Special Session

TVWS-DSANet: Dynamic spectrum access wireless networks in the TV white spaces

collocated with MOBIMEDIA - 7th International Mobile Multimedia Communications Conference

The widespread use of multimedia mobile communications for both personal and business purposes is expected to significantly intensify, in the near future, the transmission of multimedia data over wireless channels. It is likely that it will be generated a strong demand for wireless devices able to efficiently transmit data such as images and video contents. The demand for ubiquitous wireless services has been on the rise in the past and is expected to remain the same in the future. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the available spectral resources have already been licensed. It thus appears that there is little or no room to add any new services, unless some of the existing licenses are discontinued. The enormous growth in the wireless industry has come from using only a small part of the wireless spectrum, nominally less than 10% under 3 GHz. However, measurements made by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) have shown that a great part of the spectrum, although allocated, is virtually unused and known widely as spectrum “white spaces”. These white spaces vary from place to place and time to time. The transition from analog to digital TV is in progress worldwide. Digital switchover plans have driven a thorough review of UHF spectrum exploitation. Huge debates are taking place within the wireless world among broadcasters, mobile operators, Internet service providers and normative organizations about the possible utilization of the unused portion of the TV spectrum to deliver new services. Cognitive radios (CR) have been proposed in conjunction with geo-location radio map databases as tentative solution, but the investigation over this topic is very active to assess the feasibility of these approaches with respect to the protection of the incumbent radio services. Purpose of this special session is to provide an updated outlook of the state-of-the art and new issue in the present theme.

We invite original and unpublished research contributions in all areas relevant to signal processing in cognitive radio systems. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Spectrum sensing and detection algorithms
• Geolocation Databases
• Multimedia transmission over DSA Networks
• Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) techniques
• Multimedia transmission over DSA Networks
• Transmission and relay in cognitive radio systems
• Adaptive modulation and coding for cognitive radios
• Synchronization in distributed transmissions
• Distributed sensing and data fusion
• Cross-layer PHY/MAC optimization for DSA systems
• Stochastic optimization for delay-sensitive applications
• Measurements and test fields
• Regulation and Standardization issues

Important dates

Paper submission deadline: 28 April 2011

Notification of paper acceptance: 12 June 2011

Submission of camera-ready papers: 3 July 2011