Recently, the idea of simultaneous activation (or transparent coexistence) of secondary and primary nodes is being explored. Under this new paradigm, secondary nodes are solely responsible for canceling their interference with the primary nodes so that the primary nodes do not feel the presence of the secondary nodes. Although this new paradigm has the potential of offering much greater spectrum efficiency and network capacity than those under the existing interference avoidance paradigm, it is still in its infancy and current results are only limited to very simple network settings. The goal of this project is to make a fundamental advance in the transparent coexistence paradigm for multi-hop secondary networks. Specifically, this project aims to study the following important problems in the context of multi-hop networks: (1) developing new analytical models for the transparent coexistence paradigm; (2) exploring performance bounds and theoretical limits for multi-hop secondary networks; and (3) developing distributed algorithms for multi-hop secondary networks that can offer performance approaching that of a global optimal solution.
The findings from this project are expected to make a timely contribution to the research community by removing some fundamental barriers associated with the transparent coexistence paradigm. An important educational activity of this project is to develop new cross-disciplinary course materials for wireless networking, particularly efficient sharing of the radio spectrum. This project also has plans to involve undergraduates and under-represented students in wireless networking research.
