Robert Akl

University of North Texas

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Robin Chataut

Texas Christian University

Mohammadreza Robaei

University of Tabriz

Utpal Dey

Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee

Mohamad Haidar

Shimane University

Hussain M. Al‐Rizzo

University of Arkansas at Little Rock

M.V. Hegde

Manipal Academy of Higher Education

Mort Naraghi‐Pour

Louisiana State University

Uttara Sawant

University of North Texas

Yupo Chan

University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Sultan Alotaibi

Umm al-Qura University

Cooperative Institutions

University of North Texas

University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Fitchburg State University

Shaanxi Normal University

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

École de Technologie Supérieure

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Louisiana State University

University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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Attracting And Retaining Women In Computer Science And Engineering: Evaluating The Results

David Keathly Robert Akl Ryan Garlick

Abstract NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Attracting and Retaining Women in Computer Science and Engineering: Evaluating the Results Abstract Computer science and engineering communities have been exploring a variety of activities and techniques to attract and retain more students, especially women and minorities, to computer science and computer engineering degree programs1. This paper briefly describes the efforts and results of a plan for actively recruiting young women into undergraduate computer engineering and computer science programs hosted by the University of North Texas (UNT). It also describes a series of activities aimed at improving the retention rate of students already in our programs, particularly during the freshman year. Such recruitment and retention efforts are critical to the country’s efforts to increase the number of engineering professionals, and are a priority for the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department at UNT. We initially designed a three-part plan to achieve our recruitment and retention goals: • Sponsorship of portable and mobile summer computer engineering robotics camps for middle and high-school women students, coordinating with the regional Girl Scouts councils and other organizations to help with the recruitment; • Creation of an Ambassador program using young women currently enrolled in the upper division of current computer science and computer engineering programs as a form of outreach to area high schools and junior colleges; and • Expansion of our successful undergraduate mentoring program by using the Ambassador cohort mentioned above as mentors for incoming freshman and first-year transfer women entering our programs. This paper will focus primarily on the summer camp program and present an analysis of the results we have seen to date after 2 years of camp activities. Results from student surveys and parent surveys will be presented. The paper concludes with recommended changes and improvements in the program, as well as a discussion of adaptations that would create programs suitable for implementation at other institutions as well as programs aimed at a different target population. The three phases previously enumerated each build upon currently accepted educational practices. The robotics summer camp in particular used problem-based learning approaches, similar to those described in The Power of Problem-Based Learning2. This study clearly demonstrates the significant benefits of teaching students how to think by using a problem-based approach. We also developed a mobile laboratory so that the summer camp can be held at several locations, thus broadening and expanding the reach of the camps to traditionally underserved populations and geographical regions. Similarly, both the ambassador and mentoring programs derive from research showing how the recruitment and retention of women in engineering- related fields can be increased by providing opportunities to develop student-to-student relationships3, 4.

Outreach

10.18260/1-2--2173

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Self-Configuring Wireless MEMS Network

Robert Akl Krishna M. Kavi Hesham El Rewini

This presentation discusses miniature, lightweight, self-powered wireless sensors, and networking software needs.

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An Efficient and Fair Scheduling for Downlink 5G Massive MIMO Systems

Robin Chataut Robert Akl

Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is one of the key enabling technology for future generation 5G networks, which groups antenna at both base station and the user terminals to provide high spectral and energy efficiency. Massive MIMO throughput can be increased by scheduling users experiencing good channel conditions, but the users at the edge of the cell with poor channel conditions are often ignored. To improve overall system performance, a certain amount of fairness must be ensured among all the users. In this paper, we propose a fair scheduling algorithm based upon user channel gain to provides higher throughput, sumrate, and better error performance. The simulation results of the proposed algorithm, when compared to the traditional scheduling algorithms, show that the proposed algorithm provides better throughput, sumrate, error performance, and ensures fairness among all users.

Maximum throughput scheduling

Fairness measure

Proportionally fair

Spectral Efficiency

10.1109/wmcs49442.2020.9172382

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Millimeter-Wave Blockage Modeling And Mitigation

Mohammadreza Robaei Robert Akl

An Integrated Map-Statistical Blockage (IMSB) model for the millimeter-wave communication has been proposed. Also, we have proposed beam-broadening as a physical layer solution to mitigate millimeter-wave blockage impact. The map-based blockage model has been recommended by 3GPP to model large-scale diffraction loss. However, it ignores the small-scale impact of the blockage. The IMSB model utilizes both the large-scale and small-scale properties of the channel to reproduce the impact of the blockage on the channel's spectral properties. In addition, beam-broadening provides an antenna pattern with a wide and flat tip by generating multiple coordinated beams to alleviate the blockage effects. The beam-broadening pattern increases the energy of the new wavefronts diffracted from the edges of an obstacle. As a result, it raises the total collected energy by the receiver antenna. The numerical result has been presented to evaluate the performance of the IMSB model for the directional and beam-broadening antenna patterns.

