Edward Knightly is a professor and the department chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of California at Berkeley and his B.S. from Auburn University. He is an IEEE Fellow, a Sloan Fellow, and a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He received best paper awards from ACM MobiCom, IEEE SECON, and the IEEE Workshop on Cognitive Radio Architectures for Broadband. He has chaired ACM MobiHoc, ACM MobiSys, IEEE INFOCOM, and IEEE SECON. He serves as an editor-at-large for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and serves on the IMDEA Networks Scientific Council.

Professor Knightly’s research interests are in the areas of mobile and wireless networks with a focus on protocol design, performance evaluation, and at-scale field trials. He leads the Rice Networks Group. The group’s current projects include deployment, operation, and management of a large-scale urban wireless network in a Houston under-resourced community. This network, Technology For All (TFA) Wireless, is serving over 4,000 users in several square kilometers and employs custom-built programmable and observable access points. The network is the first to provide residential access in frequencies spanning from unused UHF TV bands to legacy WiFi bands (500 MHz to 5 GHz). His group developed the first multi-user beam-forming WLAN system that demonstrates a key performance feature provided by IEEE 802.11ac. His group also co-developed a clean-slate-design hardware platform for high-performance wireless networks, TAPs and WARP.
Research Areas
Wireless networks, urban-scale testbeds, clean-slate design, diverse spectrum access, multi- antenna systems, hardware platforms, high-performance protocol design, security, and performance evaluation.
Honors & Awards
2018 Dynamic Spectrum Alliance Award
2017 ACM Fellow
2009 IEEE Fellow
2001 Sloan Fellow
1997 NSF CAREER Award