RENEW Visitors Program

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About

We are excited to launch the RENEW Visitors program, to invite the community to come work with us at Rice. The RENEW team is actively developing an open-source massive MIMO framework for 5G and beyond. Our goal is to engage the academic and corporate research community to better understand and enable their research agendas..

        RENEW Visitors Program is well-suited for you:

      1. You have a research idea that needs massive MIMO experiments to publish your awesome paper.
      2. OR you are developing a new cool research idea that could plug into the RENEW open-source framework and could benefit the wider community.
      3. OR you have acquired software-defined radios from Skylark Wireless, to develop custom setups and experiments.
      4. You have existing funding to conduct the research. *See below for a potential NSF funding opportunity*.
      5. You have sufficient travel support to visit us in Houston, for a duration that meets your needs.

              6. Why travel to Rice University?

            1. Work with the faculty and the engineering team who are developing RENEW.
            2. Your research can impact what we develop in the coming years as part of the RENEW framework. RENEW framework updates are regularly released publicly and can be used for experiments on the POWDER platform.

                    3. Key things to keep in mind:

                  1. Visiting is for platform sharing and does not imply collaboration (project advising, co-authoring papers, etc.).
                  2. We only have a few available slots, so we may not be able to accommodate all requests.
                  3. Not all research ideas can currently be supported, as the RENEW framework is still in Year 2 of development.
                  4. To help us gauge whether visiting us is right for you, feel free to write to Prof. Joe Cavallaro with a short description of your research project; Prof. Cavallaro leads RENEW community engagement. If you know Rice PIs on the team, please feel free to write to them too.
                  5. If you are a graduate student writing to us, please make sure to CC your advisor in your correspondence to us.

                          6. NSF Supplement Opportunity

                          The National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is supporting supplemental funding requests for active research awards to conduct experimental research on the NSF-funded Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR). These supplemental funding requests are anticipated to be on the order of about $50,000, with higher amounts (but strictly less than one-fifth of the original award) requiring additional justification. Funded supplements will provide support for periods of up to two years, but not exceed the existing award periods. Supplemental Request submission deadline: March 15, 2020 and thereafter every March 15 till 2023. Go to NSF's website for details.

                                      International Collaboration on Core Networks and Massive MIMO arrays

                                      The Free5GC is an open-source project for 5th generation (5G) mobile core networks led by Prof. Jyh-Cheng Chen and researchers from National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Exchange visits between Houston and Taiwan for students and Rice faculty member Prof. Joseph Cavallaro began in 2019. The free5GC provides a core network which can be integrated with the Rice RENEW physical layer basestation hardware. An additional goal of the collaboration would be the development of experiments related to core network design to support topics such as handover and cell-free massive MIMO.

                                            Portland State University at Rice

                                            Portland State University Ph.D. student Gavin Megson spent a few months at Rice learning how to use the Iris SDR boards and performing channel measurements. Under the direction of Professor Ehsan Aryafar, he's been working on beamforming and self-interference techniques.