Fall 2010 - Northern Virginia Technology Council

orge the Future of Wireless
p Virginia Tech Ph.D. candidate Dan DePoy, one of the
graduate research assistants experimenting with the
network of 48 cognitive radios, adjusts the antenna on a
cognitive radio.
In the Wireless@VT lab in ICTAS, the cognitive radio system
enables Reed and others to implement and test their algorithms,
protocols, applications and hardware technologies that support
whitespace communications. Most importantly, these tests now
occur in a live environment, rather than computer simulations
or one-to-one radio interactions. Researchers are hard at work
improving the cognitive radio’s smart engine, which drives the
radio’s ability to “monitor its own performance continuously,
read the radio’s outputs to determine the radio frequency, channel
conditions and adjust the radio’s settings to deliver the needed
quality of service,” Reed said.
“The potential for development and refinement of researchbased
findings through the institute’s test-bed installation is an
outstanding example of the kind of impact that this institute was
created to inspire and support,” according to Roop Mahajan, IC-
TAS director and the James S. Tucker professor of engineering.
Mahajan and a number of ICTAS researchers maintain offices
at the Virginia Tech Research Center–Arlington (http://www.
ncr.vt.edu/arlington/index.html), as well as in Blacksburg.
This powerhouse of wireless research at Virginia Tech is attracting
nearly $10 million per year in research funding. Since
2005, the wireless group has received funding from the U.S. Air
Force, National Institute of Justice, National Science Foundation,
Office of Naval Research (ONR), U.S. Army Research Laboratory,
Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA),
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, and
other organizations.
In the midst of game-changing technologies, the international
concern about network security remains. Tech researchers are
working on this quandary with funding from DARPA and ONR.
Reed, Tamal Bose, associate director of Wireless@VT and a professor
of electrical and computer engineering, Madhav Marathe
of Virginia Tech’s Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, and a team
of graduate students are developing a new technique for security
called wireless distributed computing. The researchers said that
the advanced concept will perform computationally intensive
applications, such as geolocation, coordinated jamming, distributed
sensing and real-time image processing.
With a wireless channel between nodes, the distributed
computing problem becomes very complex. Depending on the
condition of the wireless channel, researchers are determining
whether the complex computations to process data can be executed
locally on a single radio node or in a distributed manner
on a collaborative radio network such as the one in the on-campus
ICTAS facility. This collaborative approach can benefit and
assist radios with limited computational power, such as handheld
radios, cell phones or unmanned aerial vehicles. Devices
based in aerial vehicles, for instance, could form a network that
captures images of ground activity and compresses the images
before transmitting them to a warship.
Constantly conceiving, creating and deploying new technologies,
researchers at Virginia Tech are shaping the wireless
wave that will dramatically alter social, cultural, economic and
military landscapes the world over. nvtc
This story was adapted from an article that originally appeared
in the Summer 2011 issue of Virginia Tech Magazine.
(http://www.vtmagazine.vt.edu/sum11/feature1.html)
Fall 2011 www.nvtc.org THE VOICE OF TECHNOLOGY 31