This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The objective of this research is to design and prototype mobile wireless hardware that retains high energy efficiency across a broad performance range. The approach is to systematically address the inefficiency in multiple layers of wireless hardware. Wireless hardware is conventionally optimized for delivering peak performance; the energy efficiency reduces drastically as the achieved performance decreases. The key methodology is to design scalable hardware and judiciously scale it according to the bottleneck.
With respect to intellectual merit, this project targets four engineering contributions. First, the resource demands of wireless traffic are modeled to design adaptive policies that jointly optimize rate adaption and power management. Second, wireless detection architectures are developed that can scale properly based on the data rate and power requirements, and integrate with the higher levels in the wireless system. Third, configurable decoder architectures are developed that dynamically adjust the decoder in a fine-grain manner. Fourth, using the Rice WARP platform, the proposed technologies are implemented into a complete functional wireless hardware system to evaluate the solutions under a wide range of wireless applications.
With respect to broader impact, the multidisciplinary collaboration with health scientists in preventive health care has the potential for contribution to societal needs. The collected data, the research evaluation platform, and educational content are to be made open-source and on-line. Ongoing collaboration with industry leaders, including Texas Instruments and Nokia, assist the transfer of technologies into future mobile wireless hardware. The results of this research are incorporated into undergraduate courses in VLSI design and mobile computing.
