designed to speed up and efficiently combine sensing and communications. Courtesy of the Sabharwal Research Group/

The third grant of $1 million, with UCSD and USC, will help develop a protocol stack dubbed LARA, aka “Layering for Active Resiliency and Awareness,” for wireless networks.

The goal of LARA is to become a cornerstone of future 6G networks that “create the ability for the network to reason about itself and its environment,” according to the team’s proposal. That, they say, will put the network in a constant state of preparedness for disruptions and deploy remedies to minimize network disruptions.

“LARA is backed by a unique public-private partnership between NSF and companies, so there’s a strong corporate interest in the resulting technologies,” Sabharwal said. “There is a global push towards the development of 6G and we aim to be part of it before end of the decade.”

Ashutosh Sabharwal Melissa Duarte

Dr. Ashutosh Sabharwal and his former student, Dr. Melissa Duarte, have received the 2021 ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time award for their papers on full-duplex. The SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time awards recognize papers that have had a sustained and significant impact in the SIGMOBILE community over at least a decade. The award recognizes that a paper’s influence is often not fully apparent at the time of publication, and it can be best judged with the perspective of time. Their award’s citation is: “Full-duplex has been a long-standing open problem in wireless networking — can we design wireless radios that transmit and receive at the same time and frequency without interference? These two papers demonstrated the feasibility of practical full-duplex systems, spawning an entirely new area for research exploration. In doing so, they have delivered strong impact on academia and influenced industry deployments of next-generation wireless systems.”

 

The paper “Uplink Multi-User Beamforming on Single RF Chain mmWave WLANs,” authored by Keerthi Priya Dasala and Edward Knightly, in collaboration with Josep M. Jornet from Northeastern University, was awarded the best paper award at IEEE INFOCOM 2021.

In this paper, the team proposed UMBRA, a novel framework for supporting multi-stream multi-user uplink transmissions via a single RF chain. UMBRA uses novel receiver mechanisms and beam selection policies to enable multi-user uplink beamforming without additional training overhead compared to single-user systems. UMBRA is seen to achieve more than 1.45× improvement in aggregate rate compared to single-user systems.

 

Rice University’s Yasaman Ghasempour has been named a 2020 Marconi Society Paul Baran Young Scholar for her innovative research in ultra high-speed wireless networking.

Ghasempour, a postdoctoral research associate in electrical and computer engineering, received her doctorate from Rice in May. The prestigious Marconi Society award recognizes her groundbreaking achievements as a Ph.D. student, including the first published technique for “link discovery” on terahertz frequency networks.

“‘Beyond 5G’ wireless networks of the future could make these scenarios and many others a reality,” said Ghasempour, who will join Princeton University’s faculty as an assistant professor in 2021. “Because we can share the sensor information with ultra high-speed wireless links, we can form a collaborative sensing and information environment where every device can be a sensing node.”

Named in honor of radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi, the Marconi Society envisions a world in which all people can create opportunity through the benefits of connectivity. Its Paul Baran Young Scholar Awardsrecognize researchers 27 years old or younger — Marconi’s age when he made his first successful wireless transmission — who have shown extraordinary technical acumen, creativity and promise for using information and communications technology in service of digital inclusion. Ghasempour is one of three 2020 recipients announced today.

 

 

The paper “Robust Mission Planning of UAV Networks for Environmental Sensing,” authored by Ahmed Boubrima and Edward Knightly was awarded the best paper award at ACM DroNet 2020.

Part of the ASTRO project, in this paper, the team designed and experimentally validated a robust UAV-based air pollution sensing system that leverages the effects of weather conditions on gas sensing quality. They first demonstrated that the dynamic airflow caused by drones’ propellers affects temperature and humidity levels of the ambient air, which then affect the measurement quality of gas sensors. Then, they leverage this fact in order to provide a heterogeneous-sensing-aware optimization of sensing decisions.

Yasaman Ghasempour  was recognized as runner-up for the prestigious 2020 ACM Dissertation Award. Her research on THz wireless link discovery has opening new research frontiers for next-generation wireless networks.

Rice University and the Army have established a five-year, $30 million cooperative agreement for research to enable advanced materials and next-generation networks. The effort is aimed at unprecedented intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance specifically focused on next-generation wireless networks and radio frequency (RF) electronics.The networking team aims to create distributed, self-aware networks that can sense attacks and protect themselves by adaption or stealth. The team is co-led by Rice’s Ashutosh Sabharwal, chair of Rice’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Ananthram Swami, senior research scientist in ARL’s Network Science Division, and also includes Rice ECE faculty members Edward Knightly and Santiago Segarra.

 

Ashutosh Sabharwal Behnaam Aazhang

The SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time awards recognize papers that have had a sustained and significant impact in the SIGMOBILE community over at least a decade. The award recognizes that a paper’s influence is often not fully apparent at the time of publication, and it can be best judged with the perspective of time. WARP was a groundbreaking open-source specialized hardware platform for high-performance wireless research built at Rice by Ashutosh Sabharwal, Behnaam Aazhang, and their students. As one of the very few university hardware projects that moved outside the university, WARP has served as an experimental enabler for hundreds of ideas, which otherwise would have hardly been demonstrated, due to code base limitations and the large cost of wireless platforms capable of supporting high-end research. In the process, WARP was instrumental in changing the way the SIGMOBILE wireless community did research – strong experimental evidence versus oversimplified simulations. For this, it was awarded the test of time award in 2019.