Biography

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, advised by Dr. Zhangyu Guan. I hold a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Amrita School of Engineering and a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo. My research interests span software-defined networking, cross-layer optimization, waveform design for modern wireless systems, hardware-in-the-loop simulation, and digital twin technologies.

Current Research Areas

Wireless Systems and Computing Architectures: Algorithm-hardware codesign for high-performance, energy-efficient wireless systems: Baseband signal processing, FPGA Programming, Hardware acceleration, and System-level optimization.

Intelligent and Programmable Networking: Software-defined programmable network architecture implementation for efficient, scalable, and intelligent communication systems: Cross-layer optimization, Protocol design, and AI-driven network control.

Large Scale Wireless Experimentation and Validation: Experimental validation of next-generation wireless systems operating at scale under dynamic conditions: Swarm networking, Resilient communications, and Digital twin enabled testbed development.


Publications


  • Maxwell McManus, Josh (Zhaoxi) Zhang, Sidharth Santhinivas, Yuqing Cui, Prem Sagar Pattanshetty Vasanth Kumar, Chenzhi Zhao, Nicholas Mastronarde, George Sklivanitis, Dimitris A. Pados, Elizabeth Serena Bentley, and Zhangyu Guan, "Designing, Deployment and Field Testing of C2Stack for Networked Intelligent Software-Defined UAVs," in Proc. of ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), Austin, Texas, USA, October 26-30, 2026. [pdf] [bibtex]

  • Yuqing Cui, Zhaoxi (Josh) Zhang, Sidharth Santhi Nivas, Prem Sagar Pattanshetty Vasanth Kumar, Maxwell McManus, Chenzhi Zhao, Guanying Sun, Nicholas Mastronarde, George Sklivanitis, Dimitris A. Pados, Elizabeth Serena Bentley, and Zhangyu Guan, "StormWave: An Open-Source Portable SDR Platform for Over-the-Air Resilience Evaluation of Terrestrial and Aerial Communications," in Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Smart Applications, Communications and Networking (SmartNets), Rome, Italy, July 7-9, 2026. [bibtex]

  • Sidharth Santhi Nivas, Prem Sagar Pattanshetty Vasanth Kumar, Zhaoxi Zhang, Chenzhi Zhao, Maxwell McManus, Nicholas Mastronarde, Elizabeth Serena Bentley, George Sklivanitis, Dimitris A. Pados, and Zhangyu Guan, "BenchLink: An SoC-Based Benchmark for Resilient Communication Links in GPS-Denied Environments," in Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), Tokyo, Japan, May 18-21, 2026. [pdf] [bibtex]

  • Sidharth Santhinivas, Prem Sagar Pattanshetty Vasanth Kumar, Maxwell McManus, Hatef Nouri, George Sklivanitis, Dimitris Pados, Elizabeth Serena Bentley, Nicholas Mastronarde, and Zhangyu Guan, "Resilient Communications with Lightweight Signature Synchronization on MPSoC Radios," Demo at IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), Las Vegas, NV, January 10-13, 2025. [pdf] [bibtex]

  • M. McManus, T. Rinchen, S. Suhail, S. Santhinivas, A. Dey, S. Pagidimarri, Y. Cui, J. Hu, J. Zhang, X. Wang, M. Ji, N. Mastronarde, and Z. Guan, "Demo: UnionLabs: AWS-based Remote Access and Sharing of NextG and IoT Testbeds," in Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), Vancouver, Canada, 20–23 May 2024. [pdf] [bibtex]

Links

  • Dr. Zhangyu Guan's Website
  • Electrical & Computer Engineering @ Virginia Tech
  • Electrical Engineering @ University at Buffalo