Huseyin Arslan - US grants

This action provides funding for a planning grant for the University of South Florida to become a research site to the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Wireless Communications Circuits and Systems. This research site will be part of the larger Center, which has been established and is currently supported by NSF. The site will complement the Center's research agenda with projects that address the development of new RF and analog circuits, data converters, power management IC's, low power transceiver architectures, communication protocols, algorithms, and embedded system issues for integration of hardware and software systems. The research developed in the site along with the Center will have a significant impact on several industries in telecommunications.

0711305
Arslan

This proposal is to support planning visits by the PI, Dr. Huseyin Arslan, Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF), Tampa, Florida and two of his students to Turkey, to establish research and education collaboration between the USF and two Turkish universities as well as a Turkish government agency. The Turkish collaborators are: Dr. Halim Zaim, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Istanbul University; Dr. Adnan Kavak, Electrical Engineering Department, Kocaeli University, Izmit and Dr. Murat Apohan and Mr. Veysel Baydogan from TUBITAK- National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE) in Gebze, Turkey. A strong motivation for this collaboration is the demand and interest from both countries in wireless communications in extreme scenarios. Turkey is a country that is prone to earthquakes and some other natural disasters, and during these extreme situations, communications becomes a critical issue. Cognitive radio, which is a new concept in wireless communications, can address some of the critical communication issues and problems that have been experienced in Turkey and in the U.S. during recent events.

Intellectual Merit: The visit will allow assessment of research capabilities and responsibilities of the respective US and Turkish groups and clarify individual strengths in equipment and infrastructure required to structure an international cooperative research proposal on wireless communication systems. The primary expectation of the international collaboration is to develop new concepts and strategies in wireless communication systems, especially on cognitive radio and reliable/secure wireless communications in extreme situations. The planning visit will also help develop a program of exchange visits by graduate students of the participating laboratories. The U.S. and Turkish scientists have complementary expertise and resources.

Broader Impact: Improving the performance of wireless communication systems under severe conditions would have major benefits in the U.S., Turkey and in other regions that are disaster prone. The collaboration will directly benefit the involved academic institutions in the two countries, as U.S. students from USF will participate in these planning visits and will gain a valuable experience in initiating international research from the beginning.
This project is jointly funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Electrical, Communications & Cyber Systems.

Engineering - Electrical (55)

The project is developing a state-of-the-art wireless communication systems laboratory facility and course that enables students to design, test, and simulate wireless systems and circuits using modern instrumentation and CAD/CAE software. The laboratory is utilized in all wireless systems courses at all levels, and it is building a bridge between courses in this area and those in related areas such as RF circuits and devices. In addition, the laboratory is serving as a resource for undergraduate projects and as a tool for outreach to the local community. The evaluation effort, which is being conducted with support from the University's center for teaching excellence, is utilizing student and employee surveys and a specially designated student evaluation team. The investigators are using a long standing industrial advisory committee to guide their efforts and they are disseminating their materials and results though postings on their website, papers at educational conferences and in educational journals, presentations at a special wireless and microwave technology conference, and promotions by the equipment manufacturer. The broader impacts of the proposed activity include dissemination of the course material; summer workshops for two-year college students, high school teachers and local engineers; and outreach to the local high schools through participation in a successful ongoing program.

The overarching goal of the Holistically Application-Aware Multi-dimensional Cognitive Radio (HAMCR) research is to create a set of transformative and holistic technologies that enable substantial growth in the capacity of wireless networks, with support for diverse applications, but without increasing the available spectrum. The project is based on the observation that in today's wireless networks the spectral allocation of resources is either independent of the applications' Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and of the user's perceived QoS, or at best relies on a set of pre-defined fixed priorities. HAMCR maximizes spectrum utilization by trading off the spectral resource allocations of connections for the application-level QoS, while still maintaining acceptable levels of QoS for the individual users of the underlying applications, thus satisfying an increased number of users in times of shortage of spectral resources. Such an application-aware cognitive radio significantly advances spectrum utilization by intelligently supporting the expected traffic growth and by dynamically satisfying the changing demands in traffic. To achieve the above goal, the objectives of the proposed research are to: 1) Develop the fundamental design of middleware to optimize the allocation of the available physical resources by characterizing the applications' parameters and by trading off application-level QoS for spectral resources, while minimizing the degradation to the user-perceived QoS, thus maximizing the spectrum utilization; and 2) Design and implementation of a simulated wireless testbed to assess the feasibility of the application-based resources allocation by evaluating the complexity and the gain of the proposed approach for a number of realistic communication scenarios. The results of this project are expected to forge a new direction in the cognitive radio field, i.e., application-aware cognitive radio.

