UB researchers developing new device to streamline communication across radio frequencies
By Peter Murphy
Published January 23, 2026
Radio receivers, especially on ships and vessels, need to listen across huge swaths of radio frequencies to detect threats and communicate. These critical airwaves are crowded with interference. University at Buffalo researchers are developing technology that would remove interference and help ships navigate treacherous areas.
Bibhu Datta Sahoo
Bibhu Datta Sahoo, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and UB’s lead on the $700,000 project, is part of the team developing EXCISER, a precise and fast system that automatically removes different types of radio interference at once. Sahoo’s team is a subcontractor on the project, which is led by engineering services company Excellerix.
“EXCISER can enable the next generation of smart radios for defense,” Sahoo said.
Sahoo compares the system to smart noise-canceling headphones. In this case, band-stop filters block specific frequencies while letting others pass through. Each filter can be customized to adjust the volume or completely mute incoming frequencies.
The unique part of EXCISER is the combination of two processes that work together: spectrum computation and dynamic adjustment. Spectrum computation listens and identifies which channel the interfering sounds are on and how wide they are. The second component in the system — dynamic adjustment — covers and silences the interfering sound without affecting the primary communications channel. This coarse and fine detection strategy is the most significant innovation, according to Sahoo.
“Coarse and fine spectrometer is like zooming into the area where there is noise. In order to zoom in, you need to find roughly where the noise is,” Sahoo said. “Coarse computation of spectrum lets us find the rough frequency range where the noise is, and fine computation of spectrum zooms on to the exact noise location.”
This work, according to Sahoo, could enable the next generation of smart radios.
“The intelligent cueing technique in a radio frequency (RF) receiver system is a high-level strategy, often leveraging advanced signal processing to efficiently manage a receiver’s resources, especially when dealing with a massive amount of radio spectrum data,” Sahoo said. “My long-term research goal is to develop wideband smart RF transceivers. This is an integral part of a smart RF receiver.”
