Cognitive Radio and Networking Research at Virginia Tech

More than a dozen Wireless @ Virginia Tech faculty are working to address the broad research agenda of cognitive radio and cognitive networks. Our core research team spans the protocol stack from radio and reconfigurable hardware to communications theory to the networking layer. Our work includes new analysis methods and the development of new software architectures and applications, in addition to work on the core concepts and architectures underlying cognitive radios and cognitive networks. This paper describes these contributions and points towards critical future work that remains to fulfill the promise of cognitive radio. We briefly describe the history of work on cognitive radios and networks at Virginia Tech and then discuss our contributions to the core cognitive processing underlying these systems, focusing on our cognitive engine. We also describe developments that support the cognitive engine and advances in radio technology that provide the flexibility desired in a cognitive radio node. We consider securing and verifying cognitive systems and examine the challenges of expanding the cognitive paradigm up the protocol stack to optimize end-to-end network performance. Lastly, we consider the analysis of cognitive systems using game theory and the application of cognitive techniques to problems in dynamic spectrum sharing and control of multiple-input multiple-output radios.     

A soft radio architecture for reconfigurable platforms

While many soft/software radio architectures have been suggested and implemented, there remains a lack of a formal design methodology that can be used to design and implement these radios. This article presents a unified architecture for the design of soft radios on a reconfigurable platform called the layered radio architecture. The layered architecture makes it possible to incorporate all of the features of a software radio while minimizing complexity issues. The layered architecture also enables a methodology for incorporating changes and updates into the system. An example implementation of the layered architecture on actual hardware is presented     

Radios Get Smart

If radios could somehow use a portion of the broadcast TV spectrum without causing interference, cellular telephony and other important services would be able to exploit those bands. With more room to operate, cellphone calls would be a lot cheaper, as would mobile Internet access, which would get faster as well. Your handset would be able to pull in audio and visual entertainment from all over the globe, and videophoning would finally be a reality. To manage such feats, cellphone handsets would have to be able to shift their frequency of operation on demand and without packing in lots of extra hardware. Telecommunications engineers have a name for that goal software-defined radio. And the more visionary among them see it as a stepping-stone to an even more distant ideal. Their goal is a wireless device that is smart enough to analyze the radio environment and decide for itself the best spectral band and protocol to reach whatever base station it needs to communicate with, at the lowest level of power consumption. The name for such remarkable systems is "cognitive radios," and some are already emerging from the laboratory to be field-tested by the US military, which has long sponsored research in the area     

Enabling Components for Multi-Standard Software Radio Base Stations

Receiver and transmitter technology is an enablingfactor for the software radio concept, with analogueto digital conversion being the limiting performancefactor. The requirement for common hardware forseveral different systems leads to parameterizedmodules and higher integration levels. Moduledefinition is closely related to the architecturalchallenges of receiver design. Emerging multi-mode base stations favour larger hardware granularity. Thesoftware radio approach reduces the hardwarecomplexity of a cell site from several racks ofdiscrete single-channel radios to one or two shelvesof open architecture modules.This paper presents critical functional blocks forwide-band multi-mode base stations based on thesoftware radio concept. Major component specificationsare reviewed showing the implications on systemdesign. Functional and performance parameters foranalogue to digital converters (ADCs), digital toanalogue converters (DACs), digital down and upconverters are illustrated using specific products.Applications are presented by revisiting existingtransceiver architectures in the framework of nextgeneration wireless standards.     

