Ish Kumar Jain

Ish Kumar Jain

Assistant Professor
Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Albany, NY

About Me

I joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) as a Tenure-track Assistant Professor in the ECSE Department in Fall 2024. I received my PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering with Prof. Dinesh Bharadia at UC San Diego. I received my MS degree from New York University and B.Tech. degree from IIT Kanpur, India. My research spans diverse areas in ECE, including Wireless Communications, Wireless Sensing, and Security \& Privacy. My research is both theoretical and systems-oriented and has been published in leading venues such as Sigcomm, NSDI, Mobicom, Infocom, and IEEE journals.
I am a recipient of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2022 and VMWare research grant 2023. I received the Best Poster Award at Hotmobile 2023 and won the 3-minute competition at ACM student workshops thrice. I also served as co-chair for the ACM Mobicom S3 workshop 2023.

I am actively seeking new collaborations and hiring for PhD and Postdoctoral positions. If you are interested in joining my team or know someone who might be, please reach out to me.


CV Research Teaching Diversity

Research Overview

The next generation of wireless networks would connect billions of devices using existing and limited natural spectrum resources, all the while making it secure and sustainable with limited power and antennas. My research takes a holistic approach to optimizing these resources to deliver not only high data rates but also enhance reliability and scalability and facilitate practical deployments. Moreover, as the wireless infrastructure is deployed ubiquitously in both indoor (e.g., WiFi) and outdoor (e.g., 5G cellular) environments, there is an opportunity to provide sensing services alongside data communication, eliminating the need for additional sensor deployment. By leveraging existing wireless infrastructure, my research focuses on developing radio-frequency-based sensing solutions such as localization and tracking of mobile devices. Furthermore, my research recognizes that as communication and sensing systems become more accessible, they are vulnerable to security threats such as spoofing and jamming attacks, so I designed and implemented appropriate measures to counter these attacks.

In summary, my research connects theory, hardware, and data to build the foundation of the next generation of wireless networks for Communication, Sensing, and Security:

  • Communication: Develop innovative beamforming techniques (e.g., constructive multi-beams) to enhance reliable and scalable communication, particularly for mobile multi-user millimeter-wave networks.
  • Sensing: Explore novel applications in wireless sensing, such as localization, tracking, and sensing-driven communication.
  • Security: Investigate and mitigate security vulnerabilities (e.g., spoofing, jamming attacks) on wireless devices.

Selected Publications

Please check Google Scholar for a full list of publications. Some selected publications include:

  • mmFlexible: Flexible Directional Frequency Multiplexing for Multi-user mmWave Networks. IK Jain, RR Vennam, R Subbaraman, D Bharadia [EEE Infocom 2023]
  • mmSpoof: Resilient Spoofing of Automotive Millimeter-wave Radars using Reflect Array, IEEE Security and Privacy 2023. RR Vennam, IK Jain, K Bansal, J Orozco, P Shukla, A Ranganathan, D Bharadia [IEEE S&P 2023]
  • [mmReliable] Two beams are better than one: Towards Reliable and High Throughput mmWave Links, IK Jain, R Subbaraman, D Bharadia [ACM SIGCOMM 2021]

Research Projects


project CommRad

CommRad: Context-Aware Sensing-Driven Millimeter-Wave Networks [Sensys'24]

IK Jain, Suriyaa, MM, D Bharadia

CommRad is a sensing-driven communication framework that unites wireless sensing capabilities of bi-static radio with the mono-static radar sensor at the base station to improve mmWave beam management and proactive blockage mitigation. The Radio sensor provides context to the Radar about the initial user, reflector, and blocker locations, and then the Radar aids in tracking mobile users, maintaining directional links via reflectors, and predicting blockage movements, resulting in robust and high-throughput directional links for all mobile users at all times.

