Wireless Institute Seminar Series – Interference Management in Emerging Wireless Networks and Systems
258 Fitzpatrick Hall
Sundaram (Sundar) Vanka
Associate Professor
Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad
Abstract: Most wireless technologies that enjoy mass adoption are designed to operate in the sub-6 GHz spectrum to leverage better range and simpler RF transceiver designs. While licensed spectrum (e.g., LTE bands) is walled off from unauthorized usage, unlicensed spectrum is more akin to a public park. The biggest user of unlicensed spectrum is Wi-Fi which also carries the majority of the world’s IP traffic. Efficient use of unlicensed spectrum is therefore key to the continued growth of Wi-Fi as a technology.
The first part of the talk will focus on interference management on unlicensed spectrum for wideband Wi-Fi, where the problem is particularly acute. By identifying the various scenarios when such interference occurs, it will become clear that the often-used models for interference, namely, the interference channel (from classical information theory) and the collision/SINR model (from networking literature), do not give adequate insight into the problem. Specifically, these models do not easily lend themselves to the analysis of the underlying dynamics of mutually interfering bursty traffic flows that couple via possibly non-linear RF circuits. The talk will discuss some simple and efficient protocols for flexible channel utilization to address this problem and will describe how this protocol is relatively agnostic to the disparate interference scenarios encountered in practice.
An important aspect of these protocols is the use of dynamically created non-contiguous chunks of spectrum and coordinated channel use, which necessitated a recent FCC ruling permitting such spectrum usage. Some of this work is also part of the soon-to-be-ratified Wi-Fi 7 standard (”IEEE 802.11be”). The concluding part of the talk will focus on other emerging applications of wireless networks, especially in the context of networking with autonomous navigation platforms and non-terrestrial networks in general, and some of the speaker’s current and future plans for research in that area.
Biography: Sundaram (Sundar) Vanka is an Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India. Before joining IIT-H in 2021, he was a Master Engineer in the Wireless Systems Architecture Group at Broadcom Inc., San Jose, California, USA, where his charter was to develop new technologies related to interference management, coexistence, low power operation, and low-latency connectivity and to propose, plan, and lead long term R&D projects that implement these technologies in Broadcom’s flagship Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combo SoC products. Currently, his research interests span theoretical and experimental aspects of wireless communications and networking, specifically network design for autonomous vehicles, low-latency networking, and scalable machine learning paradigms for wireless networks. He holds 12 US patents and ten invention disclosures and has published a book chapter, five journal articles, and nine conference publications, including three invited talks. He holds a Ph.D. in EE from the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA, and a bachelor’s and Master of Technology in EE from IIT Madras.