Abusayeed Saifullah, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, received a grant from the Office of Naval Research in the amount of $303,631. Saifullah's project, titled 'Handling Coexistence of LPWAN with Other Networks,' will go from May 2022 to April 2025.
Project Abstract: With its capability to enable low-power (milliwatts) wireless communication at low data rates (kbps) over long distances (kilometers), the Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technology represents the next frontier of communication in various military applications (e.g., enemy tracking, battlefield monitoring, and surveillance systems) that can extend over large areas. However, the rapid growth of LPWANs in the limited spectrum brings forth the challenge of coexistence of many networks and devices in the same band. The immediate effect of such coexistence is degraded network performance in terms of throughput, latency, and energy.
In this project, we specifically address the coexistence problem for SNOW (Sensor Network Over White spaces) so that it can operate in the presence of many other coexisting networks/devices.
To avoid the cost of the licensed band and the crowd of the limited ISM band, we designed SNOW as an LPWAN architecture to support scalable wide-area Internet-of-Things applications over the widely available TV white spaces (unused TV band). Following are the key contributions we shall make through this project. (1) First, we propose the design of a novel embedded learning agent at SNOW nodes based on reinforcement learning to improve the performance of a SNOW under coexistence with many independent networks. (2) To handle a more severe scenario of interference such as jamming, we propose a game-theoretic approach for frequency hopping at the BS. The uniqueness of this approach lies in designing the players and their actions with respect to the LPWAN characteristics as well as being comprehensive and flexible enough to be applicable for various jamming scenarios. (3) We also propose to integrate the orthogonal variable spreading factor technology in SNOW to facilitate the coexistence of multiple SNOWs. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive subcarrier bandwidth approach that enables the nodes to dynamically adjust their bandwidths and select some interference-free part of their subcarriers for communication under persistent interference. We will implement the proposed ideas on SNOW hardware and evaluate through experiments under various coexistence scenarios.