CAREER: Agile and Scalable Millimeter Wave Networks

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The ever-increasing demands for mobile and wireless data have placed a huge strain on wireless networks, and have led the Federal Communications Commission to release more than 14 GigaHerz of bandwidth for both licensed and unlicensed use in the millimeter wave frequency bands. Millimeter Wave (mmWave) bands are expected to deliver multi-Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) wireless data rates that will be central to next-generation (5G) cellular networks as well as wireless local networks. Networks using these bands will also enable new applications such as virtual and augmented reality, vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and a surge of multimedia and Internet-of-Things traffic. Millimeter wave technology, however, is fundamentally different from existing wireless technologies such as WiFi and cellular networks due to its physical properties, including directionality, wide bandwidth, and sparsity. As a result, today's mmWave systems face new challenges, in terms of mobility, medium access, and control overhead, which prevent them from scaling and supporting mobile networks. The research proposed in this project will address these challenges to unleash the potential of mmWave technologies. The project will design and build practical, scalable, mobile millimeter-wave networks for next generation communication systems. The project will also integrate mmWave communication into novel applications like virtual reality (VR) and self-driving cars. The proposed research will be disseminated through close collaboration with industry and publication in top research venues. It will also be integrated into education through the design of new undergraduate and graduate wireless classes and involvement in community outreach programs. The proposal will enable practical, agile and mobile mmWave networks and integrate them into higher layer applications. It will address the above challenges by introducing novel cross-layer protocols that exploit the underlying sparsity of mmWave networks to deliver new protocols that can perform beam alignment, tracking, interference management and scheduling in real-time and with low overhead that allows them to scale to large networks. The proposed research will be executed in three key thrusts: (1) It will develop link establishment protocols that can discover the best alignment between access points and clients and track the client's direction. (2) It will develop new medium access control protocols that will scale mmWave to multi-link networks. (3) It will integrate mmWave networks into higher layer applications like VR and self-driving cars by developing a joint communication and sensing system. The proposal will design, build and empirically test the proposed systems in wireless testbeds.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.