PDF

project BeamArmor

MIMO-RIC: RAN Intelligent COntroller for MIMO xApps [Mobicom'24 Open AI-RAN Workshop]

F Zumegen, IK Jain, D Bharadia

MIMO-RIC is an open-source RAN intelligent controller tailored for MIMO applications. We enable the streaming of extensive 3D wireless channel measurements across antennas, subcarriers, and time, from RAN to MIMO-RIC, to develop various MIMO apps like beamforming and localization. We implemented MIMO-RIC on the srsRAN open-source platform using ZeroMQ messaging system for efficient, low-latency communication.

PDF

project BeamArmor

BeamArmor: Anti-Jamming in 5G Cellular Networks with MIMO Null-steering [Hotmobile'24], [Milcom'23 Demo]

F Zumegen, IK Jain, D Bharadia

BeamArmor is a practical real-time application to monitor and mitigate jamming attacks in cellular networks while being hosted on a custom cellular Radio Access Network (RAN) controller. The RAN controller is built with the open-source RAN stack srsRAN and employs beam-nulling techniques to create nulls towards a jammer in real-time while efficiently managing computational resources, meeting the time requirements of the cellular network's physical layer functionalities, and seamlessly integrating with srsRAN.

PDF Slides Poster Demos Code

project mmSubArray

mmSubArray: Enabling Joint Satellite-Terrestrial Networks in Millimeter-wave Band [SmallSat'24]

R Vennam, IK Jain, N Bhat, Suriyaa MM, D Bharadia

mmSubArray is an array of Sub-band Phased Arrays, a novel solution utilizing commercial off-the-shelf phased arrays to achieve full-spectrum utilization and enable joint satellite and terrestrial networks. It enables strategic beam-nulling to specific overlapping frequency bands at specific directions while other frequencies and directions can be simultaneously used for communication.

PDF Slides Video

project mmFlexible

mmFlexible: Flexible Directional Frequency Multiplexing for Multi-user mmWave Networks [Infocom'23]

IK Jain, RR Vennam, R Subbaraman, D Bharadia

Millimeter-wave bands support 100$\times$ more bandwidth than sub-6 systems, which could have easily been used to scale mmWave connectivity to hundreds or thousands of devices in a network, but it is limited to only a few devices. The underlying problem is not the availability of resources but the inefficient distribution of those resources to all users. The resource distribution in mmWave is limited to time-based scheduling, which serves one user at a time using a single directional beam. Our system, mmFlexible, deploys a new antenna array for frequency-dependent beamforming, where different frequency slices of the mmWave signal are beamformed in different directions with the same pencil beam.

PDF Slides Video Code

project mmSpoof

mmSpoof: Resilient Spoofing of Automotive Millimeter-wave Radars using Reflect Array [IEEE S&P'23]

RR Vennam, IK Jain, K Bansal, J Orozco, P Shukla, A Ranganathan, D Bharadia

We show that FMCW automotive radars are vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can cause sensor malfunction and potentially lead to accidents. We present a "reflect array" spoofing device that manipulates the FMCW signal to carry out the attack.

PDF Slides Video

project Hotcarbon

Multiple smaller base stations are greener than a single powerful one [HotCarbon 2022]

A Gupta, IK Jain, D Bharadia

With uniform densification of base stations, the dependency on power amplifiers to transmit at unreasonable high powers reduces and opens the doors for greener wireless networks. At the same time, large-scale densification will lead to mushrooming of base-station hardware, which will start consuming more power. Hence, there exists a green-point of densification. Check out our short HotCarbon’22 workshop paper, which shows empirical models on green densification levels!

PDF Slides Video

project VRProj

VRProj: Delivering 360-degree Video With Viewport-Adaptive Truncation [WPMC 2022]

T Qiu, IK Jain, R Wu, P Cosman, D Bharadia

We explore a new 3D-to-2D VR projection method called truncated square pyramid projection and show that it offers high flexibility for network and headset motion adaptation.

PDF

project name mmReliable

Two beams are better than one: Towards Reliable and High Throughput mmWave Links [Sigcomm'21]

IK Jain, R Subbaraman, D Bharadia

We show that a class of beamforming techniques called constructive multi-beam not only provides blockage resilience but also doubles the SNR leading to highly reliable and high throughput links compared to traditional single-beam links.

