Main Objectives

Following current trends towards dynamic spectrum allocation and cognitive radio, SENDORA project develops a new approach to support the coexistence of licensed and unlicensed wireless users in a same area.

The capability to detect spectrum holes, without interfering with the licensed network currently in use, is the major difficulty faced today by the cognitive radio, even more when fine granularity of allocation in time and frequency is targeted. The key innovative concept developed in SENDORA is the "Sensor Network aided Cognitive Radio" technology, which allows to solve this issue thanks to the introduction of sensor networks. This concept is a system approach that involves a set of advanced wireless communications techniques like spectrum sensing, interference management, cognitive radio reconfiguration management, cooperative communications, end-to-end protocol design and cross-layer optimisation. All these enabling techniques together form a compound system able to improve the spectrum use in a significant way.

SENDORA project targets three major objectives:

• the identification and analysis of the business scenarios of the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) aided Cognitive Radio technology
• the definition and simulation of the WSN aided opportunistic access and dynamic resource allocation strategies for cognitive radios, which first requires a detailed work on the enabling techniques
• the design of a flexible and reconfigurable architecture, and a demonstration through a proof-of-concept of the WSN aided Cognitive Radio technology

As SENDORA covers a broad range of current topics of interest in wireless communications, a project at European level is required to achieve these objectives. A link with regulation authorities and standardization bodies is also necessary due to the expected changes in the way the spectrum will be managed in the future.
Beyond the limited current state-of-the-art on cognitive radio, the proposed concept will allow to address a very dynamic and competitive mixed radio access between cellular and broadband technologies.

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