ONR YIP: Polymorphic Wireless Computing for Ultra-Wideband 6G Spectrum Dominance

Achieving technological dominance in 6G wireless networks is of fundamental strategic importance to the economic well-being of the United States. To concretely deploy terabit-per-second communication links, fundamental research breakthroughs are needed to rethink how computing will be conducted in 6G wireless systems. To this end, this project will lay the foundations of a new paradigm named polymorphic wireless computing. We will research novel techniques that will seamlessly adapt not only the underlying algorithmic structure, but also the hardware and software structure of the 6G wireless platform according to ongoing mission-driven objectives, existing network/spectrum operating conditions, and current performance metrics of interest, while being able to operate at several GHz of bandwidth. To this end, we will perform highly interdisciplinary research at the intersection of machine learning, embedded systems, wireless networking and wireless security. To reduce our research to practice, we will prototype our techniques on software-defined radio platforms equipped with reconfigurable hardware; and leverage unique state-of-the-art facilities at Northeastern University to perform extensive experimental evaluation in realistic use-case scenarios.

AFOSR YIP: Dynamic Data Driven Open Radio Access Systems

In this project, we will research the underlying algorithmic foundations and theoretical performance bounds of future dynamic data-driven wireless systems. The key target of this project is to achieve strategic mission-critical application-level objectives by guaranteeing assured wireless communications in congested, contested, concealed, and contaminated environments. First, we mathematically optimize network operations through dynamic allocation of network, computation, and memory resources, taking into account the semantics of the sensed data and the current spectrum conditions into the problem formulation. Importantly, our optimization dynamically compresses sensed data according to application-level semantics, so that network load can be minimized while still guaranteeing key application performance indicators. Next, we investigate novel techniques to guarantee the performance of the proposed data-driven optimization and classification techniques in terms of latency, accuracy, and resource occupation in challenged and constrained scenarios. Our key theoretical findings will be extensively validated through extensive data collection campaigns leveraging several wireless testbeds available at the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things.

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research, or AFOSR, expands the horizon of scientific knowledge through its leadership and management of the Department of the Air Force’s basic research program. As a vital component of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), AFOSR’s mission is to discover, shape, champion and transitions high- risk basic research that profoundly impacts the future Air and Space Forces. AFOSR accomplishes its mission through global investment in advanced discovery research efforts in relevant scientific areas. Central to AFOSR’s strategy is the transfer of the fruits of basic research to industry, the supplier of Department of the Air Force acquisitions; to the academic community, which can lead the way to still more accomplishment; and to the other directorates of AFRL that carry the responsibility for applied research leading to acquisition.

AFOSR Young Investigator Award Press Release: https://www.afrl.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3245790/afrlafosr-awards-25-million-via-young-investigator-research-program/