Collaborative Research: SWIFT:Facilitating Spectrum Access by Noise Guessing

Wireless technologies play an essential role in enabling growth and prosperity in societies by supporting business, government, science and education, defense, and health sectors. The boom of connected Internet of Things (IoT) nodes and 5G wireless communications will lead to a many-fold increase in wireless data traffic. This data storm and connectivity-in-everything model will result in spectrum scarcity and increased attack surfaces, thereby driving an urgent need for wireless security and dynamically shared spectrum access technologies.

To facilitate the successful deployment of such technologies, the overarching goal of this project is to overcome fundamental challenges in spectrum utilization and sharing, energy efficiency, and security through cross-layer optimization of hardware, algorithms, and systems. Tightly integrating research with education and outreach plans, the project will train a next-generation diverse workforce in state-of-the-art wireless technologies.

This research program holistically integrates multiple areas, including information and coding theory, wireless communication and networking, security, and hardware architectures to enable efficient and robust wireless spectrum utilization. A key innovation resides in separately managing noise effects and interference effects so that stations employing different codes and rates may collide.

Specific research questions being addressed include (1) achieving successful simultaneous use of spectrum by allowing collisions without coordinating coding schemes in the MAC layer; (2) designing energy-efficient and code-agnostic decoder algorithms and hardware architectures exploiting assumed channel noise while incorporating interference cancellation techniques; (3) exploring new physical-layer approaches to prevent, mitigate, and detect attacks on energy- and spectrally-efficient wireless communications. The theoretical insights will be verified via simulations and experiments with practical system implementations, leveraging custom-designed chips and software-defined radio platforms.

Broader impacts of this research include (1) advancing the frontiers of research in secure spectrum utilization and coexistence for future dynamically-shared spectrum access scenarios with broader impact on healthcare, manufacturing, and education businesses; (2) developing software-defined radio labs for undergraduate courses; (3) fostering K-12 students' interests in STEM subjects by organizing a “5G Day” event focusing on the future of wireless communications; (4) increasing participation of under-represented and undergraduate students in research enterprise by establishing internships and research positions; and (5) organizing interdisciplinary mini boot camps on wireless spectrum sensing and security technologies.

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.