小型化低功耗数字平台设计关键技术

对于使用电池供电的背负式或手持电台,电台的平均功率消耗决 定了电台在战场的可运作时间。因此,数字平台的硬件设计和软件设计都必须把电台的大小 、重量和电源（SWAP）的设计作为首要的考虑事项。从动态时钟调整、电源供应调整、操作 模式、工作周期影响、静态和动态电源对比、硬件电源的小型化考虑以及可编程逻辑和ASIC 的设计对比等多方面进行了研究,为构建灵活的软件无线电平台体系结构提供了参考。     

Virtual radios

Conventional software radios take advantage of vastly improved analog to digital converters (ADCs) and digital signal processing (DSP) hardware. Our approach, which we refer to as virtual radios, also depends upon high performance ADCs. However, rather than use DSPs, we have chosen to ride the curve of rapidly improving workstation hardware. We use wideband digitization and then perform all of the digital signal processing in user space on a general purpose workstation. This approach allows us to experiment with new approaches to signal processing that exploit the hardware and software resources of the workstation. Furthermore, it allows us to experiment with different ways of structuring systems in which the radio component of communication devices is integrated with higher-level applications. This paper describes the design and performance of an environment we have constructed that facilitates building virtual radios and of two applications built using that environment. The environment consists of an input/output (I/O) subsystem that provides high bandwidth low latency user-level access to digitized signals and a programming environment that provides an infrastructure for building applications. The applications, which exemplify some of the benefits of virtual radios, are a software cellular receiver and a novel wireless network interface     

The roles of FPGAs in reprogrammable systems

Reprogrammable systems based on field programmable gate arrays are revolutionizing some forms of computation and digital logic. As a logic emulation system, they provide orders of magnitude faster computation than software simulation. As a custom-computing machine, they achieve the highest performance implementation for many types of applications. As a multimode system, they yield significant hardware savings and provide truly generic hardware. In this paper, we discuss the promise and problems of reprogrammable systems. This includes an overview of the chip and system architectures of reprogrammable systems as well as the applications of these systems. We also discuss the challenges and opportunities of future reprogrammable systems     

Adaptability and Configurability in Cognitive Radio Design on Small Form Factor Software Radio Platform

The recent advances in cognitive radio technology based on software defined radio platforms have extended the capabilities of wireless communication systems. The unique ability of cognitive radios to alter their communication protocols to meet changing system demands make them great candidates for wireless applications that are difficult to implement using conventional wireless terminals. Small form factor platforms make cognitive radio portable and easy to deploy. This paper discusses the design and implementation methodology to build a cognitive radio on small form factor platform with heterogeneous processing architecture. The result of this discussion is a configurable wireless transceiver that features two important concepts of cognitive radio, namely configurability and adaptability.     

基于SCA规范的软件无线电系统设计

软件通信体系结构(SCA)是软件无线电系统开发的技术规范,它能有效解决基于SCA规范的不同软件无线电系统的软件可移植性和可重用性问题。本文主要阐述了SCA规范的基本内容,从硬件体系结构、软件体系结构和安全体系结构三个方面对软件无线电系统设计所遵循的规范进行了说明,从而为软件无线电系统的开发奠定了基础。     

Software radio architecture: a mathematical perspective

As the software radio makes its transition from research to practice, it becomes increasingly important to establish provable properties of the software radio architecture on which product developers and service providers can base technology insertion decisions. Establishing provable properties requires a mathematical perspective on the software radio architecture. This paper contributes to that perspective by critically reviewing the fundamental concept of the software radio, using mathematical models to characterize this rapidly emerging technology in the context of similar technologies like programmable digital radios. The software radio delivers dynamically defined services through programmable processing capacity that has the mathematical structure of the Turing machine. The bounded recursive functions, a subset of the total recursive functions, are shown to be the largest class of Turing-computable functions for which software radios exhibit provable stability in plug-and-play scenarios. Understanding the topological properties of the software radio architecture promotes plug-and-play applications and cost-effective reuse. Analysis of these topological properties yields a layered distributed virtual machine reference model and a set of architecture design principles for the software radio. These criteria may be useful in defining interfaces among hardware, middleware, and higher level software components that are needed for cost-effective software reuse     

