Wireless

Current Research

Joint Communications and Sensing/Imaging

  • Theory and design of wireless sensing combined with communication.
  • Design of new circuits and antennas to enhance  wireless sensing.
  • Non-line-of-sight Sensing and Imaging.
  • Funded by 4D100 and OneDegree

Learning-based Wireless Systems

  • Frameworks for high-resolution datasets
  • Applications in wireless security
  • Distributed learning in wireless systems
  • Funded by ETHOS, RFDataFactory, LARAand 3DML.

Open-source Research Platforms

  • Massive MIMO software-defined wireless testbed; see RENEW and WARP for our past work.
  • We just started a major new project – Houdini.

Select Recent Full-length Publications

[Full-list at Google Scholar ]

2024

  • [Wireless ML] Qing An, Divyanshu Pandey, Rahman Doost-Mohammady, Ashutosh Sabharwal, and Srinivas Shakkotai, Helix: A RAN Slicing-based Scheduling Framework for Massive MIMO Networks. Proceedings of the CoNEXT. [Link]
  • [Communications] Besma Smida, Risto Wichman, Ken Kolodziej, Himal Suraweera, Taneli Riihonen, & Ashutosh Sabharwal. In-Band Full-Duplex: The Physical Layer. Proceedings of the IEEE. [Link] 
  • [Wireless ML] Nicolas Zilberstein, Ashutosh Sabharwal, & Santiago Segarra. Solving linear inverse problems using higher-order annealed Langevin diffusion. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. [Link]
  • [Sensing] Onel López, Zhu Han, & Ashutosh Sabharwal. Leaky Wave Antenna-Equipped RF Chipless Tags for Orientation Estimation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.00501. [Link] 
  • [NLOS Sensing] Nishant Mehrotra, Divyanshu Pandey, Akarsh Prabhakara, Yawen Liu, Swarun Kumar, & Ashutosh Sabharwal, Hydra: Exploiting Multi-Bounce Scattering for Beyond-Field-of-View mmWave Radar, Proceedings of ACM MobiCom. [Link]

2023

  • [Communications] Zhican Chen, C. Nicolas Barati, Jon Viehl, Clayton Shephard and Ashutosh Sabharwal. LensFD: Using lenses for improved sub-6 GHz massive MIMO full-duplex. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology 72.6 (2023): 7517-7529. [Link] 
  • [Sensing] Mohamad Rida Rammal, Suhas Diggavi, and Ashutosh Sabharwal. Coded estimation: Design of backscatter array codes for 3d orientation estimation. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications 22.9 (2023): 5844-5854. [Link] 
  • [Imaging] Sean Farrell, Vivek Boominathan, Nathan Raymondi, Ashutosh Sabharwal, & Ashok Veeraraghavan. CoIR: Compressive Implicit Radar. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. [Link] 
  • [Communications] Besma Smida, Ashutosh Sabharwal, Gabor Fodor, George C. Alexandropoulos, Himal Suraweera, & Chan-Byoung Chae. Full-duplex wireless for 6G: Progress brings new opportunities and challenges. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 41(9), 2729-2750. [Link] 
  • [Communications] Yiron Cheng, Eric Graves, Ananthram Swami, & Ashutosh Sabharwal. Estimating Traffic Rates in CSMA/CA Networks: A Feasibility Analysis for a Class of Eavesdroppers. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 22(12), 9793-9807. [Link] 
  • [Communications] Xinyu Zhang & Ashutosh Sabharwal. Analysis of scalable channel estimation in FDD massive MIMO. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, 2023(1), 29. [Link] 
  • [Wireless ML] Qing An, Santiago Segarra, Chris Dick, Ashutosh Sabharwal & Rahman Doost-Mohammady. A deep reinforcement learning-based resource scheduler for massive MIMO networks. IEEE Transactions on Machine Learning in Communications and Networking. [Link] 

2022

  • [NLOS Sensing] Nishant Mehrotra & Ashutosh Sabharwal. When does multipath improve imaging resolution? IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory, 3(1), 135-146. [Link] 
  • [Joint Imaging and Comm] Nishant Mehrotra & Ashutosh Sabharwal. On the degrees of freedom region for simultaneous imaging & uplink communication. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 40(6), 1768-1779. [Link] 
  • [Imaging] Sean Farrell, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Ashutosh Sabharwal  & Cesar Uribe. Distributed generalized Wirtinger flow for interferometric imaging on networks. IFAC-PapersOnLine, 55(13), 258-263. [Link] 
  • [Wireless ML] Nicolar Zilberstein, Chris Dick, Rahman Doost-Mohammady, Ashutosh Sabharwal & Santiago Segarra. Annealed Langevin dynamics for massive MIMO detection. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 22(6), 3762-3776. [Link] 

2021

  • [Communications] Xing Zhang & Ashutosh Sabharwal, A Scalable user selection in FDD massive MIMO. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, 2021, 1-18. [Link] 
  • [Communications] Xu Du & Ashutosh Sabharwal. Massive MIMO channels with inter-user angle correlation: Open-access dataset, analysis and measurement-based validation. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 71(2), 1602-1616.[Link] 
  • [Joint Sensing and Communications] Cheng Li, Nate Raymondi, Bin Xia, & Ashutosh Sabharwal. Outer bounds for a joint communicating radar (comm-radar): The uplink case. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 70(2), 1197-1213. [Link] 

 

Previous Research Directions

Full-duplex Wireless Communications: In 2010, we re-purposed off-the-shelf MIMO radios used in WARP platform to develop a single-channel full-duplex wireless communication system. Combining a mix of experiment-driven data modeling and information-theoretic analysis, we have shown that full-duplex is a definite reality for short to medium range communications. Full-duplex is adopted in cable modems and demonstrated in 5G. Awarded 2017 IEEE Jack Neubauer Memorial Award and 2018 The IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications (equivalent of the ACM Test-of-time award for Communications Theory). See more details here.

“Distributed” Network Information Theory: Local View Capacity: Mismatched and incomplete network state information, aka local view, is a reality in all wireless networks. Yet, there have been no effort to develop information theoretic capacity of networks with a local view. Started in 2009, see some of the key publications. Read a short overview of the main concepts here.

Wireless Open-Access Platform (WARP): Started in 2006,Wireless open-Access Research Platform WARP, was adopted by 150+ organizations worldwide, has been used in over 500+ research papers (see many listed here) and forms the core for Rice Argos project. Rice Argos project also led to a spin-off Skylark Wireless,  which became the basis for Rice RENEW project. WARP was awarded 2019 ACM Sigmobile Test-of-time Award.