Achievement Award 2014

Achievement Award

Research and Development of Software Defined Radio and Cognitive Radio Technologies

Kazuhiro Uehara

  Along with the rapid popularization of mobile, wearable, and M2M terminals and devices, wireless usage is constantly increasing, and a wide variety of wireless standards, systems, and networks are used in combination. For both users and operators, it is necessary to enable efficient and economical use and operation, for instance, by dynamically changing the radio functions of a single hardware to be shared by multiple systems, and by optimally using a heterogeneous network in accordance with the required data rates and/or load balancing. Particularly for the era of 5G and beyond, more efficient and tight use of frequency is one of the most important issues in the ICT field. To solve these issues, research and development of software defined radio (SDR) and cognitive radio (CR) technologies have been promoted, and these technologies are now practical in some systems. The SDR technology enables radio function to be reconfigurable, programmable, and downloadable, and furthermore, the CR technology realizes optimal resource utilization by recognizing the external environment, such as user’s requirements and/or frequency usage, and by controlling (changing and/or learning) the SDR.
  The winner, who has been engaged in the R&D of SDR and CR systems to establish a number of pioneering fundamental technologies, is the force driving this field. By prototyping actual equipment, he showed, for the first time in the world, the feasibility of applying the SDR technology in high-speed, wideband real systems of such cellular systems and wireless LANs, and the feasibility of applying a heterogeneous reconfigurable processor in low-power-consumption mobile terminals. He also showed the challenges and direction of this research area (1,2,3). He proposed and demonstrated pioneering system technologies, such as the heterogeneous wireless network architecture and its resource control systems, and high-precision cooperative interference detection and avoidance systems, as applications of SDR and CR technologies (4,5). In addition, he established a number of pioneering RF technologies that are essential in system implementation, such as a wideband, high-linearity and low-noise one-chip RF module, a concurrent multiband mixer for multisignal simultaneous frequency conversion, and a nonlinear distortion compensation technology for amplifiers used in multiband simultaneous transmission (6). Furthermore, he established a wideband radio-wave data compression and optical-fiber transmission technology for efficiently and accurately performing recognition and visualization of spectrum usage (7), a wideband spectrum-sensing technology based on received waveform cross-correlation using distributed sensors, that can detect signals whose levels are below the noise floor (8), and an efficient 3D indoor propagation calculation algorithm with exact consideration of antenna patterns, which is important as a system design tool (9).
  Toward the practical use of the SDR technology, he also participated in the study of a radio station equipment technical regulations conformity certification system in collaboration with domestic and international regulators, and showed a certain direction of this issue (10). As well as establishing these innovative fundamental technologies, he is also contributing to further efficient use of frequency in the future. Towards the practical use of dynamic frequency-sharing technology, he launched a national project in collaboration with related research institutions and demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed technologies (8), and thus contributed greatly to the advancement of the research and development for the expansion of radio wave resources.
  As described above, the winner has contributed greatly to the advancement of this research field in Japan since its start-up. He served as Chair of the Technical Committee on Software Radio (currently Smart Radio), Guest Editor-in-Chief of the Special Section on WDN and CR, IEICE Transactions on Communications, and General Co-Chair of the 6th International Conference on Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks and Communications, CrownCom 2011, which was the first held in Japan. In this way, he contributed significantly to the promotion of the R&D, as well as to informing the activities of Japan to the world. The performance of the winner is technically acclaimed as he has won a number of awards, such as the IEICE Best Paper Award in 1997 and 2014 (6), the Communication Society Best Paper Award in 2011 (7) and 2014, and the 18th Telecom System Technology Award from the Telecommunications Advancement Foundation in 2003 (2). He has also been awarded the title IEICE Fellow. His outstanding achievements are highly deserving of the IEICE Achievement Award.

Fig. 1　Example of usage scene (7)

Fig. 2　Example of SDR prototype (2)

References

（1）K. Uehara, Y. Suzuki, H. Shiba, H. Tanaka, Y. Asai, T. Shono, and S. Kubota, “Design and evaluation of software radio using multiprocessor architecture for full-duplex real-time communication,” IEICE Transactions on Communications, vol. J84-B, no. 7, pp. 1208-1215, July 2001. (in Japanese)
（2）H. Shiba, T. Shono, Y. Shirato, I. Toyoda, K. Uehara, and M. Umehira, “Software defined radio prototype for PHS and IEEE802.11 wireless LAN,” Special Issue on Software Defined Radio Technology and Its Applications, IEICE Transactions on Communications, vol. E85-B, no. 12, pp. 2694-2702, Dec. 2002.
（3）T. Shono, Y. Shirato, H. Shiba, K. Uehara, K. Araki, and M. Umehira, “IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN implemented on software defined radio with hybrid programmable architecture,” IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 2299-2308, Sept. 2005.
（4）T. Shono, K. Uehara, and S. Kubota, “Proposal for system diversity on software-defined radio,” IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals, vol. E84-A, no. 9, pp. 2346-2358, Sept. 2001.
（5）K. Akabane, H. Shiba, M. Matsui, and K. Uehara, “Performance evaluation of an autonomous adaptive base station that supports multiple wireless network systems,” IEICE Transactions on Communications, vol. E91-B, no. 1, pp. 22-28, Jan. 2008.
（6）I. Ando, G. K. Tran, K. Araki, T. Yamada, T. Kaho, Y. Yamaguchi, and K. Uehara, “Nonlinear modeling and analysis on concurrent amplification of dual-band Gaussian signals,” Special Section on Emerging Technologies and Applications for Microwave and Millimeter-wave Systems, IEICE Transactions on Electronics, vol. E96-C, no. 10, pp. 1254-1262, Oct. 2013.
（7）D. Lee, T. Yamada, H. Shiba, Y. Yamaguchi, and K. Uehara, “Combined Nyquist and compressed sampling method for radio wave data compression of a heterogeneous network system,” IEICE Transactions on Communications, vol. E93-B, no. 12, pp. 3238-3247, Dec. 2010.
（8）H. