iSchool professor wins NSF grant to study wireless communications

SYRACUSE — A professor in Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies (iSchool) will use a federal award to study radio frequency (RF) spectrum management for the next era of wireless-communication services. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded nearly $250,000 out of a total of $800,000 under a three-year research grant for the effort, Syracuse said in its announcement. Carlos Enrique Caicedo Bastidas is an associate professor at the iSchool and director of the Center for Emerging Network Technologies (CENT). He is serving as the principal investigator on the research grant, “Collaborative Research: New Spectrum: Track 1: Distributed Data-Driven Spectrum Management Architecture for the Next Era of Wireless.” Bastidas is collaborating with colleagues at Rutgers University to research new RF spectrum-management methods that can impact or enable spectrum sharing between cellular operators; coexistence of different wireless devices; and interference management for passive wireless devices, such as those used for weather forecasting and radio astronomy. “I’m very happy to have received this grant,” Bastidas said in the announcement. “For several years, my collaborators from Rutgers and I have been discussing and maturing ideas for how distributed spectrum management should be implemented.” As part of their research, the team will complete a multi-stage evaluation methodology that starts with architectural design of D3SM (distributed data-driven spectrum management). Their studies are expected to lead to an experimentally validated set of protocols and algorithms for distributed and partially centralized RF spectrum management methods. Wireless-communication services and associated applications rely on the use of radio-frequency spectrum resources for their operation. Due to the rapid growth in the use of these services, spectrum-management agencies and wireless-service providers need to migrate from current spectrum use practices to more dynamic spectrum assignment and sharing mechanisms, Syracuse University said. “This grant gives us the opportunity to finally develop the protocols and algorithms that realize our vision under a data and information-centric approach for distributed and hierarchical spectrum management,” Bastidas said. “It’s applicable in a wide range of scenarios where devices with heterogeneous radio frequency operation characteristics need to co-exist and/or share RF spectrum resources. Such scenarios will become more common as 5G evolves into 6G and beyond.”