3rd Joint Workshop on Cognitive Radio Standardization & Markets

This past November, the Flemish Interdisciplinary institute for BroadBand Technology (IBBT) organized together with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA) the third edition of their “Joint Workshop on Cognitive Radio Standardization & Markets” at the IBBT-SMIT headquarters located in Brussels. This workshop has been developed with the aim of confronting the latest points of view in Europe and the US regarding standardization, regulation and market issues for Cognitive Radio.

Given the fact that the vacant spectrum will not be enough to satisfy the increasing demand caused by aspects like the constant growth of wireless broadband or the increase of technologies and services developed to bring connectivity to underserved areas, technologies such as Cognitive Radio emerge as an efficient solution. Cognitive Radio systems can operate in an intelligent way, automatically detecting and exploiting the unused spectrum. This results on a more efficient use of this spectrum without being attached to the fixed boundaries of the traditional allocation of frequency bands.

In line with the technical research conducted on Cognitive Radio, the workshop offered the market perspective on the various technical decisions made in this field and on the consequences they would entail. Therefore, its main objective was to gather academics, regulators and business specialists in order to discuss together about policy, regulation and market issues surrounding Cognitive Radio. The workshop focused on the opportunities, challenges and crucial choices to be made in the near future with regard to context awareness enablers such as spectrum sensing or geolocation databases.

During the different sessions, the TV White Spaces (unused portions of valuable spectrum in the TV frequency band) regulation was deeply discussed. Future networks and services that could make use of these white spaces were discussed from several different perspectives including that of the manufacters, network operators, broadband service providers and users.

Continuing with the current research work conducted by Gradiant on the Cognitive Radio systems field, the organization was represented by the researcher Elena García who attended this interesting workshop held on November 22 in the Belgian capital.