A decade of connection

NYU WIRELESS, an innovative academic research center with a focus on 6G and beyond, was launched in 2012, by Founding Director and Professor Theodore “Ted” Rappaport (ECE, Courant, and the NYU School of Medicine), who pioneered the use of the millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum, paving the way for the powerful cell phones and other wireless devices most of us now use.

The world's first academic research center to combine engineering, computer science, and medicine, NYU WIRELESS is now under the direction of Distinguished Industry Professor Thomas Marzetta (ECE), who led the development of massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output), another core component of modern wireless networks.

Along with their fellow NYU WIRELESS researchers, the two, who were so instrumental in enabling 5G, are now exploring new parts of the radio spectrum, developing new technologies, forging new partnerships, and turning their attention to the next generation of mobile communications. They predict a time when autonomous vehicles communicate seamlessly with one another, remote medical devices allow a surgeon to treat a patient on the other side of the world, and wireless signals can be sent at the rate of human computation. Meanwhile, as they look ahead, in honor of NYU WIRELESS’s 10^th anniversary, we’re taking a look back.

Five Reasons to celebrate 10 years of NYU WIRELESS:

1. Research
2. Collaboration and Community
3. Leadership
4. Faculty Accomplishments
5. Grants and Funding

Research

• NYU WIRELESS researchers develop a technology, streamloading, that could ultimately make spotty streaming and data hogging downloads a thing of the past (2013)
• NYU WIRELESS researchers receive the IEEE Donald G. Fink Award for the seminal paper "Millimeter Wave Mobile Communications for 5G Cellular: It Will Work" (2015)
• NYU WIRELESS releases a groundbreaking new NYUSIM Channel Simulator that provides a complete statistical channel model and simulation code with an easy-to-use interface for generating realistic spatial and temporal wideband channel impulse responses (2016)
• Research shows real potential for the mmWave band in rural areas, with waves traveling more than 10 kilometers (2016)
• The Federal Communications Commission grants NYU WIRELESS early “Program Experimental License” for cutting-edge work throughout the radio spectrum​ (2017)
• Researchers at Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT) and NYU WIRELESS build the world’s first wireless emulator suitable for 5G systems that feature massive bandwidths and hundreds of antenna elements (2017)
• NYU WIRELESS researchers help unveil new ways of enhancing the performance of electrochemical micro-sensors — a discovery that could lead to the  detection of biomolecules, such as dopamine, at lower concentrations than is possible today (2021)

Collaboration and Community

• 

  Nokia and NYU WIRELESS bring the first-ever 5G Summit, now one of the premiere annual events in the wireless world, to Brooklyn (2014)
• Ted Rappaport keynotes a major Federal Communications Commission hearing on mmWaves at the Workshop on Spectrum Frontiers and Technological Developments (2016) and is appointed to serve on the Commission's Technological Advisory Council (2019)
• NYU WIRELESS is chosen by an NSF and industry consortium to participate in the “Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research” program, with the aim of testing new ways of boosting internet speeds to support data-intensive applications in robotics, immersive virtual reality, and traffic safety. The result is a project called COSMOS (Cloud Enhanced Open Software-Defined Mobile Wireless Testbed for City-Scale Deployment), which allowed researchers to explore wide-ranging applications, including connected vehicles, in a dense, urban area (2018)
• NYU WIRELESS is selected to participate in ComSenTer, a collaboration among the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and industry partners (2018)
• NYU WIRELESS participates in the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance, making NYU Tandon the only U.S.-based university member (2018)
• NYU WIRELESS becomes the first academic institution to join the mmWave Coalition, whose mission is to advocate for the use of radio frequencies above 95 GHz in the U.S. (2018)

Leadership

Distinguished Industry Professor Thomas Marzetta
(ECE and Director of NYU WIRELESS)

• is honored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Society with its Industrial Innovation Award for “originating the concept of Massive MIMO, and for sustained contributions to the development and promotion of that technology” (2017)
• is elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2020)

Founding Director and Professor Theodore “Ted” Rappaport (ECE, Courant, and the NYU School of Medicine)

• is elected as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (2018)
• becomes the first-ever career academic elected to the Wireless Hall of Fame (2019)
• is elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2021)

Faculty Accomplishments

• Institute Professor Elza Erkip (ECE)
  • is listed among the “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” by Thomson Reuters (2014)
  • is recognized by the Women in Communications Engineering Standing Committee for her outstanding technical work in the field of communications engineering, and for having achieved a high degree of visibility in the field (2016)
  • is elected president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Information Theory Society (2018)
  • wins the Technical Achievement Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Society (2019)
  • wins the Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award (2021)
• Professor Sundeep Rangan (ECE and Associate Director of NYU WIRELESS)  
  • is named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2015)
  • wins the Signal Processing Society Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award (2020)
• Professor Yong Liu (ECE)
  • is named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2017)
• Professor Shivendra-Panwar  (ECE and Director of CATT)
  • is honored by IIT Kanpur with their Distinguished Services Award
• Professor Dennis Shasha (Courant and Associate Director of NYU WIRELESS)
  • is named an Association for Computing Machinery Fellow for his technical and literary contributions to the field of data management (2014)

Grants and Funding

• The NSF, Empire State Development, and corporate backers award NYU WIRELESS $2M to develop a 5G network (2012)
• National Instruments donates nearly $1 million in hardware and software to NYU WIRELESS to accelerate 5G research (2017)
• NYU WIRELESS is awarded a $2.3 million contract with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to work on mmWave communications for public safety, as part of an initiative aimed at advancing broadband technologies for first responders (2017)
• Keysight donates the largest in-kind gift to NYU WIRELESS and Tandon in the history of the School (2018)

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