A team of researchers from Purdue ECE has received an award from the National Spectrum Consortium for a project titled “DSARC: 5G Dynamic Spectrum Access and Radar Coexistence.” This is a roughly $8-million effort over a period of three years. Raytheon BBN Technologies is the lead institution, with Purdue ECE and Novowi LLC being the two collaborative institutions.

The goal of the project is to promote coexistence between emerging 5G wireless networks and legacy airborne radar systems, which share certain frequency bands and thus can cause interference to one another. This has been identified as a critical national need as such interference can be disruptive to commercial, government, and military communication systems. To accomplish this goal, the project will involve foundational research innovations at the intersection of wireless communications, machine learning, information theory, and network optimization, coupled with systems prototyping.

The approach that will be taken by the team is to build out four main, complementary system components: (1) Real-time interference detection, classification, and localization; (2) Distributed edge spectrum optimization; (3) Multi-path overlay routing; and (4) Dynamic virtual slicing.

Clockwise from top left: Christopher Brinton, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering; David Love, the Nick Trbovich Professor of ECE; Jim Krogmeier, Professor of ECE; and Chih-Chun Wang, Professor of ECE

The Purdue team will lead the distributed edge spectrum optimization component, which in turn has several research thrusts. Christopher Brinton, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, will serve as the PI for the Purdue team. He’s excited for the opportunity to advance 5G-and-beyond wireless technologies.

“We look forward to working closely with the other teams throughout the program so that our foundational developments in wireless communications and distributed learning will drive the real-world system prototyping, and vice versa,” he says.

Along with Brinton, the Purdue team consists of David Love (co-PI), the Nick Trbovich Professor of ECE, and Jim Krogmeier (co-PI) and Chih-Chun Wang (co-PI), both professors of ECE. Brinton will lead the research effort in network-aware distributed machine learning, and will be responsible for the overall management on Purdue’s side. Love, who is on the Executive Committee of NSC, will take charge of the research effort on spectrum sensing and adaptation through 5G and beyond protocols. Krogmeier will lead the effort interfacing Purdue’s research with the prototyping systems being developed at BBN. Wang will take charge of the research effort on distributed network adaptation based on wireless interference.