Welcome to the Rutgers University,  ECE Department and the WINLAB’s Dynamic Spectrum Management and Etiquette Project home. This project is led by Dr. Dipankar Raychaudhuri and Professor Roy D. Yates.

Project Objectives:
The establishment of unlicensed communication bands has successfully encouraged innovation, most recently in wireless devices and infrastructure that use unlicensed spectrum to provide connections to the Internet. A key aspect of Internet usage is an almost unlimited capacity for growth. While the overload of any finite band may be inevitable, the goals of this project are to increase the capacity of the available unlicensed bands as much as possible, and to develop approaches that can predict overloads and prevent sudden, unexpected failure modes.

Technology Rationale:
For unlicensed wireless, the transition from 11 Mb/s 802.11b to 54 Mb/s 802.11a marks the start of an industry race toward ever-higher data rates. These high rate internet services will need to coexist with the emergence of wide variety of wireless devices, ranging from low bit rate sensors to high resolution full motion video cameras. The combination of increasing data rates and the proliferation of devices could easily lead to inefficiency in the use of unlicensed spectrum due to a combination of overuse and failure to develop mechanisms for efficient sharing of this resource.

Technical Approach:
We seek to promote efficient use of unlicensed spectrum by combining an engineering and technology perspective with insights from the literatures on regulation, property rights, and economic coordination. The team includes researchers with expertise in property rights, networking fairness, and wireless communications and network engineering. This team is developing a general framework for understanding cooperation in unlicensed band wireless networks by studying the following issues:

• Property rights as applied to spectrum management

• Protocols for collaboration between technology neutral wireless devices

• Pricing mechanisms for efficient and fair sharing of congested unlicensed spectrum

• Radio-level interference avoidance techniques

The above problems are being studied with a combination of formal and conceptual analysis, simulation and experimental methods, including a dynamic spectrum management testbed which implements potential collaboration protocols and cooperation models. The goal is to preserve the “creative chaos” of the unlicensed bands while creating a degree of long term stability and predictability that is appropriate to the size of the investments being made and the strategic importance of these uses to the nation. Results from the project are expected to be of value to both policy makers and emerging unlicensed band wireless Internet providers as well as wireless technologists.