THEODORE S. RAPPAPORT
NYU WIRELESS FOUNDING DIRECTOR
David Lee/Ernst Weber Professor
Prof. of Electrical and Computer Eng, NYU Tandon
Prof. of Computer Science, NYU Courant
Prof. of Radiology Medicine, NYU Langone
New York University
PHONE:646.997.3403 · 646.997.3404
EMAIL: tlw335@nyu.edu
OFFICE: 370 Jay Street, 9th Fl, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Theodore (Ted) Rappaport is the David Lee/Ernst Weber Professor at New York University (NYU) and holds faculty appointments in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, the Courant Computer Science department, and the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He is the founder and director of NYU WIRELESS, a multidisciplinary research center focused on the future of wireless communications and applications.
Rappaport is a pioneer in the fields of wireless communication, radio propagation measurement, channel modeling, antennas, and software. He has made seminal contributions in radio propagation measurements, statistical and site-specific channel modeling, communications system design, and physical layer simulation. Throughout his lifetime, he has continually created revolutionary channel sounding systems and software that explore, model, design, and explain wireless communications in the modern era. His PhD at Purdue University in 1987 provided the world’s first propagation measurements inside factory buildings, and was pivotal for the creation of the world’s first IEEE Wi-Fi standard, IEEE 802.11. His propagation measurements and channel models led the US cellular telephone industry to adopt TDMA and CDMA for the first digital 2G US cellular standards. His work influenced the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to open up the world’s first mobile telephone spectrum in the millimeter wave bands in 2014-2016 as part of the FCC Spectrum Frontiers ruling, and he again led the FCC to open up spectrum in the sub-Terahertz bands above 95 GHz with the FCC Spectrum Horizons ruling in 2018-2019. The global wireless industry adopted his millimeter wave vision for 5th generation (5G) cell phone networks. He founded two businesses that were sold to publicly traded companies — TSR Technologies, Inc. which pioneered software defined radios for cellphone/paging over-the-air intercept and the first Emergency-911 (E911) cell phone position location system, and Wireless Valley Communications, Inc., a leader in site-specific wireless deployment that ushered in the Wi-Fi and microcell/indoor cellular revolutions, and was an advisor to Straight Path Communications which sold 5G millimeter wave spectrum to Verizon. He has authored or edited over 20 books including the best-selling textbooks on wireless communications, adaptive antennas, simulation, and millimeter-wave wireless communications. He is a licensed Professional Engineer and is in the Wireless Hall of Fame, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors, a recipient of IEEE’s Eric Sumner Award, and a life member of the American Radio Relay League. His ham radio call sign is N9NB.
To reach Prof. Rappaport, please contact Pat Donohue at 646-997-3403. Please contact Teresa Wang at 646-997-3404 if you are interested in inviting Prof. Rappaport to give a presentation or attend a meeting.
Prof. Rappaport is actively pursuing fundamental knowledge to help the creation of future wireless networks in a sustainable manner.
He has pioneered the Power Waste Factor (also called Waste Figure) theory, the first unifying theory that enables engineers to objectively determine wasted power and make decisions to improve energy efficiency and sustainability in any circuit or cascade involving information flow.
Waste Figure and Waste Factor: New Metrics for Evaluating Power Efficiency in Any Circuit or Cascade
He is also conducting some of the world’s first extensive radio propagation channel measurements and channel models for the new 6G mid-band spectrum for FR3
My current research focuses on developing new methods for analyzing and implementing wireless broadband and portable internet access at millimeter wave frequencies and above. My students and I have pursued the potential of millimeter wave wireless communications, and frequencies above this spectrum, as a way to meet the growing global demand for bandwidth in both personal and cellular applications, and in both indoor and outdoor scenarios from dense urban settings to rural fiber-replacement. Using smart antennas, integrated on-chip antennas, and much greater spectrum than ever available before, we envision the ability to offer unprecedented bandwidths to mobile devices, while completely transforming the form factors and mechanical design of appliances and electronics. See mmWAVE for more information. This exciting world was first made possible by Moore’s law, and the first unlicensed 60 GHz millimeter wave band[1]. Other applications include the concept of an “information shower” where people walk from room to room, and massive amounts of content is downloaded or exchanged with devices on an as-needed basis[2],[3]. This interdisciplinary research vision combines RFIC design and semiconductor research capabilities with MAC and Network layer research, as well as radio propagation channel measurements and modeling, at frequencies of 60 GHz and greater.
By 2020, the world will see single chip data transceivers that reliably transfer more than 10 GB/s data for more than 200 meters in a vast number of military or commercial applications. A recent interdisciplinary National Science Foundation (NSF) research project involved 4 undergraduate students and 2 graduate students and developed new methods for analyzing mobile IP throughput and large scale wireless network behavior. NSF funding has allowed collaboration with the University of Auburn on the development of antenna steering to “find” highly directional portable devices in space, and along with sponsorship from our NYU WIRELESS Industrial Affiliates companies, has enabled us to capture more than 1 Terabytes of real-world measurement data at frequencies from 10 to 73 GHz throughout the United States. Further NSF funding has enabled our students to create realistic channel models and impulse response simulators, like NYUSIM, that are now being used by the global standards bodies and academicians throughout the world. Other work, funded by our Industrial Affiliates and NSF has looked at health effects due to non-ionizing radiation at mmWave frequencies, and how to model the human body for reflection and absorption. Current NSF funding is enabling our students to create novel algorithms and estimate the capacity that future mmWave wireless systems will achieve through the use of adaptive beamsteering, spatial multiplexing, massive MIMO, and Cooperative Multipoint Point diversity (CoMP). A recent NSF project, WiFiUS, is a joint effort with Finland researchers and Columbia University, where we are exploring future networks that will use edge-servers to bring content close to the edge, and how the wider bandwidths at mmWave frequencies will allow rapid/accurate position location for devices and users – something that will be needed in the coming Internet of Things (IoT).
