SII Planning: Broad Explorations on Spectrum Technologies for Navigation, Environment, Surveillance, and Transportation (BEST NEST)

Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award is a planning grant for the Spectrum Innovation Initiative: National Center for Wireless Spectrum Research (SII-Center). The focus of a spectrum research SII-Center goes beyond 5G, IoT, and other existing or forthcoming systems and technologies to chart out a trajectory to ensure United States leadership in future wireless technologies, systems, and applications in science and engineering through the efficient use and sharing of the radio spectrum. The PIs bring together an interdisciplinary team to explore research on spectrum technologies for navigation, environment, surveillance, and transportation (BEST NEST). The team consists of Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s (WPI) Center for Wireless Information Network Studies (CWINS) and Data Sciences Research Group (DSRG), in close collaboration with WPI’s Laboratory for Education and Application Prototypes (LEAP), and THz labs; Georgia Institute of Technology’s (GaTech) Electromagnetic Measurements in Communication and Computing (EMC^2) lab and GaTech Propagation Group (GTPG); University of Maine’s Wireless Sensing lab (WiSe-Net); and, Wayne State University’s Connected and Autonomous Driving (CAR) Lab. The project includes plans to initiate the creation of new cross-disciplinary curriculum to impact the training of the next-generation workforce in the emerging area of spectrum management. The proposed center will likely impact industries critical to US competitiveness in navigation, environment, healthcare, surveillance, urban transportation, and smart infrastructures. The proposed workshops called the Center Integration and Development (CID) workshops will help establish, maintain, and strengthen partnership among academia, industry, government and non-government organizations through organized panels, focused group discussions and brainstorming phases. The PIs plan to bring STEM students across multiple universities together, while exploring to engage precollege students and broaden the participation of underrepresented K-12 students. This award will fund activities towards the development of a full center proposal. The PIs propose to organize a series of CID workshops which will enable brainstorming, research coordination and community engagement, partnerships, and education and workforce development. The workshops will assess the multi-disciplinary areas of foundations, hardware, networking, security, test, and measurement, and economic and social mechanisms of spectrum technologies. The proposed BEST NEST will examine the application of spectrum management for passive systems such as space observatories, soil moisture sensing, earth exploration, and air traffic control radars. BEST NEST will also focus on sensor communication-computation techniques and protocols key to high speed, low power and efficient data acquisition, routing, analysis, and processing. 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.