Signals and Networks Lab

Visible Light Communications and LiFi Networks

A Light-emitting diode (LED) is a dominant source for future human-made light. The adoption of LEDs is expected to significantly reduce energy consumption and facilitate precise intensity and color control of illuminated spaces. An LED also makes possible the use of the visible light communications (VLC) technology that enables indoor luminaries and street lights to transmit wireless data through subtle intensity variations.

We study the use of modulated LEDs as well as superluminescent diodes (SLDs) and laser diodes (LDs) as alternative sources to realize next generation LiFi networks towards wireless high-speed Internet access, IoT deployments and sensing applications.
 

Selected Publication

Indoor optical wireless communication: potential and state-of-the-art, Hany Elgala, Raed Mesleh, and Harald Haas, IEEE Communications Magazine, September 2011.
 

Coexistence in Wireless Heterogeneous Networks

The demand for wireless capacity requires networking and Internet infrastructures to evolve and meet the needs of future bandwidth-hungry applications. Wireless heterogeneous networks (HetNets) will play an important role toward the goal of using a diverse spectrum to provide high quality-of-service (Qos) and quality-of-experiance (QoE), especially in indoor environments where most data are consumed.

We design and evaluate a coexistence framework to explore the new mobile access mm-Wave and THz optical bands with their unique propagation characteristic and capabilities to rethink the networking design towards the augmentation of existing micro-wave technologies and realization of new levels of throughput, latency, and streaming performance gains in future dense networks.
 

Selected Publications

Welcome to the CROWD: Design Decisions for Coexisting Radio and Optical Wireless Deployments, Rahaim, Michael, Iman Abdalla, Moussa Ayyash, Hany Elgala, Abdallah Khreishah, and Thomas DC Little, IEEE Network - The Magazine of Global Internetworking, July 2019.

Coexistence of WiFi and LiFi toward 5G: Concepts, Opportunities, and Challenges, Moussa Ayyash, Hany Elgala, Abdallah Khreishah, Volker Jungnickel, Thomas Little, Sihua Shao, Michael Rahaim, Dominic Schulz, Jonas Hilt, and Ronald Freund, IEEE Communications Magazine, February 2016.

Machine Learning for Communications and Networks

One of the fundamental communication problems is the reliability in the reconstruction of the transmitted messages. In a classical approach, all the processing blocks in the communication chain are separately optimized. However, such optimization process is considered suboptimal.

We study deep learning (DL) based on end-to-end performance enhancement to achieve reliable communication without any prior mathematical modeling to achieve optimal performance.
 

Selected Publications

Optimizing Handover Parameters by Q-learning for Heterogeneous Radio-Optical Networks, Shao, Sihua, Guanxiong Liu, Abdallah Khreishah, Moussa Ayyash, Hany Elgala, Thomas DC Little, and Michael Rahaim Photonics Journal, Volume 12, Issue 1., 2019.

Autoencoder Model for OFDM-based Optical Wireless Communication, Priti G. Pachpande, Monette H. Khadr, Hesham Hussien, Hany Elgala, and Dola Saha, OSA Advanced Photonics Congress (AP), 2019.
 

IoT Security

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) have a great potential in supporting time-critical data delivery among the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and for emerging applications such as smart cities. However, the unique characteristics of different technologies and shared radio operating environment can significantly impact network availability.

We study the channel assignment problem in time-critical IoT-based CRNs under proactive jamming attacks. We exploit the statistical information of licensed users' activities, fading conditions, and jamming attacks over idle channels.
 

Selected Publication

Securing IoT Delay-Sensitive Communications with Opportunistic Parallel Transmission Capability, Khadr, Monette H., Haythem Bany Salameh, Moussa Ayyash, Sufyan Almajali, and Hany Elgala, IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM 2019).

Spectrum assignment in cognitive radio networks for internet-of-things delay-sensitive applications under jamming attacks, Haythem A Bany Salameh, Sufyan Almajali, Moussa Ayyash, and Hany Elgala, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, March 2018.
 

Self-powered IoT Devices and Backscatter Communications

It is expected that by 2020, the Internet will consist of 50 billion devices, which leads to imperative design of the Internet-of-Things (IoT). The IoT should be able to link anything and everything to the Internet and to enable an exchange of data never available before. However, to braze the trail for IoT, several challenges need to be resolved.

We investigate and compare novel RF and optical backscattering wireless transmission and energy harvesting techniques to maximizing throughput, increase transmission range and provide uniform rate distribution under energy constraints.
 

Selected Publication

Pixelated VLC-backscattering for Self-charging Indoor IoT Devices, Sihua Shao, Abdallah Khreishah, and Hany Elgala, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, November 2016.
 

Positioning and Navigation

The ultra-wideband (UWB) is a wideband technology for high precision ranging, localization and data communication. UWB systems generally have a bandwidth of the order of a few gigahertz, which potentially provides sub-nanosecond scale resolution in time. Depending on how the UWB signals are transmitted and received, UWB units can be used for wireless range measurement, localization, transmission or some combination of the above.

We work on studying the propagation characteristics of the signals the UWB technology transmits in different environments and improve the performance as a standalone technology and within a heterogeneous network based on radio as well as optical wireless technologies.

We are collaborating with the Center of Technology in Government on the UWB technology.
 

Selected Publication

Intelligent Transportation based UWB Positioning and Connectivity: A Proof of Concept for Improving Public Transportation, April 2018.

SINE Lab Director

Hany Elgala's Faculty Page

Hany Elgala's Personal Page

About

I am an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department, College of Nanotechnology, Science, and Engineering (CNSE), at the University at Albany - State University of New York (SUNY). As an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, I will be conducting research with  Prof. Slawomir Stanczak at Technische Universität Berlin (TU-Berlin). I work in the area of Optical Communications and Networks. I am particularly interested in Visible Light Communications (VLC) and LiFi technologies, Machine Learning for Optical Systems, Heterogeneous RF-Optical Deployments, Wireless Backscattering and Sensing, IoT Security, and EMF Exposure.

Before joining the University at Albany, I was a Research Professor at Boston University and I have been fortunate to collaborate with Prof. Tom Little in the Multimedia Communications Lab at Boston University.  I received my PhD degree in 2010 from Constructor University (formerly Jacobs University), Germany under the supervision of Prof. Harald Haas at the University of Strathclyde/University of Edinburgh.

I'm actively looking for students to join the SINE lab.

Postdoctoral Research Fellows

Alumni

PhD Students

Saksham Dewan 
[email protected]

Chen Honglan
TBA

MS Students

TBA

Undergraduate Students

Basit A Baloch

Kristjan M Bruno

Cody W Davis

Michael T Jacques

Kihyun Lee

Alumni

Graduate

Sai Sandeep Kajuluri, TRC Companies, Inc.

Vasuda Trehan, PhD Student, University at Albany

John W Bradburn, PhD Student, University at Albany

Ahmed Hussien, Samsung

Monette Khadr, mavQ

Priti Pachpande, GlobalFoundries

Undergraduate