A 150-year conundrum involving radio waves, which had eluded even Guglielmo Marconi – the inventor of radio – has finally been solved and the credit for it goes to an Indian-American scientist.
Bharadia, 28, a doctorate from Stanford University, is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, and he has been chosen for a prestigious award for his contribution to radio waves.
"Bharadia has been chosen for the 2016 Paul Baran Young Scholar Award for his contribution to send and receive radio (wireless) signals, including mobile telephony and data on the same channel (wave)," the Marconi Society said in a statement.
"Bharadia's research disproved a long-held assumption that it is not possible for a radio to receive and transmit on the same frequency band because of the resulting interference," the statement said.
“Let's say you are shouting at someone and they are shouting back at you. Neither of you can hear the other, because you are both shouting in the same frequency. The noise in your ears (“interference“) from your own shout prevents you from hearing the other person,” he said in a telephonic interview to The Times of India.
“The key challenge was to cancel the signal. The amount of signal that needs to be cancelled is 100 billion times the strength of the transmitting signal. What we designed was a multi-stage cancellation technology, which means we basically needed to create delays in the transmission.”
Bharadia adds that the duplex radio connected to any network can double the network’s performance. Bharadia's technology can be used in India to build relays which can listen to signals from a cellular tower, transmit them instantly and extend the range across the country.
The Marconi young scholar award includes $4,000 (Rs. 2,67,870) prize and expenses to attend its annual awards event.
He will receive the award at a ceremony in Mountain View, California, on November 2.
(With IANS inputs)