ST-DSA via Underlay Sensing & Signaling

Over the past decade the research community has generated thousands of papers dealing with many different aspects of dynamic spectrum access, cognitive radios and opportunistic networking. Surprisingly, however, only a handful have addressed an end to end DSA communication system, and to the best of our knowledge none have looked at how DSA can be enabled in a single transceiver legacy radio. In our proposed approach we look to strike a balance between maximizing throughput gain via DSA and maximizing the probability for a timely and successful transition. Our approach is based on a novel mechanism for sensing of the spectrum and exchange of the sensing data within the network without any interruption of the data traffic and without any hardware blocks external to the legacy radio. During the Phase-I effort we used extensive simulations to model our approach and quantify its performance in a host of scenarios, we also validated its operation in a 4 node TRL-4 prototype system. The objective of the Phase II effort is to mature the technology with an eye towards transition. A TRL-7 prototype for COTS based MANET solutions is expected within the the Phase-II Base effort. Additionally a TRL-6 solution targeting SRW based