Northeastern Helps Lead $15M Army-Funded Center For Next-Generation Sensing And Communications

Josep M. Jornet and Tommaso Melodia, co-director and director of the Institute for Intelligent Networked Systems (INSI) at Northeastern University and faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, are co-principal investigators on a new $15M research center funded by the Army Research Office to advance secure sensing, imaging and wireless communications. The award covers a five-year period of performance running from July 2026 to June 2031.

Led by Edward Knightly of Rice University, the Center for Large Aperture Secure Sensing, Imaging and Communications (CLASSIC) brings together researchers from universities and national laboratories across the country to develop advanced antenna technologies for future wireless systems. The Northeastern effort is based at INSI, which contributes to four of the center’s five research areas and is the only site in the center whose work spans its entire frequency range, from the bands used by commercial 5G networks to frequencies a hundred times higher.

At the center of the research are extremely large-scale antenna arrays, or ELSAAs, which use thousands of coordinated antenna elements to precisely direct radio waves. The technology could help maintain reliable communications when signals are blocked or disrupted, while improving the ability to detect concealed objects and produce detailed images in challenging environments.

Reshaping the wave, not just aiming it
Jornet leads Northeastern’s work at INSI on the underlying physics of these arrays. When an array becomes large enough, or when several separated arrays are made to act as one, the region in front of it where conventional wireless models break down extends from centimeters to hundreds of meters. Inside that region, an array can control not only the direction of a signal but its shape. That makes it possible to focus energy at a specific point in space rather than along a direction, to send beams along curved paths that travel around obstacles, and to use beams that reconstruct themselves after being partially blocked. Northeastern’s contribution is to establish how those wavefronts can be synthesized and controlled across distributed apertures, and to use them as sensing instruments capable of characterizing objects that are hidden from view.

“For decades a radio beam has been essentially a spotlight, and the only question was where to point it,” said Jornet, COE Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and co-director of the institute. “Arrays at this scale let us sculpt the wave itself, so we can decide not only where the energy goes but how it travels to get there. We can place a focus at a specific distance instead of a direction, curve a signal around an obstacle, and use beams that heal themselves after something blocks them. What makes Northeastern’s role distinctive is that we will show this working from commercial 5G bands all the way up to 300 gigahertz, which is the step that turns an elegant piece of physics into something that can actually be fielded.”

From physics to fielded systems
The second half of Northeastern’s role, led by Melodia, is proving these ideas on real hardware. INSI operates the X5G private 5G network, the building-scale Arena testbed, an anechoic chamber and an outdoor drone facility. Northeastern will demonstrate the center’s techniques on standards-compliant 5G radio equipment, across multiple synchronized base stations operating together as a single distributed array, and in outdoor flight tests with drones, alongside sub-terahertz experiments reaching 300 gigahertz.

“This center asks questions that can only be answered with hardware in real environments,” said Melodia, William Lincoln Smith Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Institute for Intelligent Networked Systems. “Northeastern brings an open, programmable, AI-native wireless infrastructure that few places have: a private 5G network built on O-RAN components, a building-scale distributed antenna testbed, and an outdoor facility where we fly drones against it. That combination lets us take a new beamforming concept and run it on standards-compliant equipment within the same project, which is usually where promising ideas either prove out or stall.”

A national effort
CLASSIC’s research team spans Rice, Northeastern, Brown University, Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Industry partners include Booz Allen, Intel, Keysight, Lockheed Martin, MITRE, Northrop Grumman, Qualcomm, and Raytheon.

The center’s work is organized around five areas: advancing the fundamental science behind ELSAAs, developing sensing techniques for threat detection, building resilient high-speed wireless networks, studying wireless jamming, and validating the technology through laboratory and field testing. Northeastern contributes to the first, second, third, and fifth. The center will also build an AI-driven modeling framework capable of simulating complex electromagnetic environments in real time, an effort that could substantially cut the computing resources needed to design and test advanced antenna systems.

Why it matters for Northeastern
The award adds to Northeastern’s portfolio of federally funded research in wireless systems and secure communications, and extends INSI’s record of leading large multi-institution programs in wireless networking and sensing. It connects the institute’s research community to a national network of universities, national laboratories and industry partners working on the next generation of secure sensing and communications technology.