Besides being a developing country, Bangladesh is also a country of two extremes. In one extreme, nearly 60% of our population live in rural areas without any infrastructure to provide scalable network connectivity. In another extreme, our cities are densely populated with almost everyone using multiple wireless application services resulting into significant spectrum scarcity. I believe dynamic spectrum access through cognitive radio networks (CRN), where secondary unlicensed users opportunistically access the licensed band of primary users, could play a vital role to solve the problems of these two extremes. In rural areas, CRs could exploit the significant TV whitespace to provide scalable network connectivity. Similarly, among the urban population, with the introduction of multi-antenna cognitive devices, it can provide increased spectrum utilization through cooperative channel sensing and switching. Therefore, I have extensively studied multi-radio CRNs over the last three years. For more details, please visit the Research Projects page.
The Internet of Things(IoT) is improving lives not just in developed countries, also in developing countries. In particular, I was fascinated to learn about a research study that established a network of 48 arsenic biosensors in rural areas of Bangladesh to monitor water purity. However, the amount of information shared over the five billion IoT devices deployed worldwide poses a unique challenge of preserving security. Given these devices' power and resource constraints, traditional security mechanisms are no longer viable. However, as these IoT devices function inside a network, I believe this network if controlled by software, can play a vital role in their security. Recent research paradigm Software-defined Networking (SDN) separates control plane from data plane of networking devices. I strongly feel it will help to set up security protocols in large-scale IoTs. Hence, in this project, I am working on securing the IoT with the support of SDN.