Low-power radio-frequency ICs for portable communications

The contributions of integrated circuits to the RF front-end of wireless receivers and transmitters operating in broadcast and personal communications bands are surveyed. It is seen from this that when ICs enable a rethinking of the RF architecture, the wireless device can sometimes become significantly smaller, and consume much less power. Examples are taken from FM broadcast receivers, pagers, and cellular telephone handsets. Many semiconductor technologies are competing today to supply RF-ICs to cellular telephones. The various design styles and levels of integration are compared, with the conclusion that single-chip silicon transceivers, combined with architectures which substantially reduce off-chip passive components, will likely dominate digital cellular telephones in the near future. The survey also projects future trends for ICs for miniature spread-spectrum transceivers offering robust operation in the crowded spectrum. With sophistication in baseband digital signal processing, its increasing interaction with the RF sections, and with increasing experience in simplified radio architectures, all-CMOS radios appear promising in the 900 MHz to 2 GHz bands. A specific CMOS spread-spectrum transceiver project underway at the author's institution is discussed by way of example     

FPGA in the software radio

As new radio standards are deployed without substantially supplanting existing ones, the need for multimode multiband handsets and infrastructure increases. This article describes how emerging FPGA technology's unique combination of size and power efficiency plus field programmability offers a transition of FPCAs from ASIC prototyping to embedded products. Software-defined receiver examples suggest an enlarged role for FPGAs in pragmatic paths toward the productization of software radio technology     

RF-MEMS for Wireless Communications [Topics in Design and Implementation]

This article presents an introduction and overview of MEMS technology with a focus on RF applications of MEMS in the design of cellular handsets. A novel, integrated, high-Q tunable digital capacitor is discussed to demonstrate how RF-MEMS technology can be utilized to make high frequency components whose RF characteristics can be adjusted during operation, allowing for the first time reconfiguration of radio hardware under software control. It is concluded that as the consumer wireless market continues to grow and evolve, product designers will remain under ever increasing pressure to develop smaller, lighter, thinner products that are more functional, energy-efficient, and intuitive, and to do so faster and at lower cost. Although issues and challenges persist, opportunities abound, and RF-MEMS technology holds the promise of being a key enabler of future generations of more highly converged, cognitive, and flexible consumer wireless products.     

HC-MAC: A Hardware-Constrained Cognitive MAC for Efficient Spectrum Management

Radio spectrum resource is of fundamental importance for wireless communication. Recent reports show that most available spectrum has been allocated. While some of the spectrum bands (e.g., unlicensed band, GSM band) have seen increasingly crowded usage, most of the other spectrum resources are underutilized. This drives the emergence of open spectrum and dynamic spectrum access concepts, which allow unlicensed users equipped with cognitive radios to opportunistically access the spectrum not used by primary users. Cognitive radio has many advanced features, such as agilely sensing the existence of primary users and utilizing multiple spectrum bands simultaneously. However, in practice such capabilities are constrained by hardware cost. In this paper, we discuss how to conduct efficient spectrum management in ad hoc cognitive radio networks while taking the hardware constraints (e.g., single radio, partial spectrum sensing and spectrum aggregation limit) into consideration. A hardware-constrained cognitive MAC, HC-MAC, is proposed to conduct efficient spectrum sensing and spectrum access decision. We identify the issue of optimal spectrum sensing decision for a single secondary transmission pair, and formulate it as an optimal stopping problem. A decentralized MAC protocol is then proposed for the ad hoc cognitive radio networks. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed protocol.     

Applications of Machine Learning to Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio offers the promise of intelligent radios that can learn from and adapt to their environment. To date, most cognitive radio research has focused on policy-based radios that are hard-coded with a list of rules on how the radio should behave in certain scenarios. Some work has been done on radios with learning engines tailored for very specific applications. This article describes a concrete model for a generic cognitive radio to utilize a learning engine. The goal is to incorporate the results of the learning engine into a predicate calculus-based reasoning engine so that radios can remember lessons learned in the past and act quickly in the future. We also investigate the differences between reasoning and learning, and the fundamentals of when a particular application requires learning, and when simple reasoning is sufficient. The basic architecture is consistent with cognitive engines seen in AI research. The focus of this article is not to propose new machine learning algorithms, but rather to formalize their application to cognitive radio and develop a framework from within which they can be useful. We describe how our generic cognitive engine can tackle problems such as capacity maximization and dynamic spectrum access.     

