Leveraging Insurance for services providers cohabitation over Cognitive Radio Networks – LICoRNe

Efficient spectrum management and optimization are becoming the cornerstones for the deployment of our future mobile communications systems and, in this way, severely impact the incredible deployment of various mobile wireless technologies that would enable the instantiation of the 4G vision. As a direct result, cognitive radio networks are emerging as the new wireless standards that shall replace the traditional single frequency homogeneous environments. The concept of cognitive radios is based on using dynamically any available spectrum band for their communications. The LICoRNe project proposes to go beyond this emerging concept by investigating media transmission, services engineering, and management techniques over advanced cognitive radios. More specifically, the project aims to study what services can be offered to end users over a multi-hop cognitive radio network and how a dynamic and opportunistic optimization of cognitive radios shall be undergone to provide these services.
Practically, one key challenge for the cognitive radio networking to overcome resides in ensuring the cohabitation over a dynamic environment of several types of networks having each different constraints to satisfy. Cognitive radio networks should transparently coexist with the already active users of the exploited licensed bands (often called primary radio users) that form the primary radio network. LICoRNe aims to study the interaction between these two networks from both a user and an operator point of view. Specifically, the objectives are in one hand to develop adequate techniques to protect primary users activity, and on the other hand to cohabit efficiently several secondary networks with different requirements over the residual spectrum. This cohabitation is considered to be successful only if concrete services can be enabled. To the best of our knowledge, no existing project has investigated the capabilities in terms of user applications over this same network scenario.
In order to achieve the specified objectives, the LICoRNe project has to overcome the following scientific and technical challenges:
1.Develop and study realistic business models that allow cohabitation of networks and services over the same spectrum band dynamically.
2.Undergo PHY design through adapted distributed coordination schemes in an unstable and opportunistic multi-channel wireless network in order to maximize the physical capacity of the wireless network.
3.Exploit interference holes left over the spectrum opportunistically while mapping them to different service requirements for end users.
4.Develop and implement multi-criteria routing techniques to take into account instability, availability, learning capacities and diversity of cognitive radio environment.
5.Adapt and ensure adequate transport level for the different services to offer.
6.Build a feasible and dynamic management infrastructure.
7.Validate service cohabitation with representative scenarios over a test platform and a real-life implementation hosted at a network operator.
In the LICoRNe project we envision to handle technical challenges listed above by following a gradual and collaborative methodology that will be based on the experience/competence and the complementarities of the consortium members. First, a theoretical study should be conducted and based on this study, new solutions will be developed. Obviously, the proposed solutions have enabling services for cognitive radio while preserving the communications of licensed radios as two main objectives to satisfy. Second, a more elaborated validation will be undergone through simulations and analytical models. Third, a laboratory platform deployment will be used to test scenarios for real services to end users while in the final phase, a real implementation over a service provider platform shall quantify the impact of our solutions on real licensed users.