Swarun Kumar

Professor, Affiliated Faculty

Office 4113 Mehrabian Collaborative Innovation Center

Email swarun@cmu.edu

Phone (412) 268-1892

Department
CIT - Electrical and Computer Engineering
Computer Science Department: Affiliated

Research Interests
Distributed Systems
Mobile and Pervasive Computing
Networking
Systems

My research interests are in the area of computer networks with a special focus on wireless networks and mobile systems. Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth in wireless connectivity, enabling a host of new applications and services. My research designs and builds systems that address fundamental technical challenges impeding the growth of wireless networks. It explores new connections between wireless networking and other disciplines, such as robotics, radar, computer vision, security and signal processing.

My research has two broad focus areas:

Faster Wireless Networks: Interference is the fundamental problem facing mobile networks, particularly with rising demand for data in this ever-growing sector of the global economy. Past work develops interference management solutions that need new hardware to be deployed. In contrast, we develop solutions that use mobility, signal processing and software architecture to effectively cancel interference on commodity Wi-Fi and cellular networks. Our clean-slate designs achieve an order-of-magnitude gain in network throughput.

Novel Services for the Internet of Things: Wireless networks have traditionally been used as a means to communicate data. But beyond communication, there is an enormous potential to use our existing wireless infrastructure for novel services. In particular, we design solutions that use information embedded in wireless signals to develop new services for smart environments and the Internet of Things. My research has built a range of such services including: GPS for indoors, better navigation for robotic networks, wireless security and safer driverless cars, to name a few. 

Publications