Proposal Summary - Novel Beam Steering Apertures and Waveforms for High Capacity Broadband Wireless Nodes

Intellectual Merit

The demand for broadband wireless has put existing systems to their limits. In not so distant future mobile Gb/s portable and wearable wireless nodes will be required which will necessitate significant improvements in spectral efficiency. This work proposes an integrated research concept which brings together innovations in beam steering antenna arrays and interference immune waveforms and algorithms. To date most of the antennas and arrays that have been developed for portable and wearable wireless applications have fixed broad beams. This makes them very inefficient because much of the radiated radio frequency power is absorbed by the head or the body resulting in wasted battery power. In this work led by USC significantly smaller form factor antenna arrays will be developed by exploiting the steerable parasitic array concept. The dependency of the array gain and angular coverage on array parameters will be studied to develop new design rules. From a systems perspective, efforts have been devoted to maximize spectral efficiency within heterogeneous networking strategies. However, conventional spectrum utilization strategies which are developed for homogeneous networks are being integrated to the heterogeneous networks, which stand as the bottleneck of the heterogeneous network. To break that bottleneck the concept of enhanced partial overlapping domains is proposed by the USF team. For the first time, beam steering approaches at the mobile will be combined with time-frequency utilization considering enhanced partially overlapped domains. A system level testbed will be developed to evaluate the performance of the proposed arrays and waveforms.

Broader Impacts

The broader impact of this work includes its potential for new fundamental knowledge generation in the field of beam steering antenna arrays and interference immune waveforms/algorithms for future high capacity portable/wearable wireless applications. This will have effects on commercial and military communication domains. Immediate tangible outcome will be a system level testbed that will provide results, outcomes, and design guidelines to prospective designers. This research also involves a team from Benedict College, Columbia, SC, an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) Institution. The Benedict team will conduct research and educational activities that will lead to the development of demonstration modules that will enhance future outreach and recruitment efforts of undergraduate students, high school students, and female and minority studen

Over the past two decades, wireless technologies operating at traditional frequency bands (<6GHz) evolved into data intensive communication systems by enjoying innovations such as cognitive radio, multiple antenna systems, heterogeneous networks, and machine-to-machine communications. These innovations are currently not satisfactory to address the significantly enhanced data rate needs for future generations (5G and beyond) of wireless communication systems. Consequently, wider frequency bandwidths available at mm-Wave bands (above 10GHz) have recently attracted a strong interest from the wireless community to be able to serve the future data rate demands. Therefore, in this project, the aim is to enhance the capacity and the data rate of wireless communication systems based on the wireless channel control phenomenon by investigating the use of spatial (i.e. position) adaptation of smart antenna arrays. At mm-Wave bands, position adaptations on the order of a few centimeters can practically be realized within compact devices and yet provide new wireless channel opportunities and interference mitigation. The preliminary studies demonstrate that wireless channel opportunities achieved through such spatial adaptations can improve the wireless system capacity beyond a factor of 2.5 to 5. Hence, the results of this project are expected to be transformative in adaptive wireless communications area and the resulting knowledge base is expected to have effects on commercial, emergency, and military communication domains. Immediate tangible outcome of this project will be a system level test bed that will provide results, outcomes, and design guidelines to prospective designers within academia and industry. The proposed activity will also lead to improve the curriculums through developing lab experiments and test beds. Efforts will be made to incite the participation of the minority students via seminars, technology fairs, and specialized events. Broad dissemination is ensured via conference and journal publications, workshops, and tutorials. Specialized outreach sessions will be organized at local high schools and community colleges to expose and attract students, particularly minorities to STEM disciplines.

