The National Science Foundation has awarded a $500,000 grant under the extremely competitive NetS program to Professor Theodore (Ted) Rappaport, the David Lee/Ernst Weber Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NYU-Tandon, and Prof. Shiwen Mao, the McWane Associate Professor at Auburn University.  Rappaport and Mao are working together to create new approaches to support much greater data rates for mobile networks of the future.

The exponential growth of wireless data traffic is causing spectrum depletion, and significantly stresses the capacity of existing and future wireless networks. The massive unlicensed bandwidth in the relatively new 60 GHz band provides great potential to meet the surging wireless data demand in coming years.  The goal of this NSF project is to gain a deep understanding of the 60 GHz propagation channel characteristics and to develop effective 60 GHz network protocols that can be used in multi-user networks of the future.  This work between NYU Tandon and Auburn University will develop 3-D channel models for new use cases, and will enable new modeling and medium access control scheduling for new adaptive beam antennas that will be used in the millimeter wave bands, including the 60 GHz spectrum. The project will also create new mesh network protocols and multimedia communications techniques for 60 GHz networks.

This project is part of a broad and ambitious global effort to develop novel techniques to exploit the huge license-free spectrum in the 60 GHz band, and to exploit new millimeter wave frequency bands for cellular and backhaul networks, in the face of the exponential wireless data growth. The research has the potential to accelerate the deployment of more powerful, bandwidth intensive, ubiquitous and cheaper wireless applications and services, and the support of more versatile, robust and rich-multimedia wireless networks. Complementary to the research agenda, this project also carries out a broad range of education and outreach activities, including integration of research findings into wireless engineering courses, textbook development, promoting underrepresented and undergraduate populations, collaboration with an HBCU, and participating in existing programs at the PI’s institutions for outreach to K-12 students and teachers.

Ted Rappaport is the founder and director of NYU WIRELESS, a rapidly growing research center at NYU and NYU-Tandon that is exploring next generation wireless technologies as well as their linkages to medicine and computing.  Prof. Shiwen Mao is an alumnus of NYU-Tandon, receiving his Ph.D. from NYU Tandon in 2004.