Growing demand for wireless networking, spurred in large part by the explosive popularity of smart phones, apps and 24/7 connectivity, has created a critical shortage in the commonly used radio frequency, or RF, spectrum.

Finding solutions to the spectrum shortage for wireless communications has been a key research focus of Murat Yuksel, associate professor of computer science and engineering. This fall, Yuksel received three new grants, totaling more than $1 million, to support collaborative and interdisciplinary work on projects related to spectrum management.

"As the RF spectrum is getting overcrowded, we urgently need innovations that will enable new wireless spectrum bands in order to respond to the exploding mobile wireless traffic," said Yuksel.
Yuksel's research focuses on free space optical communications (FSO), a wireless communications technology that uses light, known as the optical spectrum band, to transmit data. FSO is a promising complementary approach to meet the wireless traffic demand, according to Yuksel, because transceivers are cheap, reliable and energy efficient.

However, FSO technology relies on establishing a line-of-sight between transmitter and receiver and is unreliable during bad weather - disadvantages that existing technologies have struggled to overcome.

Yuksel's new grants will fund work designed to compensate for these challenges, including a competitive instrumentation grant from the U.S. Army to continue his research on a multi-element, multi-hop approach to mobile networking using free space optical communications.

Yuksel has developed a prototype of a spherical module consisting of multiple transceivers, capable of maintaining line-of-sight alignment for mobile networking due to their angular diversity of spherical shapes covered with highly targeted directionality.

The U.S. Army grant, funded under the prestigious Defense University Research Instrumentation Program, or DURIP, will support further refinement of the prototypes to be miniature, energy-efficient devices with high data transfer rates. Yuksel plans to eventually mount the devices to autonomous robots to test their ability to maintain communications in situations such as tactical deployments or maneuvers.

Another research project, in collaboration with researchers at Florida International University, explores the possibility of integrating solid-state lighting technologies with free-space-optical networks to create lighting devices that can simultaneously function as communications transceivers.

As LEDs have started to replace older fluorescent lighting systems, the research teams sees a great opportunity to merge the two functions into same devices. They envision wireless access points being embedded into LED-based lighting structures that adaptively optimize for lighting and communication efficiencies.

"This research will explore a truly transformational framework for joint-design, optimization and realization of equipment and protocols for advanced illumination and communication," said Yuksel. "The technology has the potential of being widely implemented and deployed in wide range of settings including residential and commercial buildings, airplanes, military, and other high security environments."