The workshop is intended to explore how spectrum innovation (including new spectrum allocation, technologies and policies) can enable transformative use cases, applications and services in key sectors of national importance, including Healthcare, Climate/Green Economy, Education, Transportation, and Manufacturing, and how digital divide and social equity can be addressed while boosting US economic leadership.

The workshop will have the following objectives:
1) Identify representative emerging use cases and applications that can benefit from new spectrum allocation technologies and policies;
2) Understand their requirements and establish KPIs;
3) Understand what spectrum bands may be appropriate for different applications, and can multiple spectrum bands be utilized for the same application?
4) Explore whether and how application-specific dynamic spectrum allocation technologies can be developed to satisfy application-specific KPIs, and
5) Identify what policy questions may need to be answered to facilitate such emerging applications.

Learn more about the workshop

Workshop Topic: With ever increasing data-rate requirements for different applications, regulatory authorities have released spectrum across the board from sub-6 GHz to THz. The introduction of new bands from sub-6 GHz to THz that are already in use by various agencies for technologies like Navy radar,  radio astronomy, and many more requires coordination and sensing with existing technologies. The network design needs to undergo a transformation from following communication protocol to sensing the spectrum and using it cautiously without causing interference to existing technologies. Furthermore, such co-existence needs to be conducted at network scale, not just at node level. This planning workshop will explore ideas and challenges for networked sensing architectures using mobile spectrum sensors and include discussion on how to build communications infrastructure where spectrum sensing data play a key role.

Workshop Goals:  This workshop will solicit input from participants from multiple academic institutions as well as industry and government agencies to identify the most pressing network design challenges and explore ideas on how to overcome those challenges through research, industry, and community partnerships and collaboration.

Workshop Topic:  As wireless progresses to 6G, key hardware challenges arise in semiconductors and circuits, arrays, and digital signal processing. This workshop will aim to address the semiconductor/circuit/array challenges and chart a potential course for 6G. For example, with semiconductors and circuits, CMOS output power is low above 75GHz, and CMOS gain is low above 150GHz. The limited performance of CMOS can be addressed in circuit design (massive arrays, low-power, low-resolution architectures) or by pairing CMOS with high-performance SiGe and III-V technologies. High-frequency 6G transceivers need arrays with many very-closely-spaced elements. Such arrays bring critical challenges in high-frequency connections, in fitting the necessary circuits into the small available space, in removing the heat, and in providing many electrical connections into the very small areas. This workshop will address possible research, infrastructure needs, and community concerns regarding the advancement and implementation of 6G technologies.

Workshop Goals:  This workshop will identify research and manufacturing challenges in building 6G devices, circuits and systems and attempt to answer important questions such as a) should future 6G wireless systems abandon the “VLSI-CMOS for everything strategy” and embrace application-specific wireless IC technologies (i.e. semiconductor process technologies optimized specifically for various wireless sub-systems)? b) What are the system, array, and IC design choices across different semiconductor platforms, and what are the trade-offs between system architecture, systems performance, and the potential for high-volume, low-cost manufacturing? and c) To the extent that VLSI-optimized CMOS offers the lowest semiconductor costs, how can effective 6G RF systems be designed using a semiconductor technology that is increasingly marginal to the steadily-increasing carrier frequencies?

Workshop Topic:  Commercial applications for wireless communication must operate in harmony with scientific uses, and weather prediction is an example of a nationally vital activity that is dependent upon access to the radio spectrum. Therefore, this workshop will explore the need for weather sensing research, including the use of advanced radar signal processing techniques for remote sensing of the atmosphere and severe weather. Workshop participants will be asked to discuss and quantify the effects of wireless communications (wireless Lan, 5G, and 6G) on weather sensing and examine the current and future needs and challenges of spectrum researchers. Given the similarities of the radar systems used for FAA Air Traffic Management (ATM) and the weather radars, consideration of the issues relevant to the ATM systems will also be explored by the workshop collaborators Oklahoma University, MIT/Lincoln Labs, and UCSD.

