The National Science Foundation (NSF) www.nsf.gov will invest more than $400 million over the next seven years to support fundamental wireless research and develop platforms for advanced research. This investment in wireless research will test novel technologies, applications, and services capable of making wireless communication faster, smarter, more responsive, and more robust.
NSF is forming a partnership with wireless industry companies to design, deploy, and operate four platforms for advanced wireless research. NSF will commit more than $50 billion beginning in FY 2017 and will invest $5 million over the next five years as explained in the solicitation “Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR):Establishing the PAWR Project Office (PPO)” www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16585/nsf16585.htm.
Proposals may be submitted by universities and colleges, non-profits, non-academic organizations, research labs, professional societies, and similar organizations in the U.S associated with educational or research activities, observatories, and independent museums.
NSF will also issue two challenges with prizes to total $1 million to support enhancing wireless broadband connectivity to address important societal challenges. The first challenge will focus on providing rapid large-scale wireless connectivity to restore critical communication services after a disaster.
In addition, NSF is collaborating with Intel Labs www.intel.com to support basic research with Intel to support $6 million in basic research on ways to process very large quantities of information with response times of less than one millisecond.
As part of ongoing partnership with the Academy of Finland www.aka.fi/en, NSF, is investing $5 million to support U.S. and Finland research projects on novel frameworks, architectures, protocols, methodologies, and tools for dependable wireless communications systems and networks.
Currently, NSF supports an international network of researchers from industry, academia, and federal agencies working together to identify emerging challenges and share cutting-edge research. The plan is to form collaborations in broadband wireless networks operating in the “mmWave” spectrum capable of delivering nearly 1 gigabit per second of data to individual devices.
In another move related to wireless, AT4 wireless www.at4wireless.com announced on August 4, 2016, they will provide testing services to assess fair coexistence of Wi-Fi and LTE in unlicensed spectrum (LTE-U) devices as per the Wi-Fi alliance coexistence Test Plan. The testing will assess whether commercially available LTE-U devices can coexist fairly with Wi-Fi in the same environment.