KEYNOTE TALK: Issues in Cognitive Wireless Networks

Jeffrey H. Reed Willis G. Worcester Professor Director, Wireless @ Virginia Tech Bradley Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA 24061 reedjh@vt.edu,   wireless.vt.edu

 
Abstract:

In recent years, cognitive radios and cognitive wireless networks have been introduced as a new paradigm for enabling much higher spectrum utilization, providing more personal and reliable radio services, reducing harmful interference, and facilitating the interworking or convergence of different wireless networks. Cognitive wireless networks are goal-oriented intelligent networks that can autonomously be aware of situation and radio environment, learn from experience, and adapt themselves responding to the change of operation conditions. Cognitive radios have the potential to drive the next generation of radio devices, wireless system design and testing tools, wireless network protocols and applications. However, there are many inter-disciplinary research issues yet to be addressed, such as situation and environment awareness, sensing, radio resource and interference management, artificial intelligence and cognitive engine algorithms, cross-layer interactions and optimization, distributed and cooperative signal processing, QoS metrics, network architecture, and security. Common to all of these issues is the need for new metrics for analyzing, evaluating, and validating the performance of cognitive wireless. Overcoming these technical issues cannot be accomplished without considering the political and business issues. This talk will provide a broad coverage of challenges facing researchers in this new field and will overview some recent cognitive radio research developments at Virginia Tech.

Biography:

Dr. Jeffrey H. Reed is the Willis G. Worcester Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. From June 2000 to June 2002, Dr. Reed served as Director of the Mobile and Portable Radio Research Group (MPRG). He currently serves as Director of the newly formed umbrella wireless organization Wireless@Virginia Tech. Dr. Reed received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 1979-1987. Dr. Reed was employed by Signal Science, Inc. from 1980 to 1986 and worked as a private consultant and part-time faculty member at UC Davis before coming to Virginia Tech in 1992.

Dr. Reed's area of expertise is in software radios, smart antennas, wireless networks and communications signal processing. He has authored, co-authored, or co-edited ten books and proceedings, contributed to six books, and authored or co-authored over one hundred and thirty journal and conference papers. His book, Software Radio: A Modern Approach to Radio Design was published by Prentice Hall in May 2002. His latest book, An Introduction to Ultra Wideband Communication Systems was published by Prentice Hall in April 2005 and is considered one of the most comprehensive books on Ultra WideBand (UWB) communications.

Dr. Reed has made significant contributions in the area of software radio and communications signal processing. Specific contributions include the development of hardware architectures for software radios based on reconfigurable computing, prototype hardware development, assistance in standardizing software architectures, development of software radio tools for education and research that are available for public domain download, and creation of analysis procedures for cognitive software radios. His text book, Software Radios: A Modern Approach to Radio Design, is based on his research experience with ONR, DARPA, TI, and Samsung, and is one of the first books devoted exclusively to software radios. Dr. Reed has contributed to standardization efforts for the Software Communication Architecture (SCA) (which is the basis of US military and world-wide commercial software radios) through the Object Management Group and he serves as co-chair of the SDR Forum R&D working group for smart antennas. Dr. Reed has been developing educational materials to support the new area of software methodologies for SDR and to that end has released code for an OSSIE (Open Source SCA Implementation: Embedded) to build a Linux-type support environment for SDR code reuse. Since released in late summer of 2004, OSSIE has been downloaded over 2000 times and is being considered by over a dozen companies and government agencies for inclusion into their products. Dr. Reed has worked with DARPA, ONR, and Samsung on reconfigurable computing for enabling SDR handsets.

In addition to SDR, Dr. Reed's research areas include ultra wideband, channel modeling, reconfigurable computing, smart antennas, and cognitive radio. Dr. Reed's work in geometric channel models for smart antennas is one of the most referenced works in this area. Dr. Reed has an interest in building prototype hardware and has built six generations of smart antenna test beds over the past ten years. His current hardware projects include building a SDR 8 GHz bandwidth UWB transceiver and a cognitive radio test bed.

Dr. Reed received the College of Engineering Award for Excellence in Research in 2001. Dr. Reed serves on several company advisory boards, including Samsung Electronics. In 2002, Dr. Reed served as the technical co-chair of the SDR Forum's Conference in Software Radios, the leading technical organization devoted to software defined radio. In 2004, Dr. Reed Received the Outstanding Industry Contributor Award from the SDR Forum. During 2004 he also received an award from the SDR Forum for his pioneering 2001 publication that provides a mathematical foundation to cognitive radio based on game theory. In 2005, Dr. Reed became Fellow to the IEEE for contributions to software radio and communications signal processing and for leadership in engineering education.