Acceso Radio Cognitivo y Oportunista(ARCO)

Project ARCO intends to propose, develop and demonstrate new solutions for spectrum and deployment components in future mobile comunication networks, so that the achieved efficiency can be substantially increased.Solutions will be built around the “cognitive opportunistic radio network” (CORN) concept, understood as an operator-controlled coordinated extension of the infrastructure, whose creation and operation is dynamic where and when suitable for the provision of multimedia services to mobile users and that establishes its frequency and operating bandwidth in an opportunistic manner over licensed or unlicensed bands, taking advantage of certain cognitive radio features.

Project ARCO will be developed around four major pillars:

1. Conceptual studies, to firstly enable the design of a system and functional architecture, from which the corresponding control mechanisms will be derived. On this basis, management algorithms for the optimal operation of the CORN will be formulated, covering the different identified functionalities and taking into account the practical implementation of the considered algorithms.
2. Simulations, to perform a detailed evaluation of the proposed algorithms in different scenarios and under different conditions.
3. Real spectrum occupancy measurements, to demonstrate and enable the practical viability for the establishment of one or several CORNs through the identification of suitable spectrum bands for opportunistic access. In this respect, the envisaged measurement campaign will consider not only the frequency dimension but the time and space dimensions as well, in order to eventually derive spectrum occupancy models for the different dimensions.
4. Laboratory demonstrator, to valídate concepts and algorithms in a close-to-reality environment, resolving issues related to the practical implementation and interacting with application layer. Furthermore, the testbed will make use of real spectrum occupancy measurements, thus integrating different components of the project.