Smart Sharing: How Jonathan Chamberlain is Protecting Radiometers by Redesigning Spectrum Access
Imagine a major highway that is essential for many people’s commute, but only has one lane. This would pose an access issue, as not everybody who needs to use the highway would be able to efficiently because there’s not enough space. There is currently a resource allocation problem with wireless bands, important communications tools in space used for collecting data. Radiometers are given priority access to these bands to detect and measure atmospheric data, critical for climate science, weather forecasting, and more. However, there is also wireless band demand from commercial users for purposes like 5G communication. Jonathan Chamberlain (PhD ‘25, ECE) is developing resource allocation models for both radiometers and commercial users to be able to access these wireless bands.
Within the BU department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Chamberlain’s research is at the intersection of the economics of cloud computing and cognitive radio networks. His work focuses on network systems and security, and specifically the interactions of different groups on wireless bands. Chamberlain leverages techniques from operations research, game theory, and queuing theory to analyze user behavior for allocation of available resources.
Two of Chamberlain’s recent papers, published in JSAC, “Facilitating Spectrum Sharing With Passive Satellite Incumbents”, and DySPAN, “Spectrum Sharing between Earth Exploration Satellite and Commercial Services: An Economic Feasibility Analysis”, involve sharing access to wireless bands with radiometers. These two papers propose an economic framework for dynamic spectrum sharing that prioritizes and protects passive satellite systems (radiometers) while still enabling tiered commercial usage, and validate the model through data and game theory. Through these two papers, Chamberlain and his colleagues argue that even when radiometers are given wider access, availability can be allotted correctly for the maximum benefit of all parties, including commercial users, rather than having to pick between one or the other for access.
Chamberlain researches this question with Ohio State University’s ElectroScience Laboratory, work that is one part of a grant from the NSF SWIFT (Spectrum and Wireless Innovation enabled by Future Technologies) initiative. Together they are looking at the dual problem of what sort of frequency access is needed to get the most accurate radiometer data measurement and how to encourage the sharing of wireless band access between commercial users and radiometers. Chamberlain’s research specifically focuses on the latter.
Currently, commercial users highly value spectrum access and are therefore hesitant to share it with radiometers due to concerns that it would impact their usage. This increases the likelihood of commercial usage harmfully interfering with the radiometers, even though sharing would not impact commercial user’s quality of service. Chamberlain’s question is therefore how to prove this to convince commercial users to share access. “You need to demonstrate to commercial users that there’s incentive to utilize the wireless band resources [for both parties],” explains Chamberlain. “Ultimately it’s developing models to show that even if you give the radiometers priority, there’s still plenty of spectrum availability for commercial use, and so there’s incentive to share between the radiometers and commercial users.”
The other element of his research is explored through his newest paper, “Exploiting Kubernetes Autoscaling for Economic Denial of Sustainability”, which Chamberlain will be presenting at the 2025 ACM SIGMETRICS Conference this June. It involves questions of economic denial of service and sustainability attacks, which target the financial resources of cloud computing. He describes that some commercial use of network bands is not just cellular but includes swarms of Internet of Things devices that drain energy and cause congestion on networks, which slows response times because of bandwidth limitations. This is an especially important problem to solve because it presents an opportunity for adversaries to purposefully flood a system with traffic to create an unsustainable condition for the cloud network. Therefore, Chamberlain is also looking into ways to better distribute and optimize access to cloud servers. He says that “one way to do that might be to randomize the rate of scaling because that way you’re disrupting the underlying assumptions that are being used to launch the attack.”
In addition to his research, Chamberlain was involved in organizations and extracurriculars on campus. On his involvement as a CISE Graduate Student Workshop (CGSW) student organizer for the past two years, he says that “it was very helpful in just being able to see other people’s research and learn what other people are doing.” Additionally, Chamberlain says that his involvement with CGSW and the Student Association of Graduate Engineers (SAGE) has been valuable since he has been “able to interact with people who are not in [his] immediate department and get a chance to meet with people who [he] wouldn’t have had the chance to talk to otherwise”.
Chamberlain shared a couple words of advice for incoming PhD students.
“The biggest thing is to not be afraid to ask questions, whether it’s your advisor, whether it’s your fellow students, or whether it’s a professor in the classes that you’re having to take as a first or second year,” explains Chamberlain. “If you’re unsure about something, it’s better to just ask because that saves so much more time downstream and you will usually find it if you had that question and you’re in a larger group setting, someone else may very well also have the same question and be in a similar situation here they didn’t want to ask.”
Chamberlain additionally reflected on how beneficial it is for students to remember downtime to avoid burnout and hitting a wall, saying that “it is very important as a student to recognize that there does need to be downtine, because if you’re trying to go, go, go all the time, you’re going to reach a point where you’re going to hit a wall”. For him, being a part of student groups and taking time to get to know people outside of research has helped him develop a good work/life balance.
Jonathan Chamberlain successfully defended his thesis “Economic Frameworks for Spectrum Coexistence in Advanced Wireless Networks” in April 2025. Chamberlain was advised by CISE faculty affiliate and professor David Starobinski within the Laboratory of Networking & Information Systems. He has a background in mathematical logic and applied mathematics as a 2012 graduate from BU’s College of Arts and Sciences. He initially joined the College of Engineering through the Late Entry Accelerated Program (LEAP) program, intending to pursue a more technical path, but has always been interested in how people communicate with each other and the underlying technologies that make it possible, such as the history of mass media and the adoption of wireless technologies, sparking his interest in the economics of cloud computing and cognitive radio networks.