UCI engineer on team awarded $1.26 million for radio spectrum research

Hamid Jafarkhani is part of a four-institution research team recently awarded a three-year $1,258,741 National Science Foundation grant to enhance the public’s access to radio frequencies – the part of the electromagnetic spectrum used to facilitate telecommunications and modern information systems essential for public safety, transportation and national defense. Jafarkhani, a Chancellor’s Professor of electrical engineering & computer science and director of the Center for Pervasive Communications & Computing, will work on “overcoming propagation challenges at millimeter-wave frequencies via reconfigurable antennas” with colleagues at Boise State University, Cal State Bakersfield and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Smartphone use and demand for wireless broadband access have intensified in recent years, increasing utilization of radio frequencies. That and traditional methods of assigning frequencies have contributed to shortages in available radio frequencies. “Millimeter-wave frequencies are not employed for commercial applications like cellular wireless networks,” Jafarkhani said. “This is mainly because of the propagation challenges that make it hard to use. If successful, our project will solve some of these problems, and eventually these frequencies can be utilized in later generations of cellular wireless networks, such as 5G.”