Hello! Welcome to my landing page on the internet.

I’m a 2nd year M.S. student at Virginia Tech, advised by Dr. Aloizio Pereira Da Silva. I also work as a Graduate Research Assistant at the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative where I’m working on research into improving quality-of-service guarantees for 5G and 6G wireless networks. I’m also helping to build one of the country’s largest software-defined radio testbeds for industrial and academic research in O-RAN cellular networks.

You can take a look my extended CV here which contains all the relevant projects I’ve worked on through my career - both in school and work.

Research

My research primarily lies in improving channel-access fairness and efficiency in the unlicensed spectrum with incumbents such as 5G NR-U, LTE LAA and IEEE 802.11 WLANs. The ultimate goal in this line of research is to allow any compliant wireless device to access the unlicensed spectrum while ensuring quality-of-experience (QoE) guarantees for their respective services without worrying about user density and spectrum resources. I enjoy working on both discrete-event simulations where I get to model the wireless environment as well as practical research, prototyping on real hardware such as software-defined radios and open-source Wi-Fi APs, where my results showcase a genuine impact to the state-of-the-art.

Work and Academics

For the summer of 2023, I’m interning at Qualcomm in Santa Clara, CA, USA, where I’m helping to design the protocol for Wi-Fi 7 multi-link operation (MLO) and Wi-Fi 8 while also implementing them on Qualcomm’s cutting-edge wireless radio platform. I’ve had the opportunity to work on the challenges of bringing wireless system engineering research into practice and pushing the limits of performance when mapping next-generation wireless designs to current-generation hardware.

From August 2017 to June 2022, I was a System Software Engineer at Qualcomm’s Bangalore Development Center (BDC) in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India where I developed and maintained features and enhancements to the channel management and scanning protocol for Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) AP software. My work during this period also heavily featured the Linux kernel and device drivers and efficiently implementing the protocol standards of Wi-Fi on them. As a Senior Engineer, I also got a chance to conduct hiring interviews and mentoring new engineers in my team - something that I enjoyed quite a bit.

In 2017, I graduated with a B.Tech. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK) in Surathkal, Karnataka, India. While doing my undergrad, I also did a brief stint as a Research Intern at the Indian Institute of Science, under Dr. Matthew Jacob Thazhuthaveetil at the Supercomputer Education and Research Center (SERC). Over here I got a chance, for the first time, to immerse myself in the world of research. I got to use my knowledge in Advanced Computer Architecture and Machine Learning to devise intelligent techniques for optimizing gcc/g++ compilers for High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads. It was also the place where I was taught how to read a research paper for the first time!

Life

Before delving into the world of engineering and wireless communications, I was birthed and raised by two amazing doctors in the city of Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. I later moved to Abu Dhabi in 8th Grade until the end of high school.

I moved to India to study in NITK and subsequently work in Bengaluru which got me, for the first time, close my roots as a Kannadiga. I also got to experience the infamous Bengaluru traffic when I commuted to and from work to cement myself as a local.

When I’m not working, I love to travel, hike, run and also cook/bake new recipes from across the world! Mixology is something that’s fun too! I used to have a motorcycle in India that I loved but I haven’t started riding in the USA just yet. There’s so much to do but so little time but I’m trying to make it work.

Webmaster Comments

I just created this website using GitHub Pages and Jekyll by forking off the academicpages template from GitHub. It is still a work in progress but I will be curating some more objects from my life and work over due course of time. Thanks for visiting!