This project will study how to engineer modern spectrum sharing systems. Wireless spectrum is now recognized as a key national resource that has to be managed appropriately to support innovation and economic growth. Traditional wireless rules were written by a combination of lawyers and engineers in legal English, and read/interpreted by lawyers and engineers. The emerging revolution in wireless regulation is that the core rules will be embedded in automated Spectrum Access Systems (SASs) that are implemented in a combination of hardware, software, and interaction protocols. Moreover, the SASs will support diverse wireless systems ranging from legacy federal users to traditional cellular carriers to emerging new innovative wireless systems. The ideas developed in this project will be disseminated to industry as well as brought into the classroom, including our new Masters of Engineering courses aimed at educating innovative technical leaders. The project will also broaden participation in the technical workforce by mentoring students from underrepresented groups.
At its technical core, this project will help create a modern theory of how to make scalable and robust SASs by bringing together a combination of software engineering, mathematical wireless theory, as well as an understanding of the policy tradeoffs that we want to support. The key realization is that making scalable systems is about robustly approximating what we want in a safe manner while supporting flexibility. Ideas from virtualization, software-defined-networking, and cloud computing will play an important role. In addition to getting a handle on what the overall architecture should be of our SAS-enabled wireless future, the project will also take insights and embody them into easy-to-use prototype tools that can be adapted by federal regulators and spectrum managers to explore and navigate the design tradeoffs.
