Regulatory and Policy Implications of Emerging Technologies to Spectrum Management

This paper provides an overview of the policy implications of technological developments, and how these technologies can accommodate an increased level of market competition. It is based on the work carried out in the SPORT VIEWS (Spectrum Policies and Radio Technologies Viable In Emerging Wireless Societies) research project for the European Commission (FP6)spectrum, new radio technologies, UWB, SDR, cognitive radio, Telecommunications, regulation, Networks, Interconnection

Rapid Convergecast on Commodity Hardware: Performance Limits and Optimal Policies

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Algorithms for Fast Aggregated Convergecast in Sensor Networks

Fast and periodic collection of aggregated data is of considerable interest for mission-critical and continuous monitoring applications in sensor networks. In the many-to-one communication paradigm, referred to as convergecast, we focus on applications wherein data packets are aggregated at each hop en-route to the sink along a tree-based routing topology, and address the problem of minimizing the convergecast schedule length by utilizing multiple frequency channels. The primary hindrance in minimizing the schedule length is the presence of interfering links. We prove that it is NP-complete to determine whether all the interfering links in an arbitrary network can be removed using at most a constant number of frequencies. We give a sufficient condition on the number of frequencies for which all the interfering links can be removed, and propose a polynomial time algorithm that minimizes the schedule length in this case. We also prove that minimizing the schedule length for a given number of frequencies on an arbitrary network is NP-complete, and describe a greedy scheme that gives a constant factor approximation on unit disk graphs. When the routing tree is not given as an input to the problem, we prove that a constant factor approximation is still achievable for degree-bounded trees. Finally, we evaluate our algorithms through simulations and compare their performance under different network parameters

Characterization of multi-channel interference

Multi-channel communication protocols in wireless networks usually assume perfect orthogonality between wireless channels or consider only the use of interference-free channels. The first approach may overestimate the performance whereas the second approach may fail to utilize the spectrum efficiently. Therefore, a more realistic approach would be the careful use of interfering channels by controlling the interference at an acceptable level. We present a methodology to estimate the packet error rate (PER) due to inter-channel interference in a wireless network. The methodology experimentally characterizes the multi-channel interference and analytically estimates it based on the observations from the experiments. Furthermore, the analytical estimation is used in simulations to derive estimates of the capacity in larger networks. Simulation results show that the achievable network capacity, which is defined as the number of simultaneous transmissions, significantly increases with realistic interfering channels compared with the use of only orthogonal channels. When we consider the same number of channels, the achievable capacity with realistic interfering channels can be close to the capacity of idealistic orthogonal channels. This shows that overlapping channels which constitute a much smaller band, provides more efficient use of the spectrum. Finally, we explore the correctness of channel orthogonality and show why this assumption may fail in a practical setting