The U.S. National Science Foundation yesterday handed out 11 grants, totaling $12 million, to researchers working on bringing the benefits of the public airwaves to more Americans than ever before.
The awards went to researchers at a diverse range of educational institutions, including the U.S. Naval Academy, Virginia Tech, Wisconsin, and Texas A&M, among others. The research itself tended to center on work that makes spectrum sharing easier, freeing up space across the increasingly crowded airwaves.
Specifically the NSF said the awards were directed at four major areas, including:
- Innovative radio hardware and access architectures to enable spectrum sharing.
- Harmonious co-existence of heterogeneous wireless technologies.
- Development of automated detection mechanisms and compliance certification methods.
- Spectrum access for science services.
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Jim Kurose, NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, said in a statement that the radio frequency spectrum is a public good, used by a wide array of beneficial services.
“The research activities supported by these awards represent bold new approaches with the potential to contribute to improvements in the efficiency of radio spectrum utilization while protecting passive sensing services, and allowing traditionally underserved Americans to benefit from current and future wireless-enabled goods and services,” Kurose said in a statement.
The NSF said that it has given out more than $60 million over the past five years, in the form of 140 individual awards. The awards have been distributed across a range of research areas, something that NSF Assistant Director for Math and Physical Sciences Fleming Crim said is done purposefully.
“One of the great strengths of the foundation is that it supports fundamental research across all of science and engineering and, thus, can bring disparate areas together to work on compelling problems and seize unique opportunities,” said Crim.
The winners in the latest round of grants include:
- Automated Enforcement in Spectrum Sharing: Technical Challenges and Policy Considerations Martin Weiss, University of Pittsburgh and Jung-Min Park, Virginia Tech.
- Overcoming Propagation Challenges at Millimeter-Wave Frequencies via Reconfigurable Antennas. Hani Mehrpouyan, Boise State University; Hamid Jafarkhani, University of California, Irvine; Vida Vakilian, California State University, Bakersfield; Nader Behdad, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
- Mitigating Ultra-Faint RFI to Enable Radio Cosmology, Miguel Morales, University of Washington.
- Real-time Control of Dense, Mobile Millimeter-Wave Networks Using a Programmable Architecture, Nicolo Michelusi, Purdue University; Alexander Sprintson, Texas A&M University; Christopher Anderson, United States Naval Academy.
- Toward Harmonious Coexistence of Heterogenous Wireless Services, Jeffrey Reed, Virginia Tech.