PDF Slides Video Code

project name mMobile

mMobile: Building a mmWave Testbed to Evaluate and Address Mobility Effects [mmNets'20]

IK Jain, R Subbaraman, TH Sadarahalli, X Shao, H Lin, D Bharadia

We built a custom 5G NR compliant mmWave testbed at 28 GHz to evaluate beam management algorithms. We describe the architecture and challenges in building such a testbed. We then create a novel, low-complexity beam tracking algorithm by exploiting the 5G NR waveform structure. The algorithm can sustain almost twice the average throughput compared to the baseline.

PDF Slides Video Code

project name LocAP

LocAP: Autonomous Millimeter Accurate Mapping of WiFi Infrastructure [NSDI'20]

R Ayyalasomayajula, A Arun, C Wu, S Rajagopalan, S Ganesaraman, A Seetharaman, IK Jain, D Bharadia

LocAP is an autonomous system to physically map the environment and accurately locate the attributes of existing wireless infrastructure in the physical space down to the required stringent accuracy of 3 mm antenna separation and 3 degree deployment orientation median errors, whereas state-of-the-art algorithm reports 150 mm and 25 degree respectively.

PDF Slides Video


project name

mmWave Blockage Analysis

IK Jain, R Kumar, S Panwar

We analyze the impact of blockage by static buildings, mobile blockers, and self-blockage by the user's body through stochastic geometry. Our results indicate that the minimum density of BS required to satisfy the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) applications is mainly driven by reliability and latency constraints rather than coverage or capacity requirements.

Master's thesis at NYU Wireless with Prof. Shivendra Panwar

Papers: ITC 2018 and JSAC 2019

Code PDF Slides Thesis

Fun Projects


Space Balls VR game

HackXR Hackathon UCSD (May 2019)

Space Balls is a VR game designed with unity where you can test your reflexes using audio and visual cues in a space-themed environment where balls attack you from all sides!

HackXR   Devpost link


ALO (Autonomous Library Organizer)

HackNYU Hackathon NYU (Feb 2018)

ALO is an autonomous robot which can self-navigate itself in a library whose map has been stored inside the robot. It can move around various shelves avoiding obstacles and organize books at their correct place.

HackNYU   Devpost link


No more Allowed!

Intel IoT Hackathon NYC (Dec 2016)

An IoT device that will help the Fire Department to detect if a public building or room has reached its occupant's limit.

Hackster link


Chameo (A colour sensing and production device)

Electronics Club IIT Kanpur (2014)

Fabricated a device that can sense and produce the same color using different proportions of CMYK ink and solvent.

Documentation


Self Balancing Platform

Electronics Club IIT Kanpur (2013)

A platform that is balanced horizontally with the help of three motors, irrespective of the movement of the base at the bottom.

Documentation

Work Experience

Research Intern
VMware, Palo Alto, CA (Jun - Sep 2022)

Mentor: Rakesh Misra
VMWare is modernizing the next generation of radio access networks (RAN) architectures so that it is open, programmable, and more intelligent. I contribute towards developing intelligent applications (xApps) with VMWare RIC (RAN intelligent controller) and bring my research to industry development.

Summer Research Intern
Nokia Bell Labs, Murray Hills, NJ (May - Aug 2017)

Mentor: Ozge Kaya
Developed beam training algorithm for initial access in mmWave Network. It allows the users to connect to the mmWave access point faster than the traditional exhaustive search scheme using directional beams. The algorithm is robust to channel variations, blockages, and user mobility.

MITACS Research Intern
University of Victoria, Canada (May - Jul 2015)

Mentor: Dr. Jianping Pan, Dept. of Computer Science
Studied state-of-the-art Rendezvous algorithms for Cognitive Radio Networks and obtained channel availability probability for cognitive users based on primary users location in a cellular model, which is used to evaluate the rendezvous performance in the practical conditions.