Prof. Amir Banihashemi receives the Faculty of Engineering and Design’s Research Award for 2021/22 on a project entitled “Compressed Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radios”
Compressed Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radios:
This research involves the application of Cognitive Radio (CR) in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET). Such networks consist of a collection of wireless nodes that can dynamically form a network to exchange information without using any pre-existing fixed network infrastructure. Due to their flexibility and cost-effectiveness, MANETs have many applications in defense, search and rescue, and ad-hoc meetings, among others. In a MANET environment, dynamic and open spectrum access is an emerging paradigm that allows the efficient use of parts of the valuable radio spectrum that are not being used by licensed (primary) users. Key to this new paradigm is the use of a cognitive radio at a secondary user’s terminal that can sense the spectrum environment and rapidly adapt its transmitter parameters to efficiently utilize the available spectrum (spectrum holes) without causing undue interference to primary users. (This sometimes is referred to as opportunistic spectrum access.) As such, the first task of a CR is to sense the wireless environment and identify the available spectrum. This task, referred to as Spectrum Sensing (SS), however, is very challenging to implement in wideband scenarios which is of particular interest to us. The main objective of this research is to devise fast and accurate wideband SS algorithms with low complexity using an state-of-the-art signal processing technique, called compressive sensing.
Congratulations to Prof. Amir!