February Fourier Talks 2008

Cognitive Radio Approaches in Broadband Wireless Access

High Spectral Efficiency, flexible data rate access, reconfigurability, highly integrated terminal devices, and scalability are key areas of focus in the development of Third and Fourth Generation wireless systems where multiple access is the driving requirement. Central to the deployment of these broadband wireless systems is the ability to develop cost effective transceiver structures that are both flexible and robust. The following paper presents a cognitive radio architecture, which when employed in wireless access environments, supports dynamic resource assignment, interference mitigation, and efficient backhaul utilization. In this paper an architecture is described whereby the system characterizes its operational environment and dynamically, and in some cases autonomously, adjust its operating parameters to enable optimal performance. For the applications under consideration, optimality is related to link closure, transmit power, data rate, security, interference, and capacity. Key RF and digital technologies and associated signal processing techniques that enable these architectures will be presented. Selected results are also presented showing the results of traffic, complexity, compression and sensitivity analysis.