Chowdhury Awarded DARPA Young Faculty Award
ECE Associate Professor Kaushik Chowdhury was selected to receive a prestigious $500K DARPA Young Faculty Award for "Reconfigurable and Application Independent Design for Radios (RAIDER)."
RAIDER seeks to create a true ‘cognitive’ software defined radio (SDR) platform that will enable resilient communication, and increased RF environmental awareness, and intentionally protect or degrade reception capability at distant locations. SDRs allow reconfiguring the radio in real time by shifting the processing complexity within software, instead of performing all the tasks in hardware alone. This allows the radio to operate in different wireless channels, use new networking protocols, change signal processing algorithms, with time. The awarded DARPA project enabling new advances in SDR technology is aimed at transforming the radio from a rigid communications-only device to one that can learn and actuate autonomously, intentionally jamming adversarial locations, while safeguarding friendly communication links by intelligent use of the wireless spectrum.
RAIDER will provide deep theoretical understanding of how to create an application-independent SDR that can rapidly switch functionalities over time by maximally re-using high-level blocks. As a use-case, the project will demonstrate the following three innovative applications using the blocks for beamforming, preamble detection and power control: (i) detecting the type of an active wireless device, (ii) location-frequency specific jamming using distributed beamforming, and (iii) communication with simultaneous interference avoidance.