University of Mississippi engineering professor, Lei Cao, has been awarded more than $597,000 to improve sensor networks, devices often used by the military to collect and transmit data about their environment.
Cao, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, plans to use his National Science Foundation grant to improve sensor networks by making them more accurate while using less bandwidth and energy. Ramanarayanan Viswanathan, retired professor and former chair of electrical and computer engineering, also contributed to the proposal.
“This new technology proposed for 6G communications is asking, ‘How do we use the available (radio frequency) spectrum most efficiently?’” said Cao. “We know the spectrum is a very precious resource. Companies put in a lot of money to use it to transmit signals.”
Sensor networks can include a broad collection of interconnected devices that pick up and transmit data such as light, vibrations, movement and temperature to give a broader understanding of the area they observe.
“In the military, it’s used very widely because for a specific area, we can disperse a bunch of sensors and these sensors will be battery-powered and monitor the area if an anomaly happens,” said Cao.
“If, suddenly, there is an object inside this area, the sensors can see that and send that information back.”
Current sensor networks are often battery-powered, use a lot of energy and have trouble transmitting on busy channels, which can pose a security risk in military uses. Cao hopes to use wireless transmission more effectively to make networks more efficient and precise.
“We recently found that if the reporting channel is noisy, it will have errors, and things can be very different,” he said. “What we propose is we try to find the optimal form to transform the sensor information into something else, then transmit the transformed information. This way, we can get the optimal results.”
By transforming the data into a more concise and error-resilient signal, there will be less likelihood of disrupted data or data with errors, he said.
Cao’s work will also involve plans for 6G wireless communications. Sixth-generation mobile networks promise improved data speeds, but the technology is still being developed, he said.