ECE Department Research Overview

The Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Polytechnic University has a long tradition of excellence in teaching and researching. A faculty of some 25 professors offers undergraduate programs to about 450 students on two campuses: one in Brooklyn's MetroTech Center, and one in suburban Melville Long Island. Masters programs, including availability of part-time study for working engineers, serve about 200 students on three campuses: those in Brooklyn and Melville, as well as one in Westchester County. The approximately 50 PhD candidates are largely supported by fellowships and assistantships. 

Faculty and students are engaged in research sponsored at the rate of about $2.5 million by government agencies and industrial organizations such as National Science Foundation, NASA, the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force, and the New York State Office of Science, Technology, and Academic Research, and private companies and foundations such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Verizon and many well known industrial companies. 

The University is home to the 2 research centers: Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT) and Wireless Internet Center for Advanced Technology (WICAT), the leading research centers in New York that focus on innovation in telecommunications, distributed computing and wireless communication. With State funds for these centers, ECE and CS Departments of Polytechnic can in turn provide research, development and educational support for New York based corporations in telecommunications and related fields. The Centers and their related activities further strengthen Polytechnic's strong academic position in electrical engineering and computer science. 

There are over 10 research labs founded by Professors of the Department that focus on the telecommunications (including wireless and high-speed integrated networks), digital signal processing (including video, image processing), computer engineering, control and robotics, electrical power systems, electromagnetic & microwaves, electrophysics of materials (especially plasmas). Every year, there are many outstanding papers, patterns, and research achievements from faculties and students of the Department. 

Following is a brief overview over the main research areas represented in the department:

1. Fields and Waves: Including Computational Electromagnetics, RF Integrated Circuits and Antennas, Plasma, Microwave
2. Systems, Control and Signal Processing: Including analysis, design, development and control of Communication Networks, Dynamical Systems, and Other Robotic Systems. Research is focused on Transmitter-Receiver Design for Interference and Noise Suppression, Video Coding, design of Specialized Wavelet Transforms for Enhancement of video quality, On-Demand P2P Video Streaming System, Video Transport over Wireless Ad Hoc Networks.
3. Telecommunications and Wireless: Including Cellular Communications, Wireless Communications, Network Security, High Speed Network Switch Design, Network Design, Management and Analysis, Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) Systems.
4. VLSI, Electronics and Power: Including Cryptographic Architectures, Built-In-Self-Test (BIST) Architectures, Fault Attack Resistant Architectures, Fault Tolerant Nanoscale Systems in the VLSI. Unit Substation Demand Estimation, Mitigation of Voltage Disturbances in the power networks in the Power Engineering. 

•  Fields and Waves:

(Profs. Nirod K. Das, Spencer Kuo)

The department has significant research strength in the fields and waves area.

Electromagnetics: Professor Nirod K. Das is working on problems in the area of Electromagnetics including Computational Electromagnetics, Artificial Materials for Electromagnetics Applications and Multilayered RF Integrated Circuits and Antennas. The computational electromagnetic research project is targeted for modeling and design of complex RFIC chips and packages, mixed packages or systems with digital, analog and RF circuits, large phased-array antennas, and satellite communication systems. More than that, in the research project on Artificial Materials for Electromagnetics, Professor Nirod  is investigating simple artificial materials that may be implemented using periodic reinforcement of simple metallic structures in a dielectric environment. The last topic he focus is on developing new modeling and design tools that would be critical for successful implementation of multilayer circuits

Plasma, Microwave: Professor Spencer Kuo has long been research on Microwave, Plasma technologies. Right now, his research in this area is concerned with Wave-Plasma to advance the understanding of wave-plasma interaction processes that help for the realization of the future Naval/DoD systems for the missions; develop a plasma torch to be a viable Igniter/Fuel Injector in a Scramjet Engine; research on plasma effects on the shock wave structure in Supersonic/Hypersonic Flights and last but not least develop a decontamination tool that is capable of selectively and effectively destroying BWA for biodefense

 

• Systems, Control and Signal Processing:

(Profs. Z. P. Jiang, Farshad Khorrami, S. Unnikrishna Pillai, Ivan Selesnick, Yao Wang, Shivendra Panwar)

Control: On the topic that Analysis and Control of Communication Networks, Professors Z. P. Jiang and Shivendra Panwar research is focus on analysis and design of wireless ad hoc broadcasting protocols, demonstrates that tools from nonlinear system theory can play an important role in tackling “hard nonlinearities” and “unknown disturbances” for controlling communication networks. Professor Z. P. Jiang research also focus on Stability of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems, proposes a new approach to the problem of global stabilization and trajectory tracking by means of Lyapunov techniques and adaptive system theory.