This proposal introduces a novel wireless system adaptation strategy based on repositioning of mm-Wave antenna arrays during the system operation to control the wireless channel gain. The recent developments in the areas of microfluidic based reconfigurable RF devices and multi-dimensional (i.e. frequency, time, and spatial domains) dynamic spectrum access techniques are jointly investigated, for the first time, to significantly enhance wireless communication system performance. Beam and position adaptable antennas at the transmitter and receiver are used to control the multipath channel characteristics so that a favorable effective channel response for the communication link can be obtained. Unlike the on-going research efforts that focus on mm-Wave wireless systems harnessing beam-steering capability, the proposed system envisions a paradigm shift in the physical layer by controlling the wireless channel using a combination of the beam-steering and position adapting functionalities. Position adaptation is planned to be carried out in a compact, efficient, and high precision device by introducing microfluidically reconfigurable feed networks. The proposed unusual combination of beam-steering and position reconfiguration generates a need for this proposed effort to investigate and revise the long-time established channel estimation, tracking, prediction, and compensation techniques. The proposed main research thrusts are (1) Controlling mm-Wave Wireless Channel; (2) System Design in Heterogeneous Networks; (3) Spatially Adaptive Smart mm-Wave Antenna Arrays; (4) Verification of Theory Predicted Channel Capacity Enhancement with mm-Wave Wireless Communication Scenarios.

The increasing demand for wireless data has led to interest in wireless communication at mm-wave frequency bands where a large amount of spectrum is available, thus enabling high data rates for next generation wireless networks. However, conventional mm-wave links require high power transmitters, making transmitter efficiency critical. Additionally, these links must support multiple users at the same time. This project will develop both energy and spectrum efficient transmitters and receivers operating at mm-wave frequencies with innovation at all layers of the wireless link from communication protocols to transmitter/receiver integration circuits and antenna/lens design. In addition, advanced 3D printing techniques for low-cost manufacturing of mm-wave arrays will be studied. From the technology perspective, the proposed mm-wave network architectures offering high bandwidth, low latency and low-cost communications solutions will create more high-tech jobs and have major economic impact. The educational impact of the project includes curriculum enhancement, graduate course development, and research training for graduate students which also includes an emphasis on professional development and research management. The project will also expand research opportunities for high-school students and students from underrepresented groups, creating and expanding the pipeline of STEM students. A strong collaboration with industry partners will improve dissemination of the technology advances along with important training opportunities for students working on the project.

Massive antenna arrays, with hundreds of elements, capable of high gain and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)/multi-beamforming are attractive for multi-user wireless links at mm-wave frequencies. However, achieving such MIMO operation through digital beamforming is prohibitive due to costly and power-hungry mm-wave signal chains, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters required for each antenna element. As a solution, hybrid MIMO architectures with reduced number of mm-wave signal chains have recently attracted interest for practical realizations of multiple MIMO stream transmissions. However, these architectures still exhibit drawbacks in terms of spectrum and energy efficiency and do not address hardware complexity issues. This project aims to address fundamental challenges in energy efficiency, spectrum efficiency, and hardware complexity in large mm-wave arrays through a lens antenna subarray (LAS) approach. The research plan is based on an end-to-end investigation that includes antenna array designs within the LAS scheme, mm-wave transceivers that leverage LAS, physical and media access control layer algorithms utilizing LAS, and low-cost packaging with emerging additive manufacturing technology. The project is led by the University of South Florida and Oregon State University, leveraging industrial collaboration partnerships with Keysight Technologies for mm-wave device, system, network characterization, and GlobalFoundries for silicon integrated circuit design and fabrication. The main contribution of this project is the LAS architecture: It outperforms traditional hybrid MIMO solutions by reducing hardware complexity and power consumption with minimal impact on wireless channel capacity per chain, resulting in significantly higher energy efficiency measured by data rate per unit power. The second major advance is to address system and hardware challenges in realizing scalable integrated mm-wave LAS transceivers to achieve this superior energy efficiency. The third major advance is addressing the cost effectiveness of mm-wave network deployment within the mass-scale communications market through innovative packaging and integration solutions using additive manufacturing.

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.