“Cognitive Radio Networks”

Abstract

Recent advances in programmable integrated circuits have created an opportunity to develop a new class of intelligent or “cognitive” radios which can adapt to a wide variety of radio interference conditions and multiple protocol standards for collaboration between otherwise incompatible systems.  Such a cognitive radio would be capable of very dynamic physical layer adaptation via scanning of available spectrum, selection from a wide range of operating frequencies (possibly non-contiguous), rapid adjustment of modulation waveforms and adaptive power control.  In addition, a suitably designed cognitive radio with a software-defined physical layer would be capable of collaborating with neighboring radios to ameliorate interference using higher-layer protocols.  Perhaps for the first time in the short history of networking, cognitive radios offer the potential for organic formation of “infrastructure-less” collaborative network clusters with dynamic adaptation at every layer of the protocol stack including physical, link and network layers. While the development of cognitive radio hardware and software, especially at the physical layer, has received considerable attention, the question of how one transforms a set of cognitive radios into a cognitive network is much less well understood. This talk will present an overview of cognitive radio network research from the points of view of information and coding theory, game theory, collaborative and cooperative communications. The implications of such cognitive radio networks to spectrum policy as well as the design of the future internet will also be highlighted.

Bio

Narayan B. Mandayam received the B.Tech (Hons.) degree in 1989 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1991 and 1994 from Rice University, Houston, TX, all in electrical engineering. From 1994 to 1996, he was a Research Associate at the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB), Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rutgers University. In September 1996, he joined the faculty of the ECE department at Rutgers where he became Associate Professor in 2001 and Professor in 2003. Currently, he also serves as Associate Director at WINLAB. He was a visiting faculty fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University in Fall 2002 and a visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Science in Spring 2003.