FSA - Fluid Spectrum Access
Fluid Secptrum Access is a European Research Council consolidator grant, coordinated by Prof. Alexandre Proutiere, and located in the Automatic Control lab in the EE school at KTH, Stockholm, Sweden. It started in November 2012, and is going to end in October 2017.
Context and Motivation: Spectrum is a key and scarce resource in radio communication systems, and it remains tightly controlled by regulation authorities. Most of the frequency bands are exclusively allocated to a single system licensed to use it everywhere and for periods of time that usually cover one or two decades. The consensus on this rigid spectrum management model is that it leads to significant inefficiencies in spectrum use. The explosion of demand for broadband wireless services also calls for more flexible models where much larger spectrum parts could be dynamically shared among users in a fluid manner. In such models, Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) techniques will play a major role. These techniques make it possible for radio devices to become frequency-agile, i.e. able to rapidly and dynamically access bands of a wide spectrum part.
Over the last few years, DSA has triggered a huge research effort both in the academic and industrial realms. Most of the research activities around DSA have been and remain centred on the question of technological feasibility. Researchers have focussed on building frequency-agile radio devices able to rapidly detect and exploit favourable spectrum parts. Most often these devices are considered in isolation. However, the success and spread of DSA technologies also strongly depend on the ability for many devices (or systems) implementing these technologies to coexist peacefully and efficiently. With multiple interacting devices, the research agenda shifts from spectrum access problems to spectrum sharing problems, which raises original and challenging questions. There may be limited or no communication between the different devices or systems sharing spectrum. We further expect systems to be heterogeneous in their transmission capability, but also in the type of service they support. In that context, the design of spectrum access strategies resulting in an efficient and fair resource use constitutes a challenging puzzle.
Objectives: The broad objective of the proposed research is to develop original analytical and simulation methods to tackle dynamic spectrum sharing issues. Our research agenda requires an interdisciplinary effort, leveraging theoretical tools from optimisation, and machine learning. Our theoretical findings will be applied to spectrum sharing issues. We expect to provide original methods and guidelines for the design of fair and efficient distributed spectrum access strategies (operating at the OSI MAC layer). We believe that such methods are critical for the birth and rapid expansion of DSA technologies and hence for the development of future wireless broadband systems.
Current active members:
Alexandre Proutiere (PI)
Vahan Petrosyan (PhD student)
Stefan Magureanu (PhD student)
Jaran Sanders (post-doc researcher)
Past members:
Richard Combes (now assistant professor at Supelec, France)
Jaeseong Jeong (now with Ericsson Research, Stockholm)
Mathieu Leconte (now with Huawei Research, Paris)
Seyoung Yun (now researcher at Los Alamos National Lab)
Mid-term scientific report: [pdf]