Spectral Coexistence: Future of Wireless Technologies

Author: Shammi Doly, Department of Electrical Engineering

Mentor: Dr. Shankarachary Ragi, Department of Electrical Engineering

The wireless spectrum must significantly expand its capacity as demand for mobile services continues to explode every single minute, projecting exponential growth in the future. However, the Radio spectrum, like any other natural resource, is a finite resource. As a result, wireless communication will face the scarcity of spectrum to address this great demand, leading to spectral congestion. This spectral congestion will lead to poor communication performance, inadmissible for the next generation of wireless technologies. In the Unmanned & Swarm Systems (USS) lab in the electrical engineering department, we focus on developing waveform optimization methods for spectrum sharing between radar and communications users to address the spectral congestion problem. To this end, I am developing a decision-theoretic approach to optimize the waveform shape to maximize the joint radar-communications performance in spectral coexistence. Such cooperative sensing and communications methods can significantly benefit applications such as autonomous automobiles and smart home networks, where inter-vehicle and inter-node sensing and communications are converging spectrally.