Associate Professor Dario Pompili and ECE Ph.D. students Zhuoran Qi and Xueyuan Zhao have won the Best Paper Award at the 2019 ACM International Conference on Underwater Networks & Systems (ACM WUWNet), which was held in Atlanta, GA for their paper titled "Range-extending Optical Transceiver Structure for Underwater Vehicles and Robotics."
WUWNet is a premier venue for sharing state-of-the-art research and development of underwater networks and systems, bringing together leading scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs from a broad range of backgrounds relevant to underwater sensing, communications, networking, robotics, systems, and applications. The winners were presented with an award certificate and a USD 300 prize.
The abstract of the award winning paper is below.
Abstract: An underwater optical communication link provides high-speed data transfer between water surface buoys/ships and underwater vehicles for robotics applications. However, currently such optical links are severely limited by the coverage range due to the high attenuation of light in the water environment as well as by the scattering problem. A new optical transceiver structure is proposed to significantly extend the coverage range by several folds, targeting to solve this coverage bottleneck problem for high-speed data transfer. The proposal is a new optical transceiver structure with hybrid nonlinear pulse position modulation and time-frequency spreading. This new scheme is able to boost the range coverage by several folds, and was verified via thorough bit-level computer simulations using realistic models tailored for the optical channel propagation environments. The proposed structure can be integrated into the existing underwater vehicles and robots to enable the next-generation range-extended and high-speed optical links for oceanic explorations.
Congratulations to Dario, Zhuoran and Xueyuan on this recognition!