The next generation of wireless networks will be cognitive! They will learn the availability of spectrum and the application’s demand, and use it to configure its parameters, such as center frequency, transmit power, and physical layer modulation. This vision is driven by two recent developments:

Powerful new hardware, such as SDRs or multi-radio systems, enable a wireless network to quickly reconfigure itself.

The FCC is likely to allow devices to opportunistically steal licensed portions of the spectrum.  

These developments necessitate the rethinking of our current design principles for wireless networking, ranging from hardware to applications.

This summit brings together researchers from academia and industry to discuss the new challenges in building cognitive wireless networks. The cross-disciplinary agenda will include presentations and discussions on hardware challenges at RF, fundamental limits at physical layer in cognitive sensing and communications, cognitive MAC and network layers, security, spectrum policy and finally technical proof-of-concept demonstrations. The objective will be to take a critical and deep look at the nascent field, and to prioritize research problems to realize truly cognitive wireless networks.

Our hope is that, at the end of this meeting, all participants will have a much better understanding of the problems and will have made connections to other researchers working on these issues.

Although this summit is by invitation only, all presentations, position papers, and videos of talks and panels will be available for download on this web site shortly after the meeting is over.