MIT Research Center Set to Take the Lead in Mobile Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is heading for a leading role in mobile technology with its October 2012 launch of its newest research center Wireless@MIT.

The new organization combines more than twelve MIT research professors and their teams to collaborate on next-generation mobile computing and wireless networks. The work is aimed to make a big impact on technology standards and products. MIT is claiming a “strong industrial partnership" with the likes of Cisco, Amazon, Microsoft, Telefonica, MediaTek, and STMicroelectronics.

One of the biggest challenges for current mobile technology is the huge scale created by an ever-growing population of mobile devices. According to Hari Balakrishnan, Wireless@MIT’s co-director, a further problem is that the Internet was released into a world that was mostly static; mobility is a new issue to deal with.

One of the center’s initial projects will be a model wireless network which will be deployed throughout the MIT campus. The aim is for the network to supply a fully working network service to users and to demonstrate the research team’s innovations simultaneously.

Co-director Dina Katabi and colleagues at the center earned recognition in 2012 for their development of an increased-speed Fourier transform. Their model boosts the signal processing algorithm 10 times and enables faster data processing.

Katabi emphasizes the holistic approach that the multidisciplinary team at the center will adopt in order to push mobile technologies into the future. Each of the components of today’s mobile systems were designed separately, which makes the total system’s functioning less than optimal. Future systems will be fully integrated.

The research team at Wireless@MIT is currently focusing on four specific areas: security and privacy, spectrum and connectivity, low-power systems, and mobile applications. The team has launched a website outlining specifics of individual projects that are ongoing in these areas.

Many of the initial projects are aimed at providing solutions for today’s problems. One example is Katabi’s MegaMIMO, a system which allows multiple data senders to transmit simultaneously to numerous receivers on one band.

Other projects at Wireless@MIT are addressing issues that will arise in the future, such as CarSpeak. The team describes this as a communication system to suit autonomous driving. The system allows numerous self-driving cars to share information about surrounding objects that may be visible to the sensors of one vehicle, but are hidden from those vehicles nearby. This device is aimed to significantly increase the safety of the passengers of self-driving cars. (CU) Link