Bahman Abolhassani

Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Southwest Node / Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering

Track

Cybersecurity

Faculty Mentor

Tom Hou
Bradley Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Briefly describe the research project you are planning to contribute to and lead as a postdoctoral associate at Virginia Tech. What is the problem you are addressing? What is the expected impact of your work?

My planned research for postdoctoral fellowship centers at the intersection of data, security, and autonomy, with a special use-case of open radio access networks (O-RAN) and 6G/Next-G. Recent movement of opening up RAN interfaces from industry, led by the O-RAN Alliance, introduces a new paradigm for the future RAN ecosystem. With openness and intelligence as its key features, O-RAN enables a new “mix-and-match” approach to RAN deployment and allows a carrier to choose the best hardware/software from different vendors. It will break up the long-standing closed-RAN paradigm and move the RAN market towards a more competitive and vibrant supply-chain ecosystem. Another highlight of O-RAN is its drive of incorporating machine-learning (ML)-based intelligence in RAN. The openness and intelligence of O-RAN bring in both technical challenges and research opportunities to the wireless community.

I plan to investigate several most significant challenges in O-RAN, across time-scales of three control loops, with the goal of improving its performance, intelligence, and trustworthiness. Specifically, my research will focus on (i) optimizing ML-based control for real-time physical layer beamforming; and (ii) enhancing the resilience and robustness of ML-based systems against various data manipulation attacks in O-RAN.

Why did you choose to pursue postdoctoral training at Virginia Tech?

The Complex Networks and Security Research Lab at Virginia Tech is a big research lab at a university. It focuses on making networks better and keeping them secure in the US. This is a great opportunity for me to be part of research that's between industry and academia.

What are you most looking forward to as you begin in this fellowship at Virginia Tech?

I am looking forward to taking part in industry-based research and learning from top experts. They'll be sharing insights about real-world challenges in O-RAN and caching. We'll also explore how techniques like machine learning and real-time optimization can help solve these challenges.