ECE Researchers Win $600,000 NSF Grant

The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year $600,000 grant to UNC Charlotte Electrical and Computer Engineering Department researchers for the project “Intelligent Energy Efficient Spectrum Access for Wireless IoT.” The principal investigator for the project will be Dr. Jiang (Linda) Xie. The co-principal investigators will be Dr. Tao Han and Dr. Thomas Weldon. The project summary is as follows: “The future Internet of Things (IoT) will support numerous types of applications producing overwhelming data traffic with highly different Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements, creating challenges in terms of spectrum scarcity, and prohibitive energy consumption of billions of devices. This research offers transformative advances in overall network energy efficiencies, by leveraging order-of-magnitude energy efficiencies of low-frequency bands, novel heterogeneous battery management, and spectrum access methods designed to take advantage of these two new advances. This project will investigate: (1) energy-efficient spectrum access techniques with adaptive power management; (2) cognitive battery system to maximize the energy efficiency of each IoT device; and (3) digital non-Foster antennas for “Green IoT”. This research is truly interdisciplinary covering integrating advances in circuits/hardware design, device battery management, and synergistic energy-efficient networking and spectrum access. This research will generate innovative techniques to serve numerous applications of IoT technologies, e.g., smart cities and smart homes, mobile health, and intelligent transportation systems. It will also greatly advance the understanding of energy efficiency of IoT devices and networks.”