University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

Multimedia Communications and Systems Lab

Welcome

The Multimedia Communications and Systems Lab (MCSL) at the University at Buffalo is led by Prof. Nick Mastronarde. We conduct research in the following areas:

  1. AI/ML for Wireless Networks: Reinforcement learning (RL) for energy harvesting wireless sensors, Internet of Things (IoT), 5G scheduling, and digital twin.

  2. NextG Wireless Networks: Active-passive coexistence, software-defined networking, mmWave networks, device-to-device (D2D) relays, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks and applications, citizens broadband radio service (CBRS).

  3. Modeling, Simulation, and Field Experimentation for Future Networks: UB-ANC (unmanned aerial vehicle networking simulation/emulation), RF-SITL (software-defined transceiver and channel emulation), NeXT (digital twin-enabled multi-fidelity network simulator), UnionLabs (cloud-based platform for testbed sharing).

We gratefully acknowledge support from the US Air Force Research Laboratory, US SOCOM, the National Science Foundation, GE Aviation, US Ignite, ARMOR-IIMAK, and SUNY.

Biography

Nick Mastronarde is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University at Buffalo. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2011 and his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 2005 (Highest Honors, Department Citation) and 2006, respectively. He has been the recipient of several awards and honors including a first year department fellowship through the Electrical Engineering department at UCLA, the Dissertation Year Fellowship through the Graduate Division at UCLA, the Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award for 2011, the 2020 SEAS Senior Teacher of the Year Award, and UB's Teaching Innovation Award 2022.

He has spent four summers (2013, 2015, 2016, 2018) as a faculty fellow at the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Information Directorate in Rome, NY. In the summer of 2010, he was a graduate intern at IBM Research Watson Lab in the Exploratory Stream Analytics group where he developed learning algorithms for discovering anomalies in massive volumes of streaming data. In the summer of 2007, he was a graduate student intern at Intel Corporation in the Graphics Architecture Team where he developed and patented an algorithm enabling the selective use of fractional and bidirectional video motion estimation in an H.264/AVC encoder.

Prof. Mastronarde's research interests are in the areas of resource allocation and scheduling in wireless networks and systems, UAV networks, 5G and beyond networks, cross-layer design and optimization, Markov decision processes (MDPs), and reinforcement learning.

Sponsored Research

We are grateful for the support that we have received from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), SOCOM, ARMOR-IIMAK, US Ignite, Schmidt Futures, the Griffis Institute, and the University at Buffalo.

The project website for our recent NSF SWIFT award can be found here: AI-Enabled Spectrum Coexistence between Active Communications and Passive Radio Services: Fundamentals, Testbed and Data

Contact

Prof. Nick Mastronarde: nmastron@buffalo.edu

Department of Electrical Engineering
226 Davis Hall
University at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260

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