CV

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Education

• PhD in Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA (Aug 2025 - Present)
  • Investigating cross coordination between applications, cellular networks, and edge to meet end-to-end SLOs in 5G.
  • Advisor: Dr. Shaddi Hasan.
• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Jacobs University Bremen, Bremen, Germany (Aug 2019 - Jun 2022)
  • GPA: 1.47 (88%); President’s List, ranked within top 10% of graduating class.
  • Thesis: Evaluation of Resource Allocation in WiFi Networks using Minstrel-HT in user space (Funded by SupraCoNeX).
  • Completed a graduate-level course in Parallel and Distributed Computing with a 1.0 (highest grade on German scale).

Research Experience

• Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (5G-COMPASS), Berlin, Germany (Sep 2023 - Aug 2025)
  • Researcher, supervised by Dr. Julius Schulz-Zander
  • Independently drove HHI-WN research within the multi-partner 5G-COMPASS consortium (funded by BMDV); prepared official reports for the funding authority.
  • Set up and maintained Linux-based OpenWrt WiFi testbeds for experimental network evaluations.
  • Investigated supervised and reinforcement learning for MAC-layer resource allocation; modeled rate-space relationships using conditional entropy and clustering.
  • Explored joint WiFi and 5G-ORAN integration on a real-world testbed using OpenAirInterface (OAI) and FlexRIC.
• Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences (SupraCoNeX), Bremen, Germany, Remote (Jun 2021 - Jun 2023)
  • Student Research Assistant, supervised by Dr. Thomas Hühn
  • Enabled user-space execution of per-STA MAC-layer resource allocation over multiple Linux-based OpenWrt APs.
  • Built an experimentation toolchain to automate measurements across wireless devices (traffic generation, packet monitoring).
  • Contributed to collection and analysis of large experimental datasets from a WLAN testbed of 40+ WiFi APs.
  • Assisted in implementing Unimodal Thompson Sampling for WiFi rate adaptation, achieving an average 47% improvement over Minstrel-HT.
• Google Summer of Code (freifunk), Berlin, Germany, Remote
  • Mentor: DQN-based Rate Adaptation for IEEE 802.11ac Networks (May 2025 - Sep 2025)
  • Mentor: New Transmit Power Control for IEEE 802.11ax WiFi chips (May 2024 - Sep 2024)
  • Contributor: Joint Power and Rate Control in User Space (May 2023 - Sep 2023): Implemented an ACK-based joint power and rate adaptation algorithm, achieving a 15% throughput improvement.
  • Contributor: Minstrel-HT TX Rate Control in User Space (May 2022 - Sep 2022): Developed a user-space implementation of Linux’s default Minstrel-HT algorithm, validated on a mesh network of 100+ OpenWrt routers.

Publications

Interface on demand: Towards AI native Control interfaces for 6G

Abhishek Dandekar, Prashiddha Dhoj Thapa, Ashrafur Rahman, and Julius Schulz-Zander. "Interface on demand: Towards AI native Control interfaces for 6G." Proceedings of the IEEE ICC 2025.

ORCA - Open-source Resource Control API for real WiFi networks

Sankalp Prakash Pawar, Prashiddha Dhoj Thapa, Jonas Jelonek et al. "ORCA - Open-source Resource Control API for real WiFi networks." Proceedings of WiNTECH 2024 (ACM MobiCom).

Towards Infrastructure-assisted WiFi Rate Adaptation for Converged Networks with Morpheus

Prashiddha Dhoj Thapa, Arne Kappen, and Julius Schulz-Zander. "Towards Infrastructure-assisted WiFi Rate Adaptation for Converged Networks with Morpheus." Proceedings of MobiArch 2024.

Multi-Armed Bandits in IEEE 802.11ac: Efficient Algorithms and Testbed Experiments

Martin Le, Bile Peng, Sankalp Prakash Pawar, Peter Auer, Prashiddha Dhoj Thapa, et al. "Multi-Armed Bandits in IEEE 802.11ac: Efficient Algorithms and Testbed Experiments." IEEE CQR 2024.

Teaching

CS3114: Data Structures and Algorithms

Algorithms and Data Structures

Programming in Python

Honors and Awards

• Cyber Innovation Scholar, Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Southwest Virginia (Feb 2026)
• Merit-based tuition scholarship, Jacobs University Bremen (3 academic years, Mar 2019)
• Full merit scholarship for entirety of high school, British Model College (2017/18)

Skills

• Languages: Python, C++, C, SQL
• Libraries: Asyncio, ROS, Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Flask
• Tools: LaTeX, Git, VS Code, MySQL, Vim, GNU Make
• Platforms: Linux, Web, Arduino, macOS

Languages

• English: Proficient (C2), TOEFL [30R, 29L, 28S, 28W]
• German: Intermediate (B2)
• Nepali: Native
• Hindi: Proficient (C1)