Ichalkaranji youth cracks 150-yr-old telecom problem
Marconi Society honours Dinesh Bharadia for his full duplex radio technology
An Indian student in the US is being honoured, for helping crack a problem that has stumped the telecom industry for 150 years: how to send and receive signals on the same frequency. This is still not a commercial reality: Whether on mobile phones or large communication transceivers, you need two separate frequencies, one to transmit, another to receive. The research of Dinesh Bharadia and the work being progressed at a Silicon Valley (US) startup, Kumu Networks, founded by Bharadia’s doctoral guide, Dr Sachin Katti of Stanford University, may change all that.
Bharadia has been just named as a winner of the Marconi Society’s Young Scholar Award for 2016. He will receive the award at a ceremony at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on November 2. Winners are selected by an international panel of engineers from leading universities and companies.
Bharadia’s work will effectively double the efficiency of wireless networks
Bharadia’s research disproved a long-held assumption that it is “generally not possible for a radio to receive and transmit on the same frequency band because of the interference that results.”
He gives a simple analogy: “Let’s say you are shouting at someone and they are shouting at you. Neither of you can hear the other, because you are both shouting in the same frequency. The noise in your ears (“interference”) from your own shout prevents you from hearing the other person. That’s why radios use two different frequencies to transmit and receive simultaneously. It’s also why solving the challenge of developing ‘full duplex radios’ effectively doubles the amount of available spectrum.”
Dinesh Bharadia, winner of 2016 Marconi Society Young Scholar Award
The analog cancellation filter Bharadia developed, also unleashed the potential for many more applications. Says Prof. Sachin Katti, “Dinesh’s work enables a whole host of new applications, from extremely low-power Internet of Things connectivity to motion tracking. It has the potential to be used for important future applications such as building novel wireless imaging that can enable driverless cars in severe weather scenarios, help blind people to navigate indoors, and much more.”
Bharadia, now 28, was born in Ichalkaranji, Kolhapur district, Maharashtra, 250 kms from Pune and graduated from IIT Kanpur in Electrical Engineering. “My elder brother introduced me to an amazing teacher Vaman Gogate, more popularly known as Gogate Sir. He provided guidance and mental energy to prepare for IIT-JEE”, says Dinesh. After gaining his PhD at Stanford University he now continues his research into full duplex radios at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He took a leave of absence from his doctorate studies at Stanford so he could commercialize the radio through the startup Kumu Networks.
In a message to Indian readers he writes:
“India has much denser users when it comes to cellular data connectivity and very few cellular towers. Firstly, if one can talk and listen at the same time in the context of wireless radio, one can double the data we can service. Second, this technology can be used to build cheap-efficient full-duplex relays i.e. relays which can listen to signal from the cellular tower and at the same transmit it instantaneously, which would help us to extend the range very easily. We have fewer cellular towers in India; by deploying these cheap-efficient full-duplex relays, we don’t need to deploy expensive cellular tower infrastructure, but gain similar benefits.”
Hopefully in a few years, Dinesh Bharadia — and Kumu Networks’ — work will result in more efficient and ultimately more cost-effective wireless systems for the aam aadmi.
IndiaTechOnline
Originally published on The Golden Sparrow
