Grant: Engage Grants Program

In this NSERC Engage proposal, the industry partner, WireIE is a Canadian telecommunication vendor and solution provider, specializing in next generation network solutions and technologies. Recently, the company has become interested in dynamic spectrum allocation and channel bonding solutions that would enable Mobile Network Operators (MNO) to share the responsibility of serving a user at times and/or locations where one MNO cannot fully serve the user. The proposed project is a new collaboration between Prof. Shahram ShahbazPanahi and WireIE. It is well-known that the radio frequency spectrum is highly underutilized meaning that significant portions of the precious radio spectrum purchased by a certain MNO is not being used by any users of that MNO. At the same time and location, there could be users of other MNOs which may be in urgent need of service; however, their own MNO might have limited or no bandwidth to offer at that time and/or location. In this project, the goal is to study developing new physical layer technologies and test their ability to dynamically allocate radio spectrum frequencies for servicing mobile devices. Such technologies will enable broadband base stations belonging to different MNOs, to share the responsibility of serving a particular user device based on the bandwidth demand originated for this device as well as the spectrum availability at the location of the device.