Dynamic Spectrum Access

Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) Systems

DSA News

  • ANDRO Joins Team Advancing Next-Generation Spectrum Sharing Technology

    NDRO Computational Solutions is proud to be part of a newly awarded national effort to advance dynamic spectrum sharing technologies through the Advanced Spectrum Coexistence Demonstration (ASC-D) Program. Led by the Kostas Research Institute at Northeastern University in partnership with the National Spectrum Consortium, the project brings together an exceptional team of industry and academic leaders, including Battelle, Northeastern University, SMA-RTY, zTouch Networks, and ANDRO. Together, the team will validate innovative technologies that allow military and commercial wireless systems to safely and efficiently share valuable radio frequency spectrum. At the heart of the project is Battelle's RavenStar™ Ultra-Wideband Massive MIMO Radio Unit, an advanced communications platform capable of dynamically adapting frequencies, beam patterns, and transmission characteristics in real time. By combining this technology with advanced sensing and decision-making capabilities, the team aims to demonstrate how spectrum can be shared without compromising critical national security operations. As a member of the project team, ANDRO will contribute its expertise in advanced communications, spectrum technologies, and mission-focused engineering to support system integration, testing, and demonstration activities. This effort represents another exciting opportunity for ANDRO to help develop technologies that strengthen national security while enabling the next generation of commercial wireless communications. Read the full story here: Battelle’s RavenStar™...
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Spectrum Access & Policy

DSA Policy

Safely fielding Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) radios utilizing a state-of-the-art policy deployment tool-chain

Transmission Hyperspace™

Optimizing the RF spectrum to efficiently utilize a mixture of electromagnetic transmission resources including frequency, time, geography, power, modulation, and beam direction

Transmission Cyberspace™

A software solution for the mitigation of MANET intrusions by implementation of security protocols on SDR physical layer

Spectral Efficient Networking

Implementing unique transmitter signatures onto Software Defined Radios to improve spectral efficiency in hostile environments

X-Layer

A new spread-spectrum management paradigm for spectrum sharing.

DSA Policy

With the increasing popularity of cell phones and bandwidth-intensive applications, more-and-more wireless spectrum is being transferred to commercial operators to meet consumer demand. ANDRO’s DSA Policy Development program seeks to facilitate the adoption of DSA to ease the effects of recent spectrum auctions, specifically the AWS-3 transition. By developing a comprehensive set of DSA policies, tools, processes, and interfaces, ANDRO seeks to demonstrate that DSA-enabled systems can be safely governed to not interfere with systems in the same spectral frequency band. ANDRO’s policy development tool-chain was developed to work with existing and supported spectrum management tools using existing standards and interfaces to reduce integration risk and establish a feasible path to the certification of DSA. Systems impacted by spectrum transition efforts, like AWS-3, can utilize this end-to-end tool-chain on existing radios by operating a policy-based DSA engine application that governs the spectral behavior of the radio under the constraint defined by the policy. The mission is to establish a realistic path to the deployment of DSA by working with the current spectrum regulatory, management, and operations process rather than against it.

Transmission Hyperspace™

ANDRO developed and demonstrated innovative concepts for spectrum management that enabled the effective and efficient joint utilization of all orthogonal electromagnetic transmission resources, including, but not limited to, time, frequency, geographic space, power control, modulation/code, beam direction and polarization. This multi-dimensional environment is referred to as the Transmission Hyperspace, a term intended to convey the notion of a multi-dimensional resource space (with n degrees of freedom) in which each dimension allows orthogonality amongst users.

This research is aimed at developing approaches that consider the multi-dimensional nature of the transmission space, the results of which are expected to garner several orders of magnitude improvement in RF resource utilization and therefore, aggregate information throughput. The research is investigating the exploiting optimization and orthogonality schemes that allow for multiple users while minimizing interference. These include considerations for time slicing, frequency division multiplexing, directional antenna arrays, spread spectrum codes, and polarization. Joint optimization of the multiple orthogonalizing transmission parameters can show that no two users are transmitting at the same time, even though they may be using the same frequency in the same space with the same exact spread spectrum code. Similar illustrations can be given in the case of a spatially orthogonalized system in terms of transmit beam patterns that do not overlap and cross-polarized waves in ideal cases.

Transmission Cyberspace™

SBIR Phase I and II program for US Army CERDEC, develop a software upgrade kit for US Military handheld Software Defined Radios (SDR).  Functionality to include automatic Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA), intrusion detection and characterization, and pre-empt malicious users.  Project includes loading ANDRO software into AN/PRC-148 MBITR2 radios, with assistance from our subcontractor Thales who manufactures that radio as well as the PRC-154 Rifleman radio.  Operational Testing is planned in 2015 which will pave a transition path to US Army Programs of Record.

Spectral Efficiency

Military communications networks are faced with congested spectrum in hostile environments.  We are implementing new code-based spectrally efficient signature sets than enable improved use of limited wireless spectrum by allowing multiple transmitters to send data simultaneously at the same frequency. Unique signature codes are used differentiate between transmitters. Our goal is to improve spectral density,  minimize effect of interference, and maintain quality of experience based on throughput, lag, and minimizing errors. ANDRO is implementing novel algorithms developed by University of Buffalo (UB) on a universal radio serial peripheral (USRP) software defined radios (SDR).  ANDRO has had to develop customized signal processing blocks within the GNU radio software development environment to achieve the necessary coding, decoding, and synchronization required for code division multiple access.

X-Layer

Cognitive radio networks have emerged as a promising technology to improve the utilization efficiency of the available radio spectrum. Mainstream cognitive radio research focuses on opportunistic access to the licensed spectrum where the primary users of the band are known a priori and this knowledge can be utilized to detect if the band is occupied by the known signal pattern. However, in a highly dynamic military environment there may be multiple uncoordinated devices with unknown signal waveforms and activation statistics. In addition military environments may include hostile interference sources. Moreover, in cognitive radio networks with multi-hop communication requirements, spectrum occupancy is location-dependent, and the receiver interference profile will likely vary at each relay node.

We have developed a new spread-spectrum management paradigm, in which waveforms are designed to occupy the entire available spectrum without generating harmful interference to active primary or secondary users. In this way, the secondary users can share the licensed spectrum with the primary users to achieve frequency reuse. At the same time, the dynamic and location-dependent nature of the wireless environment required the development of routing algorithms that are aware of the interference profile at each candidate relay node.

SBIR Phase I and II program for AFRL and with U Buffalo as subcontractor, develop a joint routing and dynamic spectrum access capability for SDR networks.  Algorithm is ROSA (Routing and Spectrum Access) which optimizes routing based on multiple independent network parameters including interferences, node backlogs, RF whitespace, and primary user tolerance.