SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project includes three market segments and domestic/international collaboration in technology development and engineering training. The first market segment will be to provide first responders with a way to improve reliability in the communication for incident management through the deployment of on-the-scene smart self-configurable communication systems. This is expected to improve first responder reliance on communications equipment at times of disasters and crisis. The second segment is to target the proposed small cells to domestic carriers for use by enterprise customers and consumers to increase capacity and coverage locally. Finally, the third segment is to provide key spectrum management capability to the deployment of a 4G/5G system in emerging markets through partnerships. The program will also enable training programs for graduate students and complex research & development partnerships with domestic and international partners.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop a cognitive carrier-neutral small cell for mobile communications. The ability to effectively use wireless spectrum is becoming more prevalent, and even more of a requirement, as time goes on due to regulatory issues and spectrum scarcity. However, current communication systems are not sufficiently spectrum-efficient, which is why there is a land-grab for spectrum. A critical improvement needed in communication technology to address spectrum scarcity is smart spectrum reuse. This proposal seeks to develop a cognitive small cell capable of providing smart reliable coverage, and sustained data rates to users in the vicinity. The main advantages of this communication system will be to: 1) Operate as a plug-and-play access point; 2) Provide carrier neutral 4th generation/5th generation (4G/5G) wireless coverage; 3) Provide seamless coverage and sustained data rates to mobile users when multiple cells are deployed in contiguous areas; 4) Operate in multiple bands simultaneously through bandwidth aggregation; and 5) Offload traffic from the carrier network through an Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) backhaul.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project includes: 1) Training of graduate students on complex research & development as well as enabling student understanding of service and hardware business models, 2) A potential economic impact that is between $0.9T and S1.7T (trillion) according to a McKinsey study of IoT technology in smart city applications, 3) The improvement of the stature of the countries in the world market where this advanced technology solution will be offered, such as Ibero-America, 4) A significant improvement of the ability to handle large number of devices on a network without bogging down the overall network while enabling future bandwidth intensive applications, and 5) The ability to provide low-cost Internet connectivity for underserved populations through city-wide wireless network deployments.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 project seeks to complete the development of a Spectrum Intelligent IoT Gateway initiated during Phase I. The key innovation of this system is a proprietary Spectrum Intelligence capability used to identify spectrum occupancy in the vicinity and modify transmission parameters in the network. The Intellectual Merits of this project include: 1) Implementing and testing a novel IoT Gateway with autonomous channel selection capability based on spectrum occupancy information; 2) Transferring spectrum sensing algorithms into an FPGA platform for its field deployment, and as the first step towards and spectrum sensing ASIC design; 3) Obtaining a model-based design for an enterprise network architecture of IoT Gateways; and 4) Implementing and testing new adaptive OFDM approaches to optimize power and frequency usage is 4g/5G wireless communications.