Cinque Terre

I am a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at Yale University. I work with Dr. Leandros Tassiulas. My research interests are in wireless systems including massive MIMO systems (Argos, Renew) and RF sensing.


Email Address: jian.ding@yale.edu

Office: AKW 311

  LinkedIn     Google Scholar

Updates

2021.10


2021.04

2020.11

2020.02

2019.10

2019.07

2018.10

2018.07


2018.06 - 2018.09 & 2017.05 - 2018.01

I presented Strobe at the Digital Agriculture and the Future of Food Workshop as part of Microsoft Research Summit.

I was invited to give a talk about Agora at Alibaba.

Our work on real-time massive MIMO baseband processing in software is accepted to CoNEXT'20.

Awarded the Student Travel Grant of NSDI'20.

Our paper received Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at MobiCom'19.

Our work on Low Cost Soil Sensing Using Wi-Fi Singals is accepted to MobiCom'19.

Awarded the Student Travel Grant of OSDI'18.

Presented my work to Bill Gates during his visit to a FarmBeats deployment site in Carnation, WA. Check out Bill Gates's bolg & video for this visit.

Worked at Microsoft Research as a Research Intern in the FarmBeats team with Dr. Ranveer Chandra.

Publications


    Conference papers

    Jian Ding, Rahman Doost-Mohammady, Anuj Kalia, and Lin Zhong, "Agora: Real-time massive MIMO baseband processing in software," in Proc. of ACM Int. Conf. emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), December 2020. (PDF, Source code, Video, Slides).

    Jian Ding and Ranveer Chandra, "Towards Low Cost Soil Sensing Using Wi-Fi," in Proc. of ACM Int. Conf. Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), October 2019 (PDF, Slides). (Best Paper Honorable Mention)(ACM GetMobile Highlights)

    Clayton Shepard, Rahman Doost-Mohammady, Jian Ding, Ryan Guerra, and Lin Zhong, "ArgosNet: a multi-cell many-antenna MU-MIMO platform," in Proc. of IEEE Asilomar Conference (invited paper), 2017 (PDF).

    Clayton Shepard, Jian Ding, Ryan E. Guerra, and Lin Zhong, "Understanding real many-antenna MU-MIMO channels," in Proc. of IEEE Asilomar Conference (invited paper), 2016 (PDF, Released data).

  • Journal and magazine papers

    Ranveer Chandra, Manohar Swaminathan, Tusher Chakraborty, Jian Ding, Zerina Kapetanovic, Peeyush Kumar, Deepak Vasisht, "Democratizing Data-Driven Agriculture Using Affordable Hardware" in IEEE Micro, 2022 (PDF).

    Jian Ding and Ranveer Chandra, "Strobe: Towards Low-Cost Soil Sensing Using Wi-Fi," in ACM GetMobile, 2020 (PDF).

  • Others

    Chandra, Ranveer, and Jian Ding, "Soil measurement system using wireless signals," U.S. Patent No. 10,761,206, September, 2020 (Link).

    Jian Ding, "Software-based Baseband Processing for Massive MIMO", Master’s Thesis, Rice University, August 2019 (PDF).

Projects

Agora: Software-based Baseband Processing for Massive MIMO

  • Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a key technology in 5G New Radio (NR) to improve spectral efficiency. A major challenge in its realization is the huge amount of real-time computation required. All existing massive MIMO baseband processing solutions use dedicated and specialized hardware like FPGAs, which can efficiently process baseband data but are expensive, inflexible and difficult to program. In this work, we design a software-only system called Agora that can handle the high computational demand of real-time massive MIMO baseband processing on a single commodity server. To achieve this goal, we identify the rich dimensions of parallelism in massive MIMO baseband processing, and exploit them with data parallelism across multiple CPU cores. We optimize Agora to best use CPU hardware and software features, including SIMD extensions to accelerate computation, cache optimizations to accelerate data movement, and kernel-bypass packet I/O. We evaluate Agora with up to 64 antennas and show that it meets the data rate and latency requirements of 5G NR.

Strobe: Low Cost Soil Moisture and EC sensing Using Wi-Fi Signals

  • Existing soil sensing techniques are expensive (cost 100s to 1000s of USD). In this work, we design a Wi-Fi-based soil moisture and EC sensing system leveraging the phenonmenon that RF waves travel slower in soil with higher permittivity. We use a novel technique that exploits relative time-of-flight (ToF) of signals received by multiple antennas to overcome bandwidth limitation of Wi-Fi spectrum.

Exploration of Channel State Information Predictability

  • The predictablility of massive MIMO channels can help save computation resources. We apply channel prediction algorithms based on auto-regressive model and sum-of-sinusoids model to experimentally collected channel state information (CSI) of massive MIMO.

Empirical Foundations for Massive MIMO

  • Performance gains in multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems highly depends on the understanding of emprical behavior of channels. We leverage the Argos platform to conduct a comphensive real-time channel measurements accross frequency bands, mobilites, and propogation environments. We studied and compared the channel behaviors under different conditions. The results were published in our Asilomar 2016 paper.

    Our channel traces are available on Renew website.

Personal

I am from Shaoxing, Zhejiang, China. I got my B.E. from Zhejiang University in Optical Engineering. I came to the US for a Ph.D. program in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in 2014 and got my M.S. there. I transferred to Yale in January 2020.

I love photography. I post my favorite photos here.