Seminar page can be found here.

Can you imagine a system where cars are not allowed to change lane even if one lane is extremely crowded and the others are empty? Or a world in which only the singer in a concert sings and all the audience is forbidden to talk, even whisper? Unfortunately, this is similar to how current wireless communications work in the radio spectrum today. Each technology (e.g., GSM) is assigned a frequency and cannot change operation frequency even if some better frequencies are not in use by the actual owners of the spectrum. This leads to inefficiency in spectrum use and hence an illusion of spectrum scarcity which may finally affect the end users- us - by more expensive and lower quality services. 

Cognitive radio (CR) provides a solution for this inefficiency by dynamically changing its operation frequency depending on various factors such as location, nearby radios, time of day. A CR is like a car that changes lane when the other moves faster than its current lane. Beside this simple analogy, a CR can provide solutions to many problems: improving battery lifetime by applying power-efficient strategies, selecting the cheapest operator for data connection, to name a few.

Cognitive networks- the networks equipped with intelligence at each layer of the protocol stack- make use of CR paradigm to improve the network performance. This seminar course will start with an overview of the cognitive radio (CR) concept and discuss the major challenges for its realization and applications. Fundamental topics in CRs-spectrum sensing, spectrum sharing, spectrum mobility- as well as topics from a wider scope such as recent realizations, practical CR applications, CR hardware and testbeds, energy efficiency, security, and economic aspects of CRs will be covered in this seminar course. 

Please visit Nokia’s web page for some introductory material which is fun:

http://research.nokia.com/page/9401