Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

During the past couple of decades, all the research efforts have focused on improving the performance of wireless communication systems under the static frequency allocation. While these activities have led to numerous breakthroughs and inventions, they all ignore the remarkable gains that can be achieved if the unused portions of the radio spectrum can be used at proper times and/or locations to serve other (secondary) users in the network. Recently a flurry of research has targeted the so-called dynamic spectrum access schemes aiming to improve the under-utilization of radio spectrum. The majority of these activities are currently going on in the US. To preserve the leading role of Canadian institutions, researchers, and companies in the field of Advanced Communications and Management of Information, NSERC has indentified the importance of the subtopic of Dynamic Spectrum Allocation within two topics, namely Ubiquitous Networks and Adaptive/Cognitive Networks. We bring our expertise in Intelligent Signal Processing (which has also been identified by NSERC as another subtopic within both aforementioned topics) to this NSERC Strategic Project Grant proposal. We develop a new technology solution combining wireless cellular network with local broadband access that exploits the unused portions of TV spectrum through the dynamic spectrum access technique. The current cellular infrastructure has been designed to perform efficient spectrum allocation for potentially highly mobile users. As such, it may not be efficient under low-mobility or stationary environment. This project addresses the above shortcoming of the conventional cellular networks by developing a new system solution that adaptively connects the user to the infrastructure through one of the two networking modes, namely low-rate high-mobility access or high-rate low-mobility access. We explore the potentials of dynamic spectrum management for the later access solution to seamlessly integrate these two schemes.