SpecEES: Efficient Monitoring and Spectrum Utilization in Multi-Layer Wireless Networks

With the proliferation of wireless applications and devices, the demand for wireless data, and hence for wireless bandwidth, is growing exponentially. Unfortunately, these growing demands need to be met via the available radio spectrum, which is limited and therefore has to be efficiently shared among various wireless systems and devices. Effective spectrum sharing demands enhanced capability and increased intelligence at the wireless devices, capable of operating over multiple frequency bands through multiple radio access technologies (RATs); this is becoming a reality thanks to the continuous advances in the industrial sector. Therefore, the globally interconnected wireless networks are evolving into a large-scale system that simultaneously supports billions of user and trillions of devices and exhibits huge heterogeneity in all aspects. The goal of this proposal is to realize efficient spectrum and energy utilization in this huge, dynamic and heterogeneous system. In contrast to existing approaches, a new angle is taken in this project that exploits the richness and complexity of the multi-RAT, multi-band environments to our advantage, in a multi-layer fashion, so as to achieve dramatic improvement in resource utilization and system performance. The expected outcome will be valuable to all players in the wireless industry, as well as to all sectors of the national economy that benefit from wireless innovation. The inter-disciplinary nature of the proposed research will naturally help promote cross-disciplinary education and well-rounded training of the future information technology workforce.

The proposed research is comprised of four thrusts: (i) acquisition and analytics of real-time spectrum activities to build multi-layer spectrum snapshots, which we call SpecSnap, (ii) building a fundamental framework to construct distributed and time/energy-efficient spectrum allocation algorithms under heterogeneous environments with multi-RAT in a principled manner, both for single-hop access to infrastructure and multihop access for device-to-device (D2D) communications, (iii) studying how to achieve fast rendezvous in multi-layer spectrum environments, and (iv) exploring abundant opportunities in multi-layer networks for efficient pairwise and broadcast communications via intra- and inter-layer topology design. The main challenge lies in the extreme heterogeneity of spectrum band occupancy and quality-of-service requirement of devices operating on diverse frequency bands with different channel characteristics over a wide range of spatio-temporal scales. The proposed research will be evaluated through theoretical analysis, numerical and network simulation, prototype implementation, and experimentation on real testbeds.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.