The overarching goal of the Holistically Application-Aware Multi-dimensional Cognitive Radio (HAMCR) research is to create a set of transformative and holistic technologies that enable substantial growth in the capacity of wireless networks, with support for diverse applications, but without increasing the available spectrum. The project is based on the observation that in today's wireless networks the spectral allocation of resources is either independent of the applications' Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and of the user's perceived QoS, or at best relies on a set of pre-defined fixed priorities. HAMCR maximizes spectrum utilization by trading off the spectral resource allocations of connections for the application-level QoS, while still maintaining acceptable levels of QoS for the individual users of the underlying applications, thus satisfying an increased number of users in times of shortage of spectral resources. Such an application-aware cognitive radio significantly advances spectrum utilization by intelligently supporting the expected traffic growth and by dynamically satisfying the changing demands in traffic. To achieve the above goal, the objectives of the proposed research are to: 1) Develop the fundamental design of middleware to optimize the allocation of the available physical resources by characterizing the applications' parameters and by trading off application-level QoS for spectral resources, while minimizing the degradation to the user-perceived QoS, thus maximizing the spectrum utilization; and 2) Design and implementation of a simulated wireless testbed to assess the feasibility of the application-based resources allocation by evaluating the complexity and the gain of the proposed approach for a number of realistic communication scenarios. The results of this project are expected to forge a new direction in the cognitive radio field, i.e., application-aware cognitive radio.
