Cooperative strategies are those in which several transmitters and/or receivers coordinate between them to improve efficiency or increase their performance inside a wireless network. Representative examples of cooperative schemes to be considered in COSIMA are interference alignment, non-orthogonal medium access, computational codes, and iterative receivers. On the other hand, cognitive strategies refer to those communication paradigms in which radio terminals adapt their transmission parameters with the aim of not interfering the other transmissions in the network. These parameter adaptations are based on the channel observation or environment spectrum sensing prior to the transmission. The project will develop techniques to perform interference management in a cognitive system based on channel occupancy information obtained from a sensor network. The resulting techniques are expected to provide useable real-world strategies to protect the primary system from harmful interferences. Research in COSIMA will not be limited to a theoretical and algorithmic level but an heterogeneous multiterminal hardware demonstrator will be constructed for the practical evaluation over realistic scenarios of the most promising developed cooperative and cognitive techniques. The hardware demonstrator will consist of a primary network made up of six high performance MIMO terminals (already available from previous projects granted by Plan Nacional I+D) and complemented with a secondary network made up of 20 low cost terminals constructed with GNU Radio technology. GNU Radio is a free and open software toolkit for the prototyping of software-defined radio systems using an open designed motherboard named Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). The true value of the USRP is that it enables engineers to create (on a low budget and with a minimum effort) reconfigurable software-defined radio systems based on open software and hardware specifications.

Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación