Skip to main content
Department News

ECE Research Team Collaborates with Researchers from Universities in Mexico

Published Date: 03/27/2019

A team of electrical and computer engineers under the direction of Professors Michael Rice and Willie Harrison collaborated with some teachers and researchers from The Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí in Mexico on March 19, 2019 to perform some vehicular communications research.

Radio transmissions can be interrupted by almost anything—large buildings, trees, and even other cars. The purpose of their research was to test how frequencies transmitted by a vehicle are affected by those interruptions.

The experiment was as follows: One van transmitted a radio signal from various locations while another van drove around a busy street. Technologies fashioned by Dr. Rice’s team recorded the movement of the radio frequencies. These results are being analyzed by the team.

Having the group of researchers and teachers from Mexico was beneficial to both parties. Carlos Gutierrez, a professor at The Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, and his colleagues, Joaquin Cortez González at Sonora Institute of Technology, and Javier Vázquez Castillo at the University of Quintana Roo have been studying in this field for several years.

Of this experience, Gutierrez said, “I came all the way from Mexico to run some experiments with Professor Rice because I need the data that he can collect. I will use it to prove some of the models I am working on that deal with the way that signals propagate from one vehicle to another.”

In his line of research, Gutierrez and his associates in universities across Mexico and in Norway have come up with hypotheses. This particular experiment was to prove one of those.

“One of the hypotheses we have is that the time it takes the signal to reach the receiver has a direct impact on the non-stationarities of the channel. If you dig deeper, you will see that the doppler that changes in frequencies of the signal have a very strong impact on the non-stationarities. If you know that, then you can use that information to design better and better transmitters and make sure that the signal will reach the receiver with enough quality to be detected.”

He explained that transceivers are important to many facets of life, from road safety to traffic management and much more.

The next step for Gutierrez and the BYU team is to analyze the results. They will extract the information about the doppler, propagation, and statistics of the channel.

“With that information, we will try to match it up with our theoretical models, then we will repeat the experiment in Mexico,” he said.

Dr. Rice and his team plan to travel to Mexico with the equipment and perform similar experiments down there.

Guttierrez expressed appreciation for the collaboration he has with Dr. Rice.

“[Professor Rice] has a lot of experience doing channel modeling for aeronautical telemetry in channels. He knows the theory very well and he also has state-of-the-art, high-tech equipment. We cannot do this type of experiment in Mexico because we don’t have the equipment or the expertise that is required to do that type of experiment. That’s why Professor Rice’s involvement is so important.”

Professors Michael Rice and Willie Harrison have been studying vehicular communications. The BYU research team consists of Bradford Clark, Dakota Flanary, Benjamin Jensen, Nathan Nelson, Kalin Norman, Ethan Perrins.