Nazer Receives NSF CAREER Award
Bobak Nazer (ECE, SE) has received the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award in recognition of their outstanding research and teaching capabilities Nazer plans to use his CAREER award to explore a novel approach to wireless communication that could lead to substantially higher data rates. The conventional wisdom is that interference between users is a source of noise to be avoided at all costs. For instance, modern wireless systems operate by assigning users to dedicated time or frequency slots. However, interfering signals are not simply noise: they encode data sent by other users and often have considerable structure. Nazer has discovered a technique that can harness the inherent algebraic structure of interference; properly applied, it may eventually enable many users to simultaneously occupy the same channel while operating at extremely high data rates.
“Although wireless connectivity is now available almost everywhere, we still only employ wireless communication for the last hop in a network, owing in large part to the interference bottleneck,” said Nazer. “By designing protocols that can harness the structure of interference, we hope to create networks that can effortlessly scale to handle more users while maintaining high throughputs.”
Nazer’s project also incorporates interactive presentations on cellular communication for high school students, tutorials, workshops and other outreach efforts.