Ivan Seskar (left), associate director for information technology at WINLAB, and Distinguished Professor Dipankar “Ray” Raychaudhuri lead Rutgers University–New Brunswick's COSMOS research team.
Rutgers, Columbia and NYU lead NSF-funded research to push limits of wireless networking
The wireless standard known as 4G turned mobile phones into movie-streaming platforms, but the next wireless revolution promises more than speedy downloads. It could pave the way for surgeons operating remotely on patients, cars that rarely crash and events that can be virtually experienced from thousands of miles away.
Led by researchers at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, Columbia and New York University, and in partnership with New York City, Silicon Harlem, City College of New York and the University of Arizona, the platform in New York, called COSMOS, will be a proving ground for a new generation of wireless technologies and applications. The COSMOS testbed will cover one square mile in West Harlem, with City College to the north, Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus to the south, the Hudson River to the west, and the Apollo Theater to the east. Home to about 30,000 residents and the busy Broadway–125th Street shopping corridor, this vibrant neighborhood is seen as an ideal place to push the bandwidth and latency limits of 4G, and even 5G, which some carriers are rolling out in select cities now.
“COSMOS is an outdoor laboratory that will allow us to test entirely new classes of wireless applications such as smart intersections that can process massive data in real-time,” said principal investigator Dipankar “Ray” Raychaudhuri, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the School of Engineering at Rutgers–New Brunswick. He is also director of WINLAB(Wireless Information Network Laboratory).
By 2020, the number of internet-connected devices is expected to grow to 20 billion, creating an urgent need in the United States and abroad for infrastructure that can rapidly process all that data. To improve networking speeds, the New York City COSMOS network will tap previously unused radio spectrum bands and integrate optical fibers underground with radio antennas and other equipment on city rooftops and light poles.
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