Research Projects

The following is a list of our active research projects being undertaken by our group either with my students serving as the primary researchers or with our group serving in an advisory role. Nearly all of our active work falls under the umbrella of the Notre Dame Wireless Institute due to its focus on mobile devices or mobile network technology.

Tesserae The focus of this work is to explore whether or not continuous sensing streams such as wearables, smartphones, and social media streams can allow one to infer a variety of individual difference and environmental factors related to workplace performance. Or to state the problem in an alternative manner, can we move away from traditional yearly reviews or at a minimum, make them significantly better by bringing in these new data streams? This work is a joint effort across seven universities (ND, UC-Irvine, Georgia Tech, Dartmouth, University of Washington, Colorado-Boulder, Ohio State, and Texas-Austin) led by Prof. Aaron Striegel at the University of Notre Dame. The work will focus on instrumenting over a large cohort of working professionals over a one year period.  A wicked cool piece of work that will illuminate what is an immensely challenging subject area.
NetHealth NIH
RadioHound ND WI, NSF I/UCRC The heart of the RadioHound system is a low-cost, pervasive, persistent spectrum sensor that leverages low-cost SDRs suitable for deployment in mobile environments. RadioHound maps the entire spectrum from 25 MHz to 6 GHz, and will have the capability to support mmWave bands. RadioHound enables spectrum mapping in real time, providing a reliable indicator of spectrum utilization. It’s beacon capabilities provide a mechanism for measuring radio signal propagation between devices. Because of its portability and low cost, widespread deployment can give a good understanding of device-to-device and device-to-infrastructure connectivity, especially in crowded or dense environments. The widespread deployment of RadioHound enables understanding of Wireless network architectures in new frequency bands, spectrum sharing possibilities and algorithm testing, and spectral efficiency and utilization measurements across large geographic areas. The overall cost of the RadioHound Node and the low-cost SDR (a commercial DVB-T receiver), but without the three antennas for the sub-GHz range or the mmWave front-end MMIC, is around $70. The eventual target is a sensor costing less than $10.
Fast Mobile Network Characterization ND WI, NSF I/UCRC The focus of this work is to create techniques for rapidly characterizing mobile network performance with an emphasis on the wireless last mile (WiFi, LTE) that deliver iperf-like monitoring without the cost or delay of running such tests. The project has three sub-projects that include: (1) active characterization of WiFi via sliced, structured, and reordered packet streams for WiFi, (2) in-band characterization for wireless paths involving cellular links, and (3) passive characterization of WiFi through observations during normal WiFi scanning. Particular highlights of the work include simple iOS and Android clients capable of characterizing WiFi available bandwidth using only 100KB of data and completing in under a quarter of a second.
DroneSounder ND WI, NSF I/UCRC
Redundancy Elimination via PASS NSF The focus of this work is to explore the extent to which idle client-side storage can be leveraged by making said storage accessible to content providers.  Namely, what interesting services could one compose if said idle storage could have content pushed earlier and how could that content be leveraged during D2D (Device to Device) interactions or through hierarchal accesses in conjunction with Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)?  We are looking at two different components for this effort: Whirlwind and PASS.  Whirlwind focuses on D2D-based interactions whereby devices can exchange data early via D2D interactions in the hope of effectively offloading later communications by detecting early redundancy and leveraging the pre-distributed data.  Whirlwind can potentially utilize both D2D as well as MEC-based interactions.  For the second and key focus for the effort, PASS (Provider Accessible Storage Subsystem), we are building a functional version of PASS whereby content providers can push content to the MEC and client to time shift and avoid peak demand situations.

You can read about our past (archived) research projects at the following page including NetSense, WeHab, and WiiLab.