A radio that can self-determine what is good for it in a particular RF environment via learning from experience, and has the ability to self-configure to achieve that goal is a primary focus of our research. We term such a device as a cognitive radio (CR). If a wireless network itself possesses such capabilities we term it a cognitive radio network (CRN). We believe the key aspect of a true cognitive radio is its ability to learn from and interact with its environment in an optimal manner subject to given constraints, limitations and regulations.
[publications]

Cooperative communications in wireless networks can be helpful in many aspects. At one level, it allows single-antenna terminals to mimic virtual multiple-antenna array communications thereby realizing MIMO gains. In recent years user-cooperation has been widely touted as a solution various hidden terminals problems in hierarchical dynamic spectrum sharing networks. At CISL we are particularly interested in developing an integrated approach that may allow exploiting gains of cooperation at all levels.
[publications]

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is expected to play a critical role in future SmartGrids. Our work involves developing suitable smartgrid communications techniques as well as demand-response optimizations to improve overall efficiency of energy markets.
[publications]

[publications]

Wireless sensor networks exploit the flexibility of wireless communications in realizing various desirable attributes such as scalability and robustness to node failures in distributed networks. The full potential of wireless sensor network applications, however, awaits efficient distributed information processing architectures and algorithms. Invariably these involve trade-offs between sensing, computations and communications. Different applications focus on different objectives, and thus require different levels of trade-offs. In general, these can be formulated as collaborative and distributed information processing under resource constraints.
[publications]

There are many applications of distributed sensor networks in which it is desirable for all sensor nodes to be in agreement on an estimate of the global phenomenon. When nodes only have local information to generate its own local estimate of the parameter of interest, for example, such network-wide agreement cannot be expected without further assumptions. Consensus tracking/estimation schemes generally attempt to achieve network-wide agreement via information exchanges among distributed nodes. Our interest is specifically in consensus tracking/estimation problems wireless sensor networks with mobile nodes.
[publications]

As wireless networking becomes more and more prevalent, and cheap, there has been an explosion of interest in ubiquitous applications. Among them are many distributed control systems, or systems that involve remote control operations. Naturally, replacing wired control loops with wireless connections may provide enormous flexibility. However, wireless channel is inherently a challenging place for reliable communications, and control tasks come with associated well-understood requirements on controllability and observability. Thus, there are fundamental relationships and trade-offs between information theoretic concepts that characterize the (wireless) communication channel limitations and control theoretic concepts that identify minimum requirements for achieving a given control control/tracking task.
[publications]