Indian American researcher named by the Marconi Society for outstanding research

An Indian American post-doctoral student at MIT is among four 2016 Paul Baran Young Scholars named by The Marconi Society on 14 September for their outstanding research and innovations in networking.

Dinesh Bharadia, holder of a PhD from Stanford, who is currently a graduate researcher at MIT, would receive his prestigious award at a gala on 2 November at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, where Brad Parkinson, the ''father of GPS,'' would receive the $100,000 Marconi Prize.

The Business Wire reported that the Marconi Society was dedicated to advancing scientific achievements in communications and the internet.

The 28-year-old Bharadia was selected for his work on full duplex radios. His solution effectively allows the doubling of available radio spectrum in a world where bandwidth was getting increasingly scarce.

The solution had eluded scientists for almost 150 years. His work offers effective self-interference cancellation technology that allows radio transmission and reception on the same frequency.

"Bharadia has been chosen for the 2016 Paul Baran Young Scholar Award for his contribution to send and receive radio (wireless) signals, including mobile telephony and data on the same channel (wave)," the Marconi Society said in a statement.

"Bharadia's research disproved a long-held assumption that it is not possible for a radio to receive and transmit on the same frequency band because of the resulting interference," the statement said.

''Let's say you are shouting at someone and they are shouting back at you. Neither of you can hear the other, because you are both shouting in the same frequency. The noise in your ears (interference) from your own shout prevents you from hearing the other person,'' he said in a telephonic interview to The Times of India.

''The key challenge was to cancel the signal. The amount of signal that needs to be cancelled is 100 billion times the strength of the transmitting signal. What we designed was a multi-stage cancellation technology, which means we basically needed to create delays in the transmission.''

According to Bharadia, the radio connected to any network could double the network's performance and the technology would be useful in India, which had fewer cellular towers and more density of users.