Yuchen Liu and Doug Blough won the Best Paper Award at the 45th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks. The conference was held virtually November 16-19 in Sydney, Australia. 

Liu is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where he is a member of the Advanced Networking and Dependable Systems Laboratory. Blough leads this lab and is an ECE Professor and the School’s associate chair for Faculty Development. 

The title of their award-winning paper is “Blockage Robustness in Access Point Association for mmWave Wireless LANs with Mobility.” Millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless LANs are targeted for use with emerging bandwidth-intensive applications such as virtual/augmented reality and real-time high-definition video. However, a major problem with wireless signals in the mmWave band is their susceptibility to blockages from obstacles such as furniture or even the human body. 

This work applies stochastic geometric analysis to indoor environments with fixed obstacles and human mobility to derive link reliability metrics. These metrics are then used to develop an algorithm for assigning user devices to primary and backup access points. The algorithm ensures continuous high-rate device connectivity in the mmWave band with both fixed and moving obstacles.

This research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation grant "Location, Location, Location: Maximizing Network Performance in the mmWave Era" with Principal Investigators Blough and Raghupathy Sivakumar, who holds the Wayne J. Holman Chair Professorship in ECE.