Restuccia Receives Army Research Office Early Career Program Award to Study Next-Generation MIMO Networking
ECE Assistant Professor Francesco Restuccia has received the Army Research Office Early Career Program Award to develop the scientific foundations of secure, scalable, and resilient multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) communications. ECP awards are funded by the Army to support a very small group of early career scientists and engineers who show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research. The objective of the ECP Award is to foster creative basic research in science and engineering; enhance development of outstanding early career investigators; and increase opportunities for early career investigators to pursue research in areas relevant to the Army. The ECP award provides up to $120,000 per year for three years.
The project addresses a core limitation of today’s MIMO systems: beamforming still relies heavily on fixed digital signal processing pipelines that require accurate channel knowledge, high feedback overhead, and substantial computation. These assumptions are increasingly difficult to sustain in tactical wireless networks, where Army systems must operate under mobility, spectrum congestion, adversarial observation, limited size, weight, and power, and rapidly changing mission requirements. The central insight of the project is that beams do not always need to be perfectly formed; instead, beamforming can be treated as a controlled approximation problem. The project will investigate how much MIMO beamforming precision is actually necessary in a given propagation environment under specific performance, concealment, resilience, and resource constraints. The research will develop theoretical bounds on tolerable MIMO approximation across time, antenna, and frequency dimensions; design dynamic neural network architectures that approximate both MIMO feedback and digital signal processing operations in real time; and validate the resulting theory and algorithms using advanced wireless experimentation facilities at the Institute for Intelligent Networked Systems (INSI) at Northeastern University.