Sudha Lohani wins Best Student Paper Award at Prestigeous Vehicular Technology Conference

PhD Candidate, Ms. Sudha Lohani received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2016 IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference. Ms. Lohani is supervised by ECE Professor Vijay K. Bhargava and co-supervised by Professor Ekram Hossain from the University of Manitoba.

Her paper, Resource Allocation for Wireless Information and Energy Transfer in Macrocell-Small Cell Networks” proposes a new way to allocate resources to maximize wireless power transfer and information transfer for small-cell users of a heterogeneous network while ensuring that the minimum throughput requirement of macrocell users is satisfied. Transmit power of small cells needs to be very high for wireless power transfer in contrast to the traditional information transfer. However, this increases interference on other wireless users and degrades their throughput performance. The algorithm proposed in this paper opens up a new approach to overcome these contradicting challenges. Ultimately, novel approaches like the one proposed by Lohani can improve battery life of low power devices while minimizing the adverse effect on the data rate achieved by the users of the network.

The IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference  is a semi-annual flagship conference of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society that brings together individuals from academia, government, and industry to discuss and exchange ideas in the fields of wireless, mobile, and vehicular technology. The conference features world-class plenary speakers, tutorials, and technical as well as application sessions.

Photo: Sudha Lohani with Professor Bhargava at the 2015 Killiam Prize ceremony.