Next Generation Wireless Devices and Networks enabled by Self-Organized Spectrum Cartography (WISECART)

WISECART is a cutting edge project funded from the FRIPRO TOPPFORSK Programme aiming at taking device-to-device (D2D) communication beyond simple proximity services by building self-organized, adaptive mesh type formations of  wireless devices considering social engagements across the lower layers of the protocol stack.

In a press release from the Research Council, Prime Minister Erna Solberg (T.) states that TOPPFORSK is a new and targeted initiative to ensure good long-term funding for research environments that can become internationally leaders in their field.

Funding: Research Council of Norway, FRIPRO TOPPFORSK Programme

Principal Investigators (UiA): Prof. Baltasar Beferull-Lozano.

Topic: WISECART is a cutting edge project for fundamental research, funded from the FRIPRO TOPPFORSK Programme , which aims at scaling up device-to-device communications to enable a self-organized network among multiple and heterogeneous devices for different possible purposes, such as sharing contents of common interest, increasing the connectivity, or performing cooperatively some intelligent task. These networks are expected to be very heterogeneous and include not only human operated devices but also machine type communication devices and other objects, as motivated by the paradigms of Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). The ever-increasing demand for ultra-high data rates energy efficient radio access networks (RAN) and the needs to adapt to different types of user-driven applications, imposes enormous challenges to build such wireless networks. In this context, D2D communication is being investigated in the wireless communication research community as a paradigm to boost both spectrum utilization and energy efficiency. D2D communications exploits devices’ proximity, which enables locally exchanging data and control information, directly among the communicating neighbour devices, by-passing the base station. As a consequence, both a higher spectrum reuse can be potentially achieved by enabling multiple simultaneous D2D communication links, while at the same time, being able to match the communication needs for different types of services or applications. Creating such networks is enabled in this project by performing a completely self-organised spectrum cartography (spectrum maps), by means of designing novel distributed in-network signal processing algorithms.