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

规划资助：下一代无线电信工程研究中心（WiTeC）

• 批准号: 2123946
• 负责人: Mahasweta Sarkar
• 金额: $ 9.97万
• 依托单位: San Diego State University Foundation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-09-01 至 2023-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2123946&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Planning; Grant; Engineering; Research; Center

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.

工程研究中心竞赛的计划赠款是在ERC计划中作为试点招标进行的。作为全面ERC竞争的一部分，规划赠款不需要，而是要在团队之间建立能力，以计划收敛的中心尺度工程研究。COVID-19大流行增强了对电信的需求和重要性，而不是人类历史上的任何其他事件。它单枪匹马，尽管有强制性的社会隔离和隔离，但它仍使企业，政府，学术界和社会持续了下去。面对逆境和自然灾害，人类生存的需求不断发展，而无处不在的连通性成为必要。从精密农业到人工智能驱动的精确医学，从全息传送到太空连通性，重要的是创建一个世界，它可以突破我们当前的电信技术的界限，以便我们可以在下一个大流行和/或灾难中幸存下来。 15亿儿童在19020年在COVID-19-19大流行期间需要在线教育，而51％的美国人在2020年在家工作。但是，由于缺乏访问和负担能力，美国的4,400万户家庭和居住在部落土地上的非裔美国人，西班牙裔和美洲原住民中约有40％的家庭无法获得宽带服务。毫不奇怪，大流行对这些种族阶级的社会经济和心理健康造成了最严重的损失。如果没有获得有关病毒传播的在线医疗保健和政府的授权和通知，纳瓦霍国家的人均感染率最高，而失业最高的工作是在非裔美国人社区中发生的。 技术的曝光，可负担性和技术识字性可以弥合差距。这项计划赠款的目标是了解这些社区的需求，从而设计有影响力的电信系统，以帮助平衡竞争环境。 WITEC ERC的目的是将全国各地的收敛研究团队合并，以成功创建下一代电信，并具有无处不在的连接性和前所未有的可靠性和潜伏期 - 超出了当前电信系统所能提供的。这将是突破性技术研究挑战的枢纽，例如数据速率的TBP级和即使是当前毫米波技术也无法实现的微秒延迟订单。它将作为关于未来派和广泛用例的演讲的平台，从精密农业到立方体（立方毫米大小的卫星）通信，即使在美国乡村地区最遥远的部分也可以提供连通性。 WITEC的智力优点将在于它将承担的基本研究挑战，即（i）探索无线电技术，以前所未有的速度，可靠性和延迟，（ii）创新的绿色和电力有效的未来电视连接系统以及（iii）在使用人为的新型技术中，以构建人工智能的新颖方式，以构建越来越多的新颖的方式，以实现越来越多。该中心还将成为新型无线电技术中开发开创性的电信研究床的席位。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并且使用基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响评估标准，被认为值得通过评估来获得支持。