Xiang-Yang Li, professor of computer science, has been awarded a three-year grant for $498,122 from the National Science Foundation for “EARS: Providing Predictable Service and Spectrum Access With Realtime Decision in Cognitive Multihop Wireless Networks.”

Cognitive radio technology is a promising method for alleviating the spectrum scarcity problem due to the wide-spread usage of wireless devices. The objective of this project is to design real-time temporal-spatial spectrum sharing, trading and accessing schemes to provide predictable service and improve the network performances by fully exploiting the channel availability (e.g., spatial, temporal, and spectral) and quality (e.g., signal to interference plus noise ratio and data rate) diversities using cognitive radio techniques. Providing predictable performance for enhancing spectrum access has been extremely challenging because of the uncontrollable and hard-to-predict external disturbances and opportunities, including signal interference, irregular traffic pattern, and idle spectrum opportunities. Another challenging issue is to make a smart real-time decision on usage of spectrum and energy, and tradeoffs on quality, protection of primary users, and response time.