CAREER: Towards Broadband and UAV-Assisted Heterogeneous Networks for Public Safety Communications

Ismail Guvenc

Project runs from 09/01/2016 to 03/31/2020
$457,323

The demand for wireless data communications is increasing far faster than advances in wireless communications, and at the current pace, demand will outpace the available capacity in major markets in just a few short years. To encourage innovation in the area of collaborative spectrum sharing, DARPA organized a Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) with the stated goal to develop “autonomous collaboration techniques for efficient spectrum sharing,” which aim to yield 100-1000 fold improvements in spectrum efficiency. This supplement is in support of the participation of the NC State team (team Wolfpack) in DARPA’s SC2 challenge.

The main objective of the proposed supplement is to research, develop, and implement technical solution concepts for collaborative spectrum sharing and to test their performance in head-to-head scrimmages with other competing approaches. In particular, we will research, develop, and test spectrum sharing algorithms that build on fundamental concepts in communication theory, cognitive radios, machine learning, routing, among other technical domains. The proposed methods will also be validated in the DARPA SC2 challenge by competing against other teams, which will allow us to revise and improve our framework as needed.

Wireless communications are affecting deeply the daily lives of the overwhelming majority of people on this planet. The insatiable demand for network capacity has motivated an entirely different approach on spectrum utilization. Work in this proposal will enable new collaboration approaches that will impact the lives of anybody relying directly or indirectly on wireless communications. In addition to direct impacts, national security and public services rely heavily on wireless communications, and thus can indirectly impact the well being of all citizens.