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As the number and variety of smartphones and other connected devices keeps growing, the need for radio spectrum grows with it. Cognitive radio technology developed under the EU-funded QOSMOS project could help meet these needs while controlling telecom costs, improving service and driving the development of new markets.
In the near future, the telecom industry will be faced with three challenges: a need for more radio spectrum, an ever-increasing demand for data, and consumers' increasing unwillingness to pay for it. Spectrum, however, is a finite resource.
The QOSMOS project addressed the twin problems of scarcity and cost by developing cognitive radio technology that dynamically optimises the use of radio spectrum, by accessing under-utilised portions of the spectrum and sharing spectrum across devices.
'The idea is to break down silos,' says Michael Fitch of British Telecom, who coordinated the QOSMOS project. 'Every new service and technology needs a new spectrum, and silos are formed when there are umpteen different devices that use umpteen different parts of the spectrum.'
This diversity does not make for efficient spectrum management. The project partners therefore developed three technologies: a central manager that controls the spectrum 'portfolio' in real-time for a region or country; a resource manager that allocates the spectrum to individual systems and senses the environment; and a cognitive radio terminal.
The project also developed a prototype transceiver to generate FBMC (Filter Bank Multicarrier transmission) waveforms. FBMC is expected to replace the OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) technology that is more commonly in use today. With FBMC transmission, spectrum is carved out in rectangular blocks so that it is tightly packed for more efficient spectrum use.
http://phys.org/news/2015-05-cognitive-radio-technology-optimises-scarce.html
[Source]: http://www.ict-qosmos.eu
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @02:32PM
With FBMC transmission, spectrum is carved out in rectangular blocks so that it is tightly packed for more efficient spectrum use.
Does anybody know what this is supposed to mean?
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Sunday May 31 2015, @03:39PM
Does anybody know what this is supposed to mean?
Its a combo of two things when gazing into an imaginary spectrum analyzer. Normally you got guard bands because there's no such thing as a perfectly rectangular signal and you have to account for frequency errors etc so you've got 10 signals all kind of parallelogram shaped with dead space between them.
So you've got TV channel 2 from 54 to 60 MHz but its not really using every Hz of that bandwidth and there's all kinds of FCC rules you can read in your infinite spare time about unintended emissions etc but you'd usually design something to use only 54.025 to 59.975 or whatever, optimally.
So 59.975-06.025 is utterly unused. You could fit something in there, well, in theory, although in practice its always been a hopeless idea.
Of course cheap hardware is everywhere full of cut corners so you can't really use channel 2 and 3 and 4 in the same market, at least in a market flooded with junk.
Rather optimistically, if you had an infinite R+D budget and infinite hardware budget and infinite good luck and infinite command and control of everything in the system (single source it all, all one company, etc) you could implement perfect little rectangles of RF with no unintended sidebands and wedge them RIGHT up against each other with no space in between at all. Yeah, good luck with that.
In practice its pretty much a belly laugh, that isn't going to work in the real world with real people etc. Also RF schemes suffer from tyrrany of the most busy areas. So Manhattan Island really needs this, along with maybe downtown Chicago because they actually have a use for this. And the reason, say, Green Bay, or Portland Maine, is willing to eat the R+D costs of some ridiculous scheme in their empty markets is ... oh wait, they aren't. So its a non-starter. Still EE's gotta EE, so there's money to be made in writing academic papers, etc.
I guess the standard SN automotive analogy would be there's a fundamental limit to how tightly you can pack cars in a traffic jam, but if you could get all the mfgrs to work together and sing girl scout campfire songs in peace and harmony and get all the drivers to cooperate, you could spec out cars with perfectly flat front and back bumpers, hell and sides too, such that you could cram like 1% more perfect rectangle cars into a traffic jam which is supposedly "good". Which will be an expensive PITA and probably not work, and even worse, most of the country doesn't have traffic that horrific and will be unwilling to pay the substantial costs to implement it, and who's going to be liable when they don't cooperatively stick together perfectly will keep the lawyers employed into eternity, etc.
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:12PM
They have a really sharp knife?