Neal Patwari
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Engineering
Demand for wireless bandwidth keeps growing, but the radio spectrum is shared with scientists. Radio telescopes and Earth-observing sensors listen passively for faint signals, and they are easily drowned out when phones or networks transmit nearby.
- Fields
Engineering
Computer Science
Astronomy & Astrophysics
- Topics
spectrum sharing
wireless communications
radio frequency interference
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- Develop RF watermarks that embed random pseudonyms in wireless signals so that passive radio receivers, such as radio telescopes, can identify any interfering transmitter.
- Design protocols that let passive receivers indirectly tell an interfering device to change band, using differential privacy to limit how much private information leaks to other devices.
- Adapt software attestation so user devices can prove they executed spectrum decisions correctly, and test the open-source system on PAWR testbeds and at Owens Valley Radio Observatory.
More about the research
These passive receivers cannot transmit, so they cannot tell the interfering device to move. This project develops secure, accountable ways to share spectrum. The goal is for commercial wireless systems and scientific receivers to coexist, and for a passive receiver to make a specific interferer switch frequency bands.
Why it matters
Radio astronomy and Earth science rely on quiet radio spectrum and are often disrupted by wireless interference. Protocols that identify interfering transmitters and make them change bands, while protecting user privacy, could make radio telescopes more reliable. They could also allow more efficient spectrum sharing and inform future spectrum policy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Junming Diao
Mississippi State University, MS·Engineering·Early-career
Build an Earth-scale distributed radio telescope by synchronizing large numbers of IoT devices, such as smartphones and laptops, as sensor nodes, using embedded signal processing and distributed digital beamforming.
Vuk Marojevic
Mississippi State University, MS·Engineering
Build a passive microwave radiometer flown on a drone on the AERPAW testbed to collect the first large active/passive radio coexistence dataset with ground-truth information.
Guevara Noubir
Northeastern University, MA·Engineering
Analyze threats to spectrum sharing from adversaries who use software-defined radios and machine learning to evade detection, including colluding transmitters.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
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