My research goal is to make the wireless channel understood as well as a copper wire, and to design and fabricate devices, systems, and methodologies that unleash improved data transmission rates or enable new applications of wireless, such as will be needed for driverless cars, drones, biosensors, medical research, or paperless office technologies. My research has also developed site-specific network modeling and management tools that are now routinely used by industry for study, simulation, and deployment of wireless systems.
A sampling of earlier publications and talks that helped launched the mmWave movement (before the world ever believed mmWave could work) can be found here. Work that my students and I had done in the mid-1990s at 38 GHz showed me that someday this 5G millimeter wave future would be possible. We just had to wait for Moore’s law and the consumption of data to catch up to what was waiting for it. Our pioneering measurements in Austin (2011) and New York City (2012) gave proof that wideband mobile communications at frequencies never thought to be viable would indeed work well in non-line of sight conditions in urban and suburban channels. A complete list of more recent papers are given below.
Many thanks to the generous funding we have received from our NYU WIRELESS Industrial Affiliate companies, the National Science Foundation, The US Dept. of Education, and, of course a huge thanks goes out to the hard working generations of students whose efforts have made these research products possible and who are lighting the way to an exciting wireless future (
Millimeter Wave 5G Wireless
The millimeter wave (mmWave) bands (frequencies roughly above 10 GHz) are a new frontier for wireless communications. The massive bandwidths in these frequencies offer the possibility of new networks with orders of magnitude greater capacity than current systems operating in the highly congested bands below 3 GHz. Due to their enormous potential, mmWave is now being developed as a fifth generation (5G) cellular systems including the 3GPP New Radio effort. My group’s work in this area is done with NYU WIRELESS including the following projects:
Other NYU WIRELESS research can be found on its research page
Approximate Message Passing
Approximate message passing (AMP) and their variants are a powerful class of algorithms for various forms linear inverse problems. The methods are based on graphical models and have the benefit of being computationally scalable and applicable to a wide range of problems including compressed sensing, sparse regression, dictionary learning, matrix completion and estimation in networks. In addition, in certain large random instances, the performance of the methods can be precisely characterized with testable conditions for Bayes optimality, even in non-convex instances.
Read more on Approximate Message Passing
For all of Ted Rappaport's publications please click here
Current Ph.D. Students
Dipankar Shakya
Research Interests: mmWave and THz channel measurement systems and RF circuit design.
Mingjun Ying
Research Interests: Wireless Communications
Staff
Pat Donohue, NYU WIRELESS Administrative Director
Phone: 646-997-3403
Teresa Wang, NYU WIRELESS Center Administrator
Past Students
Yunchou Xing
Research Interests: Wireless Communication, Channel Sounding, RF channel measurements
Ojas Kanhere
Research Interests: Wireless Communications, Millimeter-Wave Channel Sounder Development, Millimeter-Wave Channel Simulator (NYUSIM) Development, Statistical Channel Modeling and Indoor Position Location
Shihao Ju
Research Interests: MmWave communications, MmWave channel sounder development, MmWave channel simulator NYUSIM, MmWave indoor channel models
George R. MacCartney Jr.
Research Interests: Millimeter Wave Propagation, Statistical Channel Modeling, Wireless Backhaul, Ray-Tracing.
Shu Sun
Research Interests: Wireless communications, beamforming and beam combining.
Adapative Antenna Arrays and their impact on System Capacity
Joe Liberti, Zhigang Rong, Paul Petrus, Paulo Cardieri, Rias Muhamed
Biological Effects of Millimeter Wave
Ting Wu
Impulsive Noise Modeling and Simulation
Ken Blackard, Keith Blankenship, Donna Krizman
Measurement and DSP Hardware
Mike Keitz, Greg Bump, Scott McCulley, Alan Fox
Network Management and Radio Propagation
Roger Skidmore
PN Sequence Generator and Channel Sounder Miniaturization
Chris Anderson, Vikas Kukshya
Propagation Measurements and Predictions
Scott Seidel, Tom Tran, Kurt Schaubach, Tom Russell, Ken Blackard, Duane Hawbaker, Hao Xu, Keith Blankenship, Bill Newhall, Huihui Wang
Site Specific Radio Propagation Modeling and Simulation
Scott Seidel, Hao Meng, Graham Stead, Prab Koushik, Kurt Schaubach, Greg Durgin, Neal Patwari, Roger Skidmore, Peter Ho, Chaitanya Rajguru, Orlando Landron, Subramanian Parameswarman, Praveen SheethalNath
Statistical Channel Modeling
Mathew K. Samimi
RFIC Design
Craig Christianson
RF/Analog Circuit Design in Wireless Communications
Ting Wu
Wireless LAN
Chen Na, Jeremy Chen, Ben Henty, Mujahid Ali, Chris Swift
Wireless Communicaitons
Sijia Deng
Wireless Networking
Varun Kapoor
Wireless Position Location
Kevin Krizman, Tom Biedka
Wireless System Simulation
Joe Liberti, Weifeng Huang, Victor Fung, Bob Brickhouse, Berthold Thoma, Donna Krizman, Eric Nuckols