This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Project Proposed: This project, developing a multi-purpose Software Defined Communications (SDC) testbed to be used for rapid design and prototyping of the next generation wireless communication networks making use of radio, optical, or ultrasonic modalities, responds to the impending need for new high-bandwidth, inexpensive, flexible, and upgradable wireless communication technologies to meet the growing demands of future applications. Among others, the SDC testbed aims to enable many projects including high-speed secure data transmission, thru-metal relay and control networks, localization and tracking, real-time wireless video transmission, and enhanced home entertainment systems. The integrated plan challenges the existing radio frequency centric view of software defined radio by addressing the requirements of high-bandwidth, robustness, and easy configurability for future telecom applications. Supporting multiple signal propagation media within a single framework, the project aims to - Develop a modular hardware and software platform which can be used to prototype technology and algorithms for macro- and micro-scale communications, local area networking, and localization applications. - Provide software reconfigurability at all layers of the protocol stack (in contrast to conventional SDR which only provides physical layer flexibility) so that cross layer UWB and optical communications techniques can be developed and field-tested. - Disseminate transceiver hardware block diagrams and FPGA/DSP software modules to allow the SDR community to prototype high performance radio, optical, and ultrasonic communications systems. - Build propagation channel data repositories for high data rate UWB, optical, and ultrasonic wireless systems which can be used by industry and academia to design and evaluate new algorithms. - Demonstrate, experimentally for the first time, the augmentation of UltraWideBand (UWB) multicarrier, UWB impulse radio, diffuse free space optical, line-of-sight optical communications with spectrum-efficient MIMO space-time coding techniques.
Broader Impacts: This project offers educational opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as for K-12 students and teachers. It catalyzes advanced telecommunications development, but also trains and excites future engineers and general public. The project creates an Entrepreneur Development program in ECE; it will be used as a model for undergraduate senior design students in the context of starting a small business; facilitates independent study and cooperative work, and conducts outreach programs with local students and teachers.
