Project Grant 2548685

The National Science Foundation Division of Information and Intelligent Systems awarded Massachusetts Institute of Technology $216,000 on October 1, 2026, to conduct collaborative research on management and control methods for next-generation wireless networks that share both infrastructure and spectrum under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070).

MIT is developing a sharing-native network framework enabling multiple service providers and infrastructure providers to pool spectrum bands, share base station infrastructure, and use service level agreements to specify performance targets. The project studies how market incentives and pricing can support efficient sharing among independent providers. The technical work organizes into three thrusts: developing control architectures, market models, service level agreement designs, and resource pooling methods for multi-infrastructure spectrum sharing networks; developing centralized and decentralized resource provisioning algorithms that provide quality of service guarantees for throughput, delay, reliability, and queue stability under stochastic wireless conditions; and mapping these algorithms into practical open radio access networks using non-real-time, near-real-time, and real-time control applications, multi-timescale radio resource scheduling, carrier aggregation, dual connectivity, and mechanisms for adapting to intermittent spectrum availability.

The award is collaborative with investigators from Northwestern University. Place of performance is Cambridge, Massachusetts. The period of performance runs from October 1, 2026, through September 30, 2029. The assistance type is Project Grant.