Dmitriy Garmatyuk, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Miami University, is involved in the newly launched Spectrum Management with Adaptive and Reconfigurable Technology (SMART) Hub project. Baylor University leads a team of 29 researchers at 17 institutions to revolutionize the increasingly crowded communication spectrum used by the Department of Defense and the population at large.

“Members of the SMART Hub research team from across these organizations will contribute expertise in communication systems, radar, circuits, spectrum security, economics, policy and more,” Baylor said in a news release. “Both military and corporate organizations recognize that dwindling space will soon have an impact on their users. The need has led researchers to pursue entirely new approaches to spectrum communication, which will be the focus of SMART Hub.”

We caught up with Garmatyuk to find out more about his involvement in the project that received $5 million in federal funding. Garmatyuk has received a $66,307 grant for the research this year. 

Garmatyuk and student Logan Rauh get ready to demonstrate a wireless electricity experiment in CEC’s electromagnetic lab

How did you get involved with the SMART Hub project?

I was invited to submit a proposal on the topic of my research to professor Charles Baylis of Baylor University, who conceived the original idea behind the SMART Hub.

What is your specific role?

The current SMART Hub effort is broken down into several tasks, each with its team of researchers who lead sub-tasks. I am responsible for two sub-tasks in two tasks: “Exploiting scenarios of opportunity for UWB joint radar-communications operations in unfriendly environments” and “Receiver design for simultaneous UWB SAR sensing and backscatter communications via random sequence encoding (RSE).”

Will Miami students be involved in any way?

Yes, our own graduate of the bachelor's program in ECE, Mika Burmester, has started as a graduate research assistant on this project. He is pursuing a master's degree in ECE under my advisorship, and his studies are fully supported by the grant's funds.

This SMART Hub will conduct multifaceted spectrum research to meet national defense needs. Why is an increasingly crowded communication spectrum problematic?

This is due to a modern battlefield, which increasingly employs high-tech means and equipment to achieve the goals of secure, high-volume communications; surveillance for early warnings; detection and tracking of adversary forces; as well as optimal navigation of own units, to name several of them.

Each such functionality requires transmission and reception of multiple radio signals per second, which will interfere with one another; in addition, the adversary may try to jam our communications, exacerbating the accuracy with which we can receive and decode these signals. It’s like being in a crowded room with many people trying to talk to one another, while the TV and stereo are blaring loud music over the conversations.

Could a crowded communication spectrum also become a problem for typical cellphone users just trying to get a good signal?

Yes, with more and more wireless services arriving on the market (even fridges have communication capabilities nowadays!), the problem of spectrum congestion will become acute in the civilian sector as well.

Anything else you would like to add about this project?

It is exciting to be a part of this brilliant team and be able to contribute to the solutions of very real challenges, some of which are already on display in the ongoing war of Russian aggression against Ukraine.