Xiaonan Zhang, an Assistant Professor in the FSU Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a new NSF grant titled “Collaborative Research: CISE MSI: RDP: NeTS: Enabling Spectrum-Efficient Wireless Coexistence for Heterogeneous IoT over 2.4GHz: A Hardware Software Framework Co-Design”. This project seeks to design a novel hardware-software co-design communication framework that enables parallel communication for heterogeneous IoT devices, fundamentally enhancing spectrum utilization and power efficiency. The proposed framework advances the understandings of enhancing the spectrum utilization and power efficiency for large-scale heterogeneous IoT systems, such as smart healthcare, industrial IoT, and many more crucial sectors requiring continuous connections among disparate system objects. Moreover, this project aims at broadening the scientific view of undergraduates and underrepresented students in the minority-serving institution in the field of wireless communications and networking and prepare them with the cross-disciplinary skills needed to succeed in the modern workforce. The project is a collaborative effort among FAMU, Clemson University, and FSU. The total funding size is 600K and FSU share is 200K.