Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Next Generations of Wireless Telecommunication (WiTeC)

The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.

The Covid-19 pandemic reinforced the need and importance of telecommunications more than any other event in the history of mankind. It, single-handedly, kept businesses, governments, academia and societies running in spite of the mandated social isolations and quarantines. The need for the human race to survive in the face of adversities and natural calamities continues to evolve where a world of ubiquitous connectivity becomes a necessity. From precision agriculture to artificial intelligence driven precision medicine, from holographic teleportation to space connectivity, it is important to create a world which pushes the boundaries of our current telecommunication technologies so that we can survive the next pandemic and/or calamity better and stronger. 1.5 billion children required online education during the COVID-19 pandemic and 51% of Americans worked from home in 2020. However, 44 million households in America and about 40% each of African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans residing on tribal lands do not have access to broadband services owing to the lack of access and affordability. It is not surprising that the pandemic has taken its most severe toll on the socio-economic and mental well-being of these ethnic classes. Without access to online healthcare and government mandates and notifications about the spread of the virus, the Navajo Nation had the highest per capita infection rate in the country and the highest job-losses occurred in the African American community. Exposure, affordability and literacy in technology can bridge the gap. The goal of this planning grant is to understand the needs of these communities and thereby design impactful telecommunications systems to help level the playing field.

The WiTeC ERC aims to amalgamate a convergent research team from across the nation to successfully create the next generation of telecommunication with omnipresent connectivity and unprecedented reliability and latency -leaps beyond what current telecommunication systems can offer. It will be a hub for breakthrough technological research challenges like Tbps-level of data rates and microsecond orders of delay that even current millimeter wave technology cannot achieve. It will serve as a platform for discourse on futuristic and widely variant use cases, ranging from precision agriculture to CubeSat (cubic millimeter sized satellites) communication that can provide connectivity even in the remotest part of rural America. The intellectual merit of WiTec will lie in the fundamental research challenges it will undertake, namely (i) exploring radio technologies for ubiquitous connectivity with unprecedented speed, reliability and latency, (ii) innovating greener and power efficient future telecommunication systems and (iii) novel ways of utilizing pervasive artificial intelligence to build a telecommunication system that is smarter and more robust than ever before. The Center will also be the seat for developing groundbreaking telecommunications research test-beds in novel radio technologies.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.