AUSTIN, Texas—Engineers and computer scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and Virginia Tech have been awarded two three-year collaborative research grants from the National Science Foundation totaling about $1.85 million. The grants will allow the two universities to create a computer program to rapidly test and deploy future wireless networks.
The collaboration involves both the Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Computer Science departments at The University of Texas at Austin and Virginia Tech’s Computer Science Department.
“Future wireless devices will enable streaming video, voice over the Internet, and vast amounts of data transfer. While we are many years away from being able to use wireless broadband devices in a ubiquitous manner, the software needed to simulate the performance of these future devices and networks must be created now,” says Dr. Ted Rappaport, holder of the William and Bettye Nowlin Chair in Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, and co-investigator on both grants.
The project is expected to involve six faculty and 15 students between the two universities, and will yield a public-domain testing software simulator that can emulate thousands of simultaneous wireless users on a national or international wireless network.
The grant reinforces The University of Texas at Austin’s recent thrust in wireless communications, which includes an industrial affiliates program involving seven major wireless companies and more than $1 million in private funding. At Virginia Tech the grant will benefit from the university’s recent investment in developing a national-scale parallel computing cluster.
Rappaport, Electrical and Computer Engineering Assistant Professor Sanjay Shakkottai, and Computer Science Professor Jim Browne, all of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group at the university, will work with professors Naren Ramakrishnan and Srinidhi Varadarajan at Virginia Tech.
Rappaport served on the Virginia Tech faculty for 14 years before moving to The University of Texas at Austin in 2002 to start the Wireless Networking and Communications Group. Progress on this research will be discussed at the group’s upcoming Wireless Networking Symposium, an international technical and business conference to be held on the The University of Texas at Austin campus Oct. 22-24.
For more information contact: Becky Rische, College of Engineering, 512-471-7272.