Extremely high frequency

10.1109/cqr39960.2021.9446217

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Dynamic Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) scheme for two-tier network in LTE

Sultan Alotaibi Robert Akl

Femtocell networks are a promising solution to enhance the capacity of the LTE networks, especially for the indoor environments. However, unplanned deployment of the femtocells causes the co-tier interference and cross-tier interference. The interference limits the advantages of deploying the femtocell networks. The Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) concept is introduced to mitigate the effect of the interference on the system. In this work, Dynamic scheme is proposed to partition the spectrum efficiently. The objective of the proposed scheme is to increase the capacity of the femtocells, which enhances the performance of the system and benefits of fmetocells. The proposed scheme assign less resources for macrocell's part, which has more deployed femtocells in order to reuse as much as possible of the available resources. An experiment is conducted in order to evaluate the proposed scheme. The results indicates that the proposed scheme can increase the capacity of the system.

Macrocell

Femtocell

10.1109/uemcon.2017.8249098

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Citations (5)

Hybrid Energy-Aware Synchronization Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Networks

Robert Akl Yanos Saravanos

We present a time synchronization scheme for wireless sensor networks that aims to conserve sensor battery power while maintaining network connectivity for as long as possible. The proposed method creates a hierarchical tree by flooding the sensor network from a designated source point. It then uses a hybrid algorithm derived from the Timing-sync protocol for sensor networks (TSPN) and the reference broadcast synchronization method (RBS) to periodically synchronize sensor clocks by minimizing the number of required transmissions. In multi-hop ad-hoc networks, a depleted sensor will drop information from all other sensors that route data through it, decreasing the physical area being monitored by the network. It is therefore imperative that time synchronization schemes are aware of the number of sensors being used at any given time. The proposed method uses several techniques and thresholds to maintain network connectivity. A new source point is chosen when the current one's battery power reaches a designated energy threshold. The network is also re-flooded whenever the number of used sensors drops below another threshold. We implement and show that our scheme can provide significant power savings over both TPSN and RBS; the power reduction is even more drastic in large multi-hop sensor networks. The method also improves upon these algorithms by maintaining a large area of coverage even when some sensors lose power.

sync

10.1109/pimrc.2007.4394371

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An Adaptive User Scheduling Algorithm for 6G Massive MIMO Systems

Robin Chataut Robert Akl

10.23919/icact60172.2024.10471912

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Examining Spatial Consistency for Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO Channel Estimation in 5G-NR

2023 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) (2020)

Mohammadreza Robaei Robert Akl

Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has determined the millimeter wave (mmWave) as one of the main technologies to achieve a high data rate communication scheme for 5G. Unlike conventional sub-6 GHz bands, mmWave communication has short areal coverage due to its propagation characteristics. As a result, mmWave strongly depends on beamforming using Massive MIMO to achieve expected optimal spectral efficiency. For this propose, accurate channel state information is essential to align the antenna arrays properly. However, mmWave channel estimation is challenging because of its sparse delay-angular characteristics. In this paper, we are examining the local Spatio-temporal correlation of the non-stationary mmWave channel to study the effect of the spatial consistency from mmWave channel estimation point. We are employing Correlation Distance Matrix (CDM) to characterize the correlation between channel ensembles in non-stationary mmWave channel model. Our observation shows that spatial consistency decreases sharply as the physical distance between the channel ensembles increases. Also, we observed that channel estimation using a sparse recovery algorithm preserves the spatial consistency between estimated channels. Our results show that the spatial consistency can be employed to design more efficient channel estimation techniques for mmWave massive MIMO system provided that the update distance is very short.

Extremely high frequency

10.1109/icce46568.2020.9042983

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Citations (7)

Subscriber Maximization in CDMA Cellular Networks

Robert Akl

This presentation gives an overview of code division multiple access (CDMA), traffic and mobility models, subscriber optimization formulation, and numerical results.

W-CDMA

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Radio resource management in LTE femtocell networks

Sultan Alotaibi Robert Akl

In wireless network system the resources are limited. Therefore, managing resources is considered as a challenging task. The resource are distributed among attached UEs, so allocating resources needs to be well controlled. Packet scheduler in LTE network is responsible for assigning resources to attached UEs. Also, femtocell network is considered as promising solution for poor channel in indoor environment. Femtocell deployment within macrocell (traditional base station) would increase the capacity of the cell. Therefore, incubating robust Packet Scheduler scheme within femtocell would deliver better capacity. In this work Packet Scheduler scheme is proposed. It performs with consideration of maximizing the capacity as well as preserving the fairness among UEs. A simulation is conducted in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The result shows that it outperforms well-known PF scheduler in terms of cell aggregated throughput and average throughput of UEs.

Femtocell

Macrocell

Network scheduler

10.1109/nca.2017.8171396

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Citations (3)