SBIR Phase II: Cognitive Radio Small Cell for Pervasive Coverage and Sustained

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project includes: 1) Training of graduate students on complex research & development as well as enabling student understanding of service and hardware business models, 2) A potential economic impact that is between $0.9T and S1.7T (trillion) according to a McKinsey study of IoT technology in smart city applications, 3) The improvement of the stature of the countries in the world market where this advanced technology solution will be offered, such as Ibero-America, 4) A significant improvement of the ability to handle large number of devices on a network without bogging down the overall network while enabling future bandwidth intensive applications, and 5) The ability to provide low-cost Internet connectivity for underserved populations through city-wide wireless network deployments. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 project seeks to complete the development of a Spectrum Intelligent IoT Gateway initiated during Phase I. The key innovation of this system is a proprietary Spectrum Intelligence capability used to identify spectrum occupancy in the vicinity and modify transmission parameters in the network. The Intellectual Merits of this project include: 1) Implementing and testing a novel IoT Gateway with autonomous channel selection capability based on spectrum occupancy information; 2) Transferring spectrum sensing algorithms into an FPGA platform for its field deployment, and as the first step towards and spectrum sensing ASIC design; 3) Obtaining a model-based design for an enterprise network architecture of IoT Gateways; and 4) Implementing and testing new adaptive OFDM approaches to optimize power and frequency usage is 4g/5G wireless communications.