Alenka Zajic received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Communications and Electronics, held July 30-August 1 in Da Nang, Vietnam.

An assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Zajic received this award with her coauthors Meisam Naderi and Matthias Patzold, a Ph.D. student and professor, respectively, from the University of Agder in Norway. The title of the team’s award-winning paper is “A Geometry-Based Channel Model for Shallow Underwater Acoustic Channels under Rough Surface and Bottom Scattering Conditions.”

Many scientific, defense, and safety endeavors require communications between untethered submerged devices and/or vehicles. Examples include sensor networks for seismic monitoring, analysis of resource deposits, oceanographic and environmental studies, and tactical surveillance, as well as communications between Unmanned or Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (UUVs or AUVs) for deep-water construction, repairs, scientific or resource exploration, and defense applications.

As the first step toward making these applications feasible, scientists and engineers need to understand underwater propagation mechanisms and how they affect communication systems. In the awarded paper, Zajic and her colleagues develop a stochastic geometry-based channel model for wideband shallow underwater acoustic (UWA) channels under the assumption that the ocean surface and bottom are rough. The paper also proposes a new UWA channel simulator based on a technique known as the equally spaced scatterers method (MESS).

This paper is the result of Zajic’s Georgia Electronic Design Center collaboration with the University of Agder and their work on the S2EuNet project, an effort sponsored by the European Commission that will strengthen international partnerships in the areas of next generation mobile systems and wireless networks.