Hayssam Dahrouj (S'02, M'11, SM'15) received his B.E. degree (with high distinction) in computer and communications engineering from the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon, in 2005, and his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Toronto (UofT), Canada, in 2010. In July 2020, he joined the Center of Excellence for NEOM Research at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) as a senior research scientist. From June 2015 to June 2020, he was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Effat University as an assistant professor, and as a visiting scholar at the Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) division at KAUST, where he also was a research associate between April 2014 and May 2015. Prior to joining KAUST, he was an industrial postdoctoral fellow at UofT, in collaboration with BLiNQ Networks Inc., Kanata, Canada, where he worked on developing practical solutions for the design of non-line-of sight wireless backhaul networks. His contributions to the field led to five patents. During his doctoral studies at UofT, he pioneered the idea of coordinated beamforming as a means of minimizing intercell interference across multiple base stations. The journal paper on this subject was ranked second in the 2013 IEEE Marconi paper awards in wireless communications. Dr. Dahrouj is a senior member of the IEEE, an associate editor of the Frontiers in Communications and Networks, and a lead-guest editor of the Frontiers special issue on Resource Allocation in Cloud-Radio Access Networks and Fog-Radio Access Networks for B5G Systems. His main research interests include 6G wireless systems, cloud radio access networks, cross-layer optimization, cooperative networks, convex optimization, distributed algorithms, and optical communications.

Education and Early Career

Prof. Dahrouj received his bachelor of engineering degree (with high distinction) in computer and communications engineering from the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon, in 2005, and his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Toronto (UofT), Canada, in 2010.

Prior to joining KAUST in 2014, he was an industrial postdoctoral fellow at UofT, in collaboration with BLiNQ Networks Inc., Kanata, Canada, where he worked on developing practical solutions for the design of non-line-of sight wireless backhaul networks. His research in backhaul design led to five patents, some of which already became essential differentiators in BLiNQ's novel products, which empowered Prof. Dahrouj’s contributions to have realistic commercial impacts.

During his doctoral studies at UofT, he pioneered the idea of coordinated beamforming as a means of minimizing intercell interference across multiple base-stations. The journal paper on this subject has already been cited more than 740 times since its publication in May 2010, and was ranked second in the 2013 IEEE Marconi paper awards in wireless communications. Prof. Dahrouj is the recipient both of the faculty award of excellence in research, and of the faculty award of excellence in teaching (at the university level) in May 2017. He is a senior member of the IEEE.

Research Interest 

Prof. Dahrouj’s research interests can be classified within the areas of signal processing, communications, machine learning, and optimization. His research contributions span over the areas of cloud-radio access networks, cross-layer optimization, coordinated resource allocation, convex optimization, distributed algorithms, and deep and reinforcement learning.

Groundbreaking Research

Among Dr. Hayssam Dahrouj’s many research contributions, we single out his bold pioneering research advancement, known as coordinated beamforming, a technique that helps minimizing intercell interference across multiple base-stations in a distributed fashion– a simple idea, yet powerful in terms of its academic and practical impacts. A highlight of such research breakthrough [1] is that it is the first of its kind which develops and conceptualizes an efficient strategy for finding the joint globally optimal beamformers across base-stations in futuristic networks. Dr. Dahrouj’s proposed algorithm in [1] is based on a generalization of uplink-downlink duality to the multicell setting using the Lagrangian duality theory. An important feature is that it naturally leads to a distributed implementation in time-division duplex systems, which makes it amenable to practical implementation. Dr. Dahrouj’s journal paper on the subject [1] has already been cited more than 750 times since its publication in May 2010, and had inspired his subsequent five patents on wireless backhaul systems design [2-6]: https://patents.justia.com/inventor/hayssam-dahrouj

Another research highlight of Dr. Dahrouj is a recent work in collaboration with Caltech (USA), and KAUST (KSA). The highlight of his work [7] is that it is the first of its kind that finds the global optimal solution of the mixed-integer joint scheduling and power optimization problem using graph theory techniques. The novel results proposed in [7] have a strong capability of becoming fundamental building blocks in next generation cloud-radio access networks.

[1] H. Dahrouj and W. Yu, "Coordinated beamforming for the multicell multi-antenna wireless system," in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 1748-1759, May 2010.

[2] H. Dahrouj, W. Yu, T. Tang, J. Chow and R. Selea,``Method and apparatus for coordinated power-zone-assignment in wireless backhaul networks'', United States Utilities Patent No. 14/093,011, May 2014.

[3] T. Tang, H. Dahrouj, J. Chow and R. Selea, ``Method and apparatus for inter-cluster power management'', United States Utilities Patent No. 61/723,494, May 2014.

[4] T. Tang, H. Dahrouj, J. Chow and W. Yu, ``Method and apparatus for determining network clusters for wireless backhaul networks'', United States Utilities Patent No. 14/129,150, May 2014.

[5] H. Dahrouj, W. Yu, T. Tang, J. Chow and R. Selea,``Method and apparatus for mitigating wireless interference via power control with one-power-zone constraints'', United States Utilities Patent No. 13/852,765, Mar. 2013.

[6] H. Dahrouj, W. Yu, T. Tang and S. Beaudin,``Interference mitigation with scheduling and dynamic power spectrum allocation for wireless networks'', United States Utilities Patent No. 13/463,478, Nov 2012.

[7] A. Douik, H. Dahrouj, T. Y. Al-Naffouri and M. Alouini, "Coordinated Scheduling and Power Control in Cloud-Radio Access Networks," in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 2523-2536, April 2016.

More details about Dr. Dahrouj’s patents can be found at following link: 

Link

Original Research Queries

Another highlight of Dr. Hayssam Dahrouj’s recent research contributions is launching a university-based startup company through a novel product, named Next Generation Augmented Reality systems (NEXTGAR): http://www.nextgartech.com/ NextGAR is a medication recognition system, which is under concurrent development between Effat University and KAUST. It aims at enabling a wide range of augmented reality applications, which serve to enrich elderly, sensory impaired, and sick people lives. NextGAR develops a software application that provides the users with augmented capabilities to make medications-related decisions, through which the users can learn about the type of medications within their vision sight and, at the same time, receive healthcare related instructions, i.e., drugs dosage, side effects, and drugs due time.  NextGAR, as an entrepreneurial high-tech initiative, is another testimony of my research originality, as it aims at reaching practical solutions, products, intellectual property, and enterprises that have a large gravity of societal and socioeconomic impacts on both the Arab World community, and the global community at large.

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