Liu Awarded Funding from Air Force Research Lab

October 5, 2022

An assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Mississippi State University was recently awarded funding to achieve intelligent spectrum sensing in the sky.

Chun-Hung Liu received over $200,000 from the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) for his project titled “Adaptable Spectrum Sensing and Sharing for UAV-Enabled Networks with Intelligent Reconfigurable Surfaces.”

The AFRL’s funding supports exploration into employing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to efficiently sense and access radio spectrum in wireless networks equipped with intelligent reconfigurable surfaces (IRSs), which make wireless channels “controllable.”

“This project aims to investigate novel joint data-driven and model-driven methodologies of spectrum access and sharing (SAS) in wireless networks with intelligent reconfigurable surfaces (IRSs), which lack appropriate channel models that can be used to achieve SAS,” Liu said.

Liu added that this will help open a new research filed of data-driven 3D sensing and access for wireless networks with controllable channel properties.

“Its research outcomes will be able to accurately learn and estimate spectrum usage in NextG IRS-enabled wireless networks, thereby achieving extremely high coverage and spectrum utilization in the wireless networks,” he added.

More information on Dr. Liu and his research may be found on ECE’s website.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University consists of 27 faculty members (including 6 endowed professors), 7 professional staff, and over 700 undergraduate and graduate students with approximately 100 being at the Ph.D. level. With research expenditure of the department in excess of $11.94 million, the department houses the largest High Voltage Laboratory among North American universities.