Assistant Professor Romit Roy Choudhury has received a 5-year, $437,000 National Science Foundation Early CAREER award. The distinction recognizes and supports the early career development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become academic leaders
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“A smart antenna is like a spotlight,” Roy Choudhury explains. “It forms a focused beam that can be used to precisely transmit and receive information. This opens up a new realm of possibilities, including concurrent communications, higher transmission range, better information hiding, etc. In contrast,” he said, “old school ‘dumb’ antennas are analogous to lightbulbs. You turn them on and they spread light everywhere, or in this case, interfere with all the other communications around them.”

“Security and privacy are additional advantages of antenna-aware protocols”, said Roy Choudhury. “By focusing your beams intelligently, you may prevent eavesdroppers form listening to your conversation, and even jam them selectively. Such capabilities have obvious implications for national security.”

Through his NSF CAREER project, named Spotlight, Roy Choudhury plans to develop the theoretical basis for antenna-aware networking, design distributed protocols, and implement them on an experimental testbed.