Section: Application Domains

Public wireless access networks

The commercial markets for wireless technologies are the largest markets for sdr and cognitive radio. These markets include $i)$ the cellular market (4G, lte ), $ii)$ the Wireless Local Area Network market (wlan , e.g. Wifi), and $iii)$ the Broadband Wireless Access market (e.g. WiMax). The key objective here is to improve spectrum efficiency and availability, and to enable cognitive radio and sdr to support multimedia and multi-radio initiatives.

The mobile radio access network referred to as 4G (4th generation) is expected to provide a wireless access of 100 Mbps in extended mobility and up to 1Gbps in reduced mobility as defined by the group IMT-Advanced of the ITU-R(adiocommunication) section. On the road towards the 4G, IMT-2000 standards evolutions are driven by the work of the WiMAX forum (IEEE 802.16e) on the one hand and by those of the LTE (Long Term Evolution) group of the 3GPP on the other hand. Both groups announced some targeted evolutions that could comply with the 4G requirements, namely the Gigabit Wimax (802.16m) and the LTE-Advanced proposal from the 3GPP.

In both technologies, the scarcity of the radio spectrum is taken care of by the use of mimo and ofdma technologies, combining the dynamic spatial and frequency multiple access. However, a better spectral efficiency will be achieved if the radio spectrum can be shared dynamically between primary and secondary networks, and if the terminals are reconfigurable in real-time. Socrate is active in this domain because of its past activity in Swing and its links to the telecommunication teaching department of Insa. The developement of the FIT plateform  [37] is a strong effort in this area.