Won the First Prize at WiFi Th!nkFest!

Dheryta Jaisinghani and Akanksha Pandey were declared as first prize winners for the WiFi Ideathon titled ‘Mojo WiFi Think Fest’, organized in India by Mojo Networks. Prof. Vinayak Naik and Prof. Mukulika Maity advised these two students of IIIT Delhi. Dr. Pravin Bhagwat, CTO and Co-Founder of Mojo Networks, distributed the prizes in a ceremony held at IITB on Sept 14, 2017.

Dheryta and Akanksha’s idea “Enabling communication over management frames without WiFi associations” was based on speeding up data transfer using lesser energy. To transmit data over WiFi, a user needs to first connect to an Access Point, get authenticated, and then the user is allowed to send/receive data over the network. Certain applications, such as IoT, generate small amounts of data at regular intervals. In such cases, the overhead of setting up a connection is high compared to the size of the data transaction during the session. To reduce this overhead, Dheryta and Akanksha proposed a mechanism by which the data can be sent in ‘Probe Request’ frames, which can be broadcast by any IoT device without the need of a session being established with an Access Point. Such frames are received by all the co-channel Access Points within the radio range of the transmitting device.

The contest saw some highly innovative and fresh ideas coming from the young minds across the nation. It received close to 400 registrations from students across the country and was reviewed by

• Dr. Pravin Bhagwat, CTO and Co-Founder of Mojo Networks
• Dr. Vinosh Babu James, Lead-Technical Standards at Qualcomm India Pvt. Ltd.
• Prof. Bhaskaran Raman, Professor at CSE IIT Bombay
• Dr. Srikanth S, Chief Knowledge Officer at Nanocell Networks
• Mr. Navpreet Singh, Chief Engineer of Computer Center at IIT Kanpur.

The second and third prizes were grabbed by students from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee and National Institute of Technology (NIT) Rourkela respectively.