Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

The ever-increasing demand for broadband spectrum has led to a re-evaluation of spectrum utilization, and highlighted the need for smart technologies that can scan availability and opportunistically use signal free channels without interrupting services to licensed users. Canada faces the challenge of remaining globally competitive in the development of smart bandwidth management technologies as well as the policy guidelines to manage this industry which represents a potential market in the billions annually. At present, there is an international push to produce and deploy intelligent technology to improve the utilization of spectrum. Governments must confront the need to establish efficient policies, introduce effective monitoring, and institute enforcing mechanisms to safeguard the functionality of the spectrum. In the proposed research, intelligent and practical spectrum allocation mechanisms will be developed such that unlicensed users can transmit more data over wireless channels without affecting the quality of licensed users' communications. To this end, many critical problems are studied including channel identification, spectrum sensing, adaptive spectrum allocation, and auction competition for spectrum. This research area is strategic as the anticipated market and economic/social impacts are immense. Major communications technology developers around the globe have started investing in the area in order to seize a share of this new market. Timely research advancements achieved by the proposed research are vital to such competition and the outcomes will have a direct economic benefit for Canada. Each year in Canada, it is planned that several students (five PhD., two M.Sc., four B.Sc. and one or two visiting students from France) will receive research and development training through interactions with project researchers as well as the technical staff of industrial partners.