The director of SARL, Dr. Mary Ann Weitnauer, retired on May 1, 2025 and is living in Holly Springs, NC. SARL is no longer accepting students, however, 31 students obtained their PhDs working on SARL projects and are making significant impact on the field all over the world. Please take a look at our publications.
The mission of the SARL was to employ multiple antennas in radio transmissions to enhance the performance of wireless networks. For example, it considered how separate, inexpensive radios, each with just one antenna, could work together to form a “virtual array” that achieved the same benefits afforded by an expensive, real array; these benefits included longer transmission range, higher data rates, and increased reliability. SARL was especially interested in how multiple-antenna solutions could be best employed within a network, not just in an isolated link. SARL investigated routing and medium access control (MAC) protocols that exploited multiple antennas in innovative ways, for instance, using range extension to enable decades-long, maintenance-free lifetimes for sensor networks, and to use MIMO spatial multiplexing to improve the throughput of ad hoc and mesh networks. SARL strove for a balance of theoretical and experimental research; it valued practical solutions in real environments and built and tested prototypes. It used a 20-node ad hoc network of software-defined radios (SDRs) to test its distributed MIMO-based routing protocols.
Last revised on August 9, 2010.