Workshop on Cognitive Radio Standards and Markets

IBBT and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA)  invite you to the third edition of their Joint Workshop on Cognitive Radio Standardization & Markets  at  the premises of  IBBT-SMIT  in Brussels on 22 November. The workshop, the most important non-technical event on Cognitive Radio in Europe, confronts the latest insights in Europe and North America regarding standardization, regulation and market issues for Cognitive Radio.
 
In different regions of the world, far-reaching measures are currently being announced and implemented to deal with the ever increasing demand for radio spectrum caused by the steady growth of wireless broadband, the multiplication of technologies and services relying on spectrum and the policy objective
of bringing internet connectivity to currently underserved areas. As the vacation and/or reallocation of frequency bands will not suffice  to reach these ambitious requirements, intelligent technologies such as Cognitive Radio, in which networks and handsets have the intelligence and autonomy to actively
monitor and change their behavior, will be needed to increase the efficiency of spectrum usage by allowing flexibility of use and sharing of spectrum. 
 
While the issue of Cognitive Radio has been put on the agenda of the upcoming 2011 World Radio Conference of the ITU, research into this novel paradigm for mobile communications is slowly but steadily moving in the direction of market introduction. An important test case are the TV White Spaces
(TVWS), the unused portions of valuable spectrum primarily allocated to broadcasting for which secondary use by other services is now being introduced in several countries. From a business perspective, the TVWS debate brings to the surface a number of important challenges: firstly, it has
raised the question what types of context awareness gathering (i.e. the collection of information on existing spectrum use in a given area, in order to determine the possibilities for re-using certain frequencies) are to be preferred –and mandated by regulators– so as to create a workable technology in
a viable business ecosystem. Secondly, a  viable business case also needs to be found for the networks and services making use of TVWS, both from the perspective of device manufacturers, network operators and service providers.
 
Therefore, the objective of this third joint workshop is to discuss policy, regulation and market issues surrounding Cognitive Radio together with academics, regulators and business strategists, focusing this time on the opportunities, challenges and crucial choices to be made with regard to context awareness enablers such as spectrum sensing, geolocation databases and pilot channels. Participation to the workshop is  free of charge, but attendance will be limited in order to encourage active discussion between participants. Therefore, it is important to register promptly.