Contact: Akbar Sayeed, 608-265-4731, akbar.sayeed@wisc.edu; Xinyu Zhang, xyzhang@ece.wisc.edu; Suman Banerjee, 608-262-7387, suman@cs.wisc.edu
Madison – Open air is getting crowded. Signals streaming back and forth from smart devices stretch existing fourth-generation wireless networks almost to their limits.
As demands on these systems increase, University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers aim to open new frontiers in cutting-edge wireless communications. Their research is part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) initiative announced July 15 to develop the next generation of wireless technologies.
“These four awards given to the researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison demonstrate NSF commitments to enabling fundamental wireless research, advancing innovative communication infrastructure, and encouraging collaborations among experts in academia and industry,” says NSF Program Director Thyaga Nandagopal.
Across the country, NSF will help establish research platforms and collaborations between academia and industry to investigate, develop and begin implementing key components for the future of communication infrastructure. At UW-Madison, Akbar Sayeed and Xinyu Zhang, both professors of electrical and computer engineering, and Suman Banerjee, a professor of computer science and of electrical and computer engineering, will embark on four pivotal projects.
“This is a really exciting time,” says Sayeed. “A lot of new innovations, like smart cities, autonomous vehicles and the Internet of Things, rest on very fast wireless connectivity.”
Existing communication networks can barely keep up with the modern world’s insatiable appetite for data.
“The need for research advances in wireless communication and mobile systems is stronger than ever before, especially as users continue to expect robust anytime, anywhere access through their personal devices,” says Banerjee.
Currently, all wireless networks compete for signal space from a limited amount of bandwidth on the electromagnetic spectrum. Information travels as waves, defined by their frequencies and wavelengths, and right now everything operates below frequencies of 5 gigahertz. Higher frequencies, the so-called 5G millimeter-wave technologies, promise vastly improved performance in both data delivery speed and signal lag time, which is called “latency.”
