PART I: Cognitive Radio: A Panacea for RF Spectrum Scarcity

Wireless communication networks enable all members of society to connect with each other.  With the prevalence of cell phones, laptops with built-in WiFi, Bluetooth headset, and other similar devices in our everyday world, we are totally immersed in communication technology. Moreover, our connectivity is almost entirely ubiquitous and its reach extends to the most remote corners of the planet.  However, given the growing amount of wireless chatter and transmissions surrounding us across the airwaves, the ability for wireless technology to accommodate this amount of growth is quickly approaching a critical limit in terms of how many more devices can be supported across the same frequency within the context of the current regulatory framework used to simultaneously handle this plethora of wireless appliances.  In this talk, we will examine one potential solution to this issue called cognitive radio.  In particular, several innovative solutions and initiatives involving cognitive radio designed to address this growth issue.

PART II:  Software-Defined Radio and Advanced Wireless Implementation

Modern society depends on telecommunications in order to enable a diverse range of activities, such as financial transactions, public safety, education, and social networking.  To achieve ubiquitous and robust last-mile access, many applications require some form of wireless transmission to connect the end-users with the rest of the network. However, several serious issues are beginning to emerge given society’s growing dependence on wireless access.  For instance, although the demand for wireless access based on the number of users and applications is rising steadily, the amount of freely-available electromagnetic spectrum is rather limited and may not satisfy this need.  Furthermore, new complex wireless networking architectures are becoming increasingly difficult to realize using conventional radio technology.  Consequently, cognitive radio has been proposed as a viable solution to these issues.  A cognitive radio is a type of wireless networking system that combines autonomous device operating parameter reconfigurability, real-time situational awareness of the radio/network/system environment, and artificial intelligence-driven decision-making for achieving the “best possible” parameter selection.  This is all made possible by employing microprocessor technology at the core of a cognitive radio system in order to perform baseband digital signal processing and digital communication operations.  In this talk, implementations of several subsystems that constitute a cognitive radio platform using software defined radio will be presented, including digital transmission and digital signal processing techniques for enabling high-speed wireless data access across several non-contiguous frequency bands, and the latest research findings in these areas will be presented.