Paving the way for the next generation of wireless technology

Wireless@Virginia Tech is a research center, and our center has more than 30 faculty, and we work on all aspects of wireless. One of the projects I lead is a mobile distributed MIMO, and in mobile distributed MIMO, we have people from Wireless@Virginia Tech, we have Innovation Campus, and also we have National Security Institute, so all working together for a relatively large scale project which may potentially impact the future of wireless. To me, NextG is actually not only one single aspect, not only let's say improving the data rate. It really covers various aspects. If you look at 5G, it has both improved data rate, and also it improved something called massive connectivity. Where you have those smart cities, smart homes, where a lot of sensors and a lot of internet of things, applications, have started in the 5G domain, and also there's another important application which is ultra reliable low latency communication, which is mainly for autonomous driving, where cars, a lot of cars talking to each other, not necessarily at a high data rate, but they need to be very low latency, and very reliable. We start to see 5G already has a lot of applications and 6G and NextG is even more. One of the big thing, I would say currently under the national scope as well, even international scope, is something called ORAN, Open radio Access Network, and that Virgina Tech is very strong at. Traditionally, the video access network is kind of closed. It's more like proprietary. If it's proprietary, you can't change much. But once you opened it up, you can potentially bring the cost down. Then you can potentially bring lot of innovative strategy into it to improve performance. That gives you the potential to actually help those underdeveloped countries. Virgina Tech is trying to be an integral part of that to help this overall mission. We want to leverage technology to help humanity.