Flexible and efficient hardware platform and architectures for waveform design and proof-of-concept in the context of 5G

Several technical contributions are emerging nowadays to fulfill the new requirements foreseen in the 5th generation (5G) of mobile communication systems. Among these contributions, different variants of waveform design are proposed for the new radio air interface as alternative to orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) adopted in 4G. However, in order to prove the feasibility and the benefits of the proposed waveforms, practical hardware implementations are necessary. This paper presents one of the first flexible and efficient hardware platforms for waveform design and proof-of-concept. The proposed platform constitutes a complete hardware/software development environment, with digital processing, radio frequency boards, and all associated interfaces for control, communication, and display. Furthermore, the proposed platform allows the support of several communication scenarios as foreseen in 5G. Promising waveform candidates are implemented, in addition to OFDM, with careful architectural choices to allow fair comparisons. Particularly, this paper presents novel hardware architectures for the UF-OFDM transmitter and receiver.     

Effect of a policy intervention on handset subsidies on the intention to change handsets and households’ expenses in mobile telecommunications

This study examined effect of a policy intervention that provides an upper limit for handset subsidies on users’ intention to change handset and households’ expenses on mobile telecommunications. The Korean government has prohibited mobile network providers from providing excessive subsidies for mobile handsets to attract subscribers since Nov. 2014 according to the mobile act. Using the exogenous variation, we estimate the impact of the policy on the intention to change handsets and expenses on handset installment, total mobile communications, and online content. The longitudinal data are from the 2014 to 2015 waves of the Korea Media Panel Survey. The mobile act lowered the predicted probability of switching handsets by 0.4% points. Moreover, the mobile act increased the predicted probability of any expense on handset installment by 7.5% points and had a significant impact on the amount of expenses on handset installment, with an increase of 7.8%. The mobile act lowered users’ willingness to switch handsets and increased spending on handset installment. This increased burden in handset installment might shrink the online content market, which has a large need for government support, as well as decrease consumers’ welfare. We assert that the policy intervention on handset subsidies is questionable with regard to both consumer welfare and the healthiness of the ICT ecosystem.     

The software radio architecture

As communications technology continues its rapid transition from analog to digital, more functions of contemporary radio systems are implemented in software, leading toward the software radio. This article provides a tutorial review of software radio architectures and technology, highlighting benefits, pitfalls, and lessons learned. This includes a closer look at the canonical functional partitioning of channel coding into antenna, RF, IF, baseband, and bitstream segments. A more detailed look at the estimation of demand for critical resources is key. This leads to a discussion of affordable hardware configurations, the mapping of functions to component hardware, and related software tools. This article then concludes with a brief treatment of the economics and likely future directions of software radio technology     

Multi-radio coexistence and collaboration on an SDR platform

In order to support the simultaneous use of both legacy and new radios in a multi-radio handset, a Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform needs to offer coexistence mechanisms and services for radios. This paper proposes an SDR control framework to provide the coexistence services and common interfaces for them. The multi-radio control in proposed platform is divided into two parts, the light-weight dynamic scheduling with tight real-time constraints to solve the temporal interoperability issues between radios, and the semi-dynamic admission control to perform the resource allocation when a radio changes its behavioral pattern. The control framework was implemented on a SDR technology demonstrator, to show how multiple simultaneously active radios are controlled, and how the coexistence mechanism can be used to provide tangible benefits to the SDR modem user, like the ability to utilize fine-grained spectral holes.