Workshop Goals:  This workshop specifically aims to explore and address the following: a) how to preserve the one-week look ahead weather prediction capability, which is highly dependent on space-based radiometric sensing of water vapor in the clouds just above 20 GHz, (b) discuss the impact of WiFi at 5+GHz  and spectrum sharing at 3.2 GHz on ground-based national weather radars that operate in the spectrum below 6 GHz (S,C Bands), MPAR phased array radar development, as well as Advanced Technology Demonstrator (ATD) radar operating at 3.0-3.5GHz, (c) understand the trade-offs in using 6G 30+ GHz data links for weather sensing, and (d) explore the development of techniques to identify 6G interference and develop adaptive waveforms to minimize and mitigate deleterious effects.

This workshop is aimed at gaining machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) based insights into highly interference-tolerant, error-resilient as well as bandwidth-efficient waveforms utilizing the dimensions of space, frequency, and time optimizing bits/sec/Hz/m^2.  SII Center planning discussions will focus on centralized, as well as distributed, lightweight algorithms for physical layer beamforming, MAC layer coordination, as well as aggregation across multiple modalities of communications (e.g., WiFi and cellular) beyond the MAC layer.Particular emphasis will be placed on how to plan for use of real-world measurements for design of data-driven communication waveforms that can address interference and coverage issues and radio frequency (RF) sensing.

Workshop Goals:  This workshop is intended to help identify a few grand challenges that hinder the efficient use of sub-6 GHz, mmWave and THz frequencies for pervasive coverage and suggest potential individual NSF research projects that could address those problems.  In addition, the workshop will define possible collaborative mechanisms and resource sharing opportunities for joint projects and industry partnerships that can mutually benefit a future SII Center and the wireless industry.

Workshop Topic: The potential for 6G wireless frequencies to interfere with the position, navigation, and timing (PNT) services provided by the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) –  a federation of space-based broadcast satellites systems from multiple nations – is a major concern to the world and is an important topic of consideration for a potential Spectrum Innovation Center. GPS and, by extension, GNSS provide global services for “safety of life” PNT for all modes of transportation, including the US military and encryption time synchronization for secure banking transactions, and it enables 1000s of 5G mobile applications.

Workshop Goals:  Planning activities for this topic will explore the infrastructure and research needed to a) understand all the factors that will affect navigation negatively, b) identify techniques for interference mitigation, c) explore opportunistic benefits of new LEO constellations and d) propose tight integration of terrestrial and satellite communications networks.

Workshop Topic:  The high cost of small-cell networks with each cell providing coverage of up to a few hundred meters has been impeding the widespread commercial deployment of 5G in mmwave spectrum.  The cost involves not only the fiber backhaul and antenna tower, but also subsequent network management and maintenance. Unless this issue is resolved, the dense 5G mmWave networks cannot deliver their anticipated gains. This workshop will bring together carriers, network OEM suppliers, internet companies (such as Google and Facebook) and academic researchers to discuss promising networking directions for 6G (as well as 5G), such as integrated access and backhaul (IAB) and AI-driven models for deployment and optimization. Such AI-driven network concepts should enable network slicing and multi-tenancy, where dynamic resource utilization and agile service provision are enabled by SDN and NFV. Discussions will also address possible knowledge gaps and infrastructure needed to foster advancements in this area.

Workshop Goals:  This workshop will address possible knowledge gaps and infrastructure needed to foster advancements in ultra-dense mmwave coverage, identify needed research, and define possible collaborative mechanisms and resource sharing opportunities for joint projects and industry partnerships that can mutually benefit a future SII Center and the wireless industry.

Workshop Topic: The challenging problem of managing RF inference in a manner that protects radio astronomy studies will be a major thrust of the proposed Spectrum Innovation Center. This workshop will engage with researchers at NRAO and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, as well as with researchers at the Australia Telescope National Facility to develop a blueprint for spectrum sharing that could enhance the science and open up new bands for commercial use. This thrust will leverage the experience from the radio-quiet zone around Greenbank to explore enlarging the shared use of valuable spectrum using methods such as the sharing of transmitted waveforms for joint decoding of signals at the radio telescopes and the development of rapid probing strategies to dynamically identify locations and times when communication transmissions will not interfere with ongoing radio astronomy measurements.

Workshop Goals:  Workshop participants will be asked to discuss and suggest research that can answer the following questions a) What are the interference issues facing radio astronomy as we plan for 5G and 6G and have they been characterized? b)  What are the issues and concerns of radio astronomers vis a vis shared spectrum? c) Is there a way to quantify the effect of interference in terms of loss of scientific precision or fidelity of radio astronomy studies, and c) is there a way to quantify unused capacity as a function of location and time?