Kumar and colleagues win Best Paper Award at SIGCOMM

Swarun Kumar and MIT collaborators won the Best Paper Award at ACM SIGCOMM 2016 for their paper on Eliminating Channel Feedback in Next Generation Cellular Networks. The paper develops a new technology that is fundamental for the deployment of 5-G cellular networks

“We found a way to eliminate a key problem,” explains Kumar, “which is the need for networks to receive feedback from every single cellular device in the network before it can see a speedup in data rates.”

This paper focuses on a simple, yet fundamental question--can a node infer the wireless channels on one frequency band by observing the channels on a different frequency band? This question arises in cellular networks, where the uplink and the downlink operate on different frequencies. Addressing this question is critical for the deployment of key 5G solutions such as massive MIMO, multi-user MIMO, and distributed MIMO, which require channel state information.

Collaborators from MIT include Deepak Vasisht, Hariharan Rahul, and Dina Katabi. The Best Paper Award is shared with two other submissions: Don’t Mind the Gap: Bridging Network-wide Objectives and Device-level Configurations (Princeton, Microsoft, and UCLA), and Inter-Technology Backscatter: Towards Internet Connectivity for Implanted Devices (University of Washington).