Chao-Fang Shih and Raghupathy Sivakumar received the Best Paper Award at the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Computing, Networking, and Communications, held February 3-6 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Both Shih and Sivakumar are affiliated with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech.

Entitled “FastBeam: Practical Fast Beamforming for Indoor Environments,” the award-winning paper presented a solution that uses a suite of algorithmic strategies to enable fast and practical indoor Wi-Fi beamforming using only received signal strength indicator (RSSI). FastBeam consists of both optimality-preserving techniques and heuristic approaches that are selectively applied depending on the rate of change of the channel. The paper also presents experimental results from an implementation of FastBeam on the Phocus Array System with eight antennas. The results show that FastBeam reduces the time complexity for RSSI-based beamforming by an average of 50 percent and by up to 75 percent compared to existing approaches. This translates into a data rate improvement of 40 to 80 percent.

Shih is an ECE Ph.D. student and is advised by Sivakumar, who is a Ken Byers Professor in ECE and is the leader of the Georgia Tech Networks and Mobile Computing Group.