CSL student wins first prize at ACM SIGCOMM student research competition

Each year, dozens of students submit their work to the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Data Communication (ACM SIGCOMM) Conference Student Research Competition. Last month, after three rounds of competition, third-year

doctoral student Suraj Jog was announced as the overall winner of graduate student division.

Jog, in conjunction with professors Haitham Hassanieh and Romit Roy Choudhury in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is working to increase wireless network capacity and performance. Doing so would allow multiple users to access high bandwidth, like the kind needed for virtual reality, simultaneously. Current standards are unable to support this level of access.

To improve network capacity the group is exploiting current beam patterns of millimeter waves to find where the waves link and could be reused for additional bandwidth.

“Millimeter wave is a new wireless technology that offers a huge amount of bandwidth,” said Hassanieh. “The radios use very directional, narrow transmission, which allows us to pack many wireless links on the same channel without creating interference. Thus, we can increase the network output by increasing the number of links.”

Jog submitted his work to the conference months ago. It was accepted, and he presented at a poster session, which took place at the annual conference last month in Budapest, Hungary.

“I got some good pieces of advice before the first round,” Jog said. “Be energetic, and show your excitement about your work. It turned out really well.”

After the initial session, semi-finalists were announced at a conference banquet. As the next step in the process, he gave a 10-minute presentation with a question-and-answer session about the research. Jog credits this presentation with giving him the edge over his competitors.

“As soon as the finalists were announced, I went and looked at all the other posters,” Jog remembers. “I realized the opportunity for me to stand out was the presentation. It was the first time I experienced presenting when body language and attitude mattered. How you present the information really matters.”

While Jog emerged the victor, he still has one more phase of the competition to complete. He will compete against students who won the competition at other conferences in the Grand Finals. More details will be available in March 2019.

He is not finished perfecting his research either. Jog hopes to improve networking protocols in low-power IoT networks.