The new center site of the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) for Broadband Wireless Technologies and Applications at the University of Notre Dame will complement the existing center?s activities through a focus on emerging wireless technology, economics, and regulatory policy challenges. The site intends to develop a cohesive and integrative approach to broadband research challenges in areas including cellular data collection, analytics, & visualization; heterogeneous network modeling, analysis, and design; electromagnetic radiation exposure; spectrum sharing; vehicular communications; inter-machine wireless; crowd-sourced approaches and advanced circuitry.
The center site addresses an area of critical economic and has the potential to support development of broadband wireless as a platform for innovation as addressed in the White House PCAST Report. The center site at Notre Dame has the potential to link an even greater diversity of member companies across the broadband industry sector with university a broader base of discovery in this area. The site will provide early exposure to the concerns of and approaches employed in industry in students? education and career development. Underrepresented undergraduate and graduate students will be recruited to the program through existing mechanisms at the site such as the REU program in Experimental Research on Wireless Networking (ERWiN), in which more than 40% of the participants were from underrepresented groups over the last five years.
The major goal of this project was to organize a planning workshop to help establish an ND IUCRC site of the Broadband Wireless Access and Applications Center (BWAC). We accomplished this goal, and submitted an I/UCRC proposal as a result of the workshop, with five industry partners. The major research and development areas that we identified included: wireless network architectures for dense deployments, such as major metropolitan areas and stadiums; spectrum sharing between commercial and government systems; multiband radio frequency circuits; millimeter wave measurements and technologies; and quality of experience data, metrics and analytics. The team incorporated industry feedback into the project executive summaries, continued to recruit member companies, and submitted an IUCRC full site proposal in March 2014 with commitment letters from Alcatel-Lucent, Interdigital, National Instruments, Office of Naval Research, and Sprint. We focused on corporations representing key segments of the commercial wireless industry, and related federal agencies, to identify topics of most interest and to recruit attendees for the workshop. We worked with the NSF program management, NSF evaluator, and BWAC center director to plan and execute a very successful workshop. In addition to the strong I/UCRC proposal that was submitted, the workshop led to a follow-on proposal that was strengthened by the interactions: an NSF MRI development proposal.