Professor Farshad Khorrami researches focus on architecture for Autonomous Unmanned Vehicles, Nonlinear Control for Electric Motors, Development of an Ultra-Accurate High-Speed Six DOF Manipulator and Other Robotic Systems and Decentralized Control of Nonlinear Large-Scale Interconnected Systems.

Communication: Professor S. Unnikrishna Pillai doing research on Joint Transmitter-Receiver Design for Interference and Noise Suppression which focus on designing the optimal transmit-receiver pair so as to maximize the output signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) at the decision instant.

Signal processing: Professor Ivan Selesnick and Professor Yao Wang doing research focus on Video Coding using 3-D Motion-Selective Wavelet Transform. Professor Selesnick research on signal processing such as: A Motion-Selective 3-D Wavelet Transform for Enhancement of Imagery in Video Data, Wavelet Processing for Positron Emission Tomography. More than that Professor Selesnick also focuses on designing specialized wavelet transforms, building upon the recently developed dual-tree transform, an oriented complex-valued wavelet transform shown to be highly beneficial for multi-dimensional signal processing; developing fast and effective non-linear denoising algorithms based on multivariate Laplacian distributions and now working with mixtures of such distributions.

Video, P2P and Ad Hoc network: As a hot topic, Professors Shivendra Panwar, Keith Ross (CIS Dept.), and Yao Wang are doing research on On-Demand P2P Video Streaming System that enables users to search and view on-demand enormous libraries of video content stored in the Internet by using Pear to Pear technology and gaining benefits By coding a video into multiple sub-streams and distributing the sub-streams from separate peers. Professors Panwar and Wang have also undertaken research on Video Transport over Wireless Ad Hoc Networks by proposing to new method of combining multistream source coding and multipath transport.

• Telecommunication and Wireless:

(Profs. Frank Cassara, H Jonathan Chao, Ramesh Karri, Elza Erkip, Andrej Stefanov, Yao Wang, David Goodman, Yong Liu, I-Tai Lu, Shivendra Panwar, Peter Voltz, Henri Bertoni)

Cellular Communications: Teams with guidance form experienced professors and grants from NSF and WICAT are into research on several areas in Cellular Communications. Fading Channel Prediction for enhancing WCDMA Cellular Radio (Prof I-Tai Lu) focuses on increasing the accuracy and speed of calculating Channel State Information (CSI) estimation, tracking and prediction to enhance WCDMA cellular radio. Radio Resource Management, CDMA based communication of Real-Time Media Signals and Data (Prof. David Goodman). Power Efficient Multimedia Wireless Communications (Profs. David Goodman, Elza Erkip, Yao Wang) aiming at effective utilization of radio resources, including transmitter power and channel bandwidth for improving the QoS and efficiency of network.

Wireless Communications: Unlike the standard communication technique of processing and routing signals form earlier nodes in the route; the Cooperative Networking, which is one of the major areas of research at Polytechnic Institute of NYU, aims at network users sharing their information jointly with the objective of gaining greater reliability and efficiency than they could obtain individually. Professors Elza Erkip, Andrej Stefanov, Yao Wand and Shivendra Panwar head research in Cooperative Wireless Communications by undertaking various projects like Cooperative Source and Channel Coding, Cooperative Regions and Partners Choice in Coded Cooperative Systems, Designing Medium Access Control for Cooperative Networks.

Professor Shivendra Panwar is also involved in Performance Evaluation of IEEE the 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) which aims to enhance the QoS capability of Wireless Local Area Networks.

Research to implement OFDM Wireless LANs that can support data rates with little or no Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI), is undertaken by Professor Frank Cassara. The 802.11a OFDM wireless transmitter and receiver baseband processors are designed and coded in VHDL and simulation is in progress for the Receiver processor. The RF front end design and simulation will be the next in line.

Network Security:  Cyber Security Processor (CYSEP) to perform the functions of Firewall & Intrusion Detection, Encryption/Decryption, Authentication and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection is under Development by Professors H Jonathan Chao and Ramesh Karri. The CYSEP, consisting of four engines, will be implemented on Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) with state-of-the –art CMOS technologies and is expected to achieve 10 Gbps wire-speed operation.

High Speed Network Switch Design: Switching technology continues to be one of the bottlenecks in the development of broadband networks. Fixed-length switching technology is widely accepted as an approach to achieving high switching efficiency for high-seed packet switches. One approach is to schedule input-output connections in each time slot. The other approach is to use a load balanced switch. Professor H Jonathan Chao and Professor Shivendra Panwar have designed a load balanced switch called the Byte-Focal switch, which shows encouragingly low cell delay results.

Professor H. Jonathan Chao is also working on Multi-Stage Buffered Packet Switches to find a cost-effective router with a few tens of terabit or even petabit capacity to meet the future bandwidth requirements and global packet switching infrastructure.

Network Design, Management and Analysis: To better understand network condition and achieve better network control and management, a proposal for an information theoretic framework within which to study the redundancy present in Packet header traces is put forth by Professor Yong Liu. He is interested in a distributed network monitoring application for network intrusion detection. A research project for Analysis and Design on Overlay and Peer-Peer Networks by exploring the flexibility of control at the application layer, proposes various application level data relay schemes to significantly improve network users’ throughput. It also investigates the design on a relay network to efficiently support new end-end applications like VOIP and video conferencing.

The goal of Network X-ities project is to begin to build a solid, quantitative foundation for explicitly considering the X-ities (viz. non-fragility, manageability, diagnosability, optimizability, scalability, and evolvability) in the design and analysis of network architectures and protocols.

Multiple Input Multiple Output Systems: Information transfer through WLANs involves simultaneous communication among multiple source-destination pairs. Professor Andrej Stefanov’s research project Codec Cooperative OFDM Systems aims to analyze the performance of the coded cooperative system by developing a framework for the generalized block fading OFDM channel and study the achievable diversity and coding gains. Joint Source Channel Coding for MIMO Video Communications (Professors Andrej Stefanov and Yao Wang) investigates which diversity level and which error resilient video coding algorithm is best for a MIMO video system. Other research projects involving MIMO wireless communications are Space-Time Coding (Prof. Andrej Stefanov), Capacity of MIMO systems with Antenna Subset Selection (Prof. Peter Voltz)

• VLSI, Electronics and Power:

(Profs. Zivan Zabar, Dariusz Czarkowski, Ramesh Karri)

Power: Profs. Zivan Zabar and Dariusz Czarkowski head the research in the Power Systems. Their principal focus is on Mitigation of Voltage disturbances caused by Nonlinear Electrical Massive loads and Unit Substation Demand Estimator (USDE). The voltage disturbances caused by Massive Nonlinear Electrical Loads are but a major concern of Power Utilities for providing high quality power at the customer end. Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) and Key Span Energy sponsor this research to investigate and mitigate the effect of such disturbances in the LIPA network. USDE, as the name suggests, is used for short and long tem load forecasting, using Real-Time data and different analyzing methods. This research project is sponsored by Consolidated Edison Company New York, NY.

VLSI and Electronics: Prof. Ramesh Karri heads the VLSI design research projects. The main areas of interest are to develop Fault Attack Resistant High Speed Cryptographic Architectures. Information security is the prime concern of today’s communications. Numerous encryption/decryption algorithms are proposed day-to-day, but the overhead of these encryptions and decryptions is a major factor in adopting certain algorithms. Architectures which are fault tolerant and attack resistant, yet those function at high speeds are the need of the day. Secure Built In Self Test (BIST) architectures for efficiently testing circuits under test with a low area overhead, superior fault coverage and test sequence length is one other stream of research.

Research into Fault Tolerant Nanoscale Systems investigates design principles for building reliable systems from unreliable nano device technologies of Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) and Negative Differential Resistance (NDR).