Rakesh Taori

Rakesh is a passionate, result-oriented and an accomplished wireless systems engineer, a prolific inventor (holds over a 100 US patents) and a global leader with a unique combination of engineering and management skills and expertise. He has amassed over 20 years of achievements in research, standardization, and the development of innovative technology that can be deployed globally.
Before joining PHAZR, Rakesh was a Senior Director with Samsung Research America, responsible for research, proof-of-concept development and standardization of new air interface technologies. Rakesh has been a leading figure in advancing 5G millimeter wave (mmW) efforts since 2010, driving the development of essential system design algorithms and protocols for enabling mmW cellular system through innovative concepts such as Cloud Cell with beamformed MAC, in-band mmW backhaul and access, and Coreless networks. Rakesh also played a crucial role in advancing the 5G spectrum efforts. His presentation (which was also the Industry’s first) to the FCC’s Spectrum Frontiers Group (May 2013) paved the way to the opening of the 5G mmW spectrum in the US (his contribution is referenced in FCC’s mmW band NoI).
Since 2014, Rakesh has also been an active figure in advancing the next generation of WLAN technologies. He spearheadered Samsung’s standardization efforts for both the sub-6 GHz bands (802.11ax) and the millimeter wave bands (802.11ay)), and also led an in-house “Future Wi-Fi” project called Wi-XLE targeting sub-terabit/s data rates at extremely low energy. Under his leadership, the team taped out world’s 1st 125 GHz RF and antenna chip and a powerful FPGA-based baseband platform equipped with OFDMA, MIMO and LDPC functions capable of handling 10s of Gb/s. Since 2011, Rakesh has been serving on the Board of Directors of the Wi-Fi Alliance, where he was also the chairman of the Internet of Things (IoT) Task Group.
Other significant achievements from Rakesh include substantial contributions to, and driving industry’s first multi-hop mesh standard (IEEE 802.11s), industry’s first cellular standard for multi-hop relay (IEEE 802.16j), and the 4G standardization efforts in IEEE 802.16m (adopted as one of the IMT-Advanced (4G) systems). At the time, Rakesh served as the Vice Chairman of the IEEE 802.16 Working Group.
Before Samsung, Rakesh worked with Ericsson (in Sweden and the Netherlands) where he led the standardization of the Bluetooth High Rate mode as MAC/DLC chair in the BT SIG. His contributions to “Faster Inquiry” and “Adaptive Frequency Hopping” are a core part of the Bluetooth standard. Prior to joining Ericsson, Rakesh was with Philips (in the Netherlands) where he worked on Speech/Audio compression. His main contribution was the world’s first natural-sounding parametric speech coder called Harmony-1, which was incorporated in an IC commercialized by Philips Semiconductors (now NXP). The IC sold by the 100s of millions in applications such as digital telephone answering machines and toys). While at Philips, Rakesh also contributed to the ITU-T’s AMR speech codec and the MPEG-4 wideband and narrowband speech codecs.
Rakesh is a well-recognized wireless standards delegate, is well published and has served as a panelist and moderator on 5G related topics at major forums and conferences related to wireless communications. He is currently a senior member of the IEEE.