Collaborative Research: EARS: Fundamental Limits of Spectrum Sensing

目的：无线连接的无处不在及其应用和规模的不断增长需要极其有效地利用频谱作为无线行业的主要商品。高度管制的频谱接入政策和不断增长的频谱接入需求促使人们提出这样的概念，即在持牌业务未充分利用频谱的情况下，满足无牌业务的需求。本项目的目标是描述频谱传感的基本限制，同时认识到系统级和物理级的限制，这些限制是由信息获取成本、数据流量需求和模型不确定性造成的，并充分保证灵活性、响应性和对地球-时间频谱占用变化的适应性。智力优势：所提出的研究处于无线通信、顺序统计和随机优化的交叉点。它旨在发现频谱感知的基本限制，并描述频谱活动决策的性能保证、感知成本、通信延迟容忍和模型动力学的不确定性之间的相互作用。这导致了新的频谱传感程序，其中可以根据操作需要在不同方面之间达到最佳平衡。更广泛的影响：该研究具有多重技术和社会影响。它为在同一框架内评估不同可用频谱感知程序的能力提供了基线，并且还提供了产生符合理论基本限制的性能水平的新型感知程序。在这个项目中发展的理论模型和概念有可能影响邻近的研究领域，特别是那些涉及实验设计和高维数据假设检验的研究领域。

Objective:Ubiquity of wireless connectivity and its constant growth in application and scale necessitate extremely efficient usage of spectrum as the main commodity in wireless industry. Highly regulated spectrum access policies and growing demands for spectrum access have promoted the notion of accommodating the needs of unlicensed services when the license-holding ones under-utilize the spectrum. The goal of this proposed project is to characterize the fundamental limits of spectrum sensing while recognizing the system-level and physical-level limitations imposed by costs of information acquisition, data traffic demands, and model uncertainties with sound guarantees on agility, responsiveness, and adaptability to the geo-temporal spectral occupancy variations. Intellectual merit:The proposed research lies at the crossroad of wireless communication, sequential statistics, and stochastic optimization. It aims to find the fundamental limits of spectrum sensing and delineates the interplay among the performance guarantees on the decisions about spectral activities, cost of sensing, communication delay tolerance, and the uncertainty level about model dynamics. This leads to novel spectrum sensing procedures in which an optimal balance among can be struck among different aspects based on the operational needs. Broader impact:The research has multiple technological and societal impacts. It furnishes a baseline for assessing the competency of different available spectrum sensing procedures within the same framework, and also provides novel sensing procedures that yield performance levels that match the theoretical fundamental limits. The theoretical models and concepts that are developed in this project have the potential to impact adjacent research domains, especially those involving experimental design and hypothesis testing for high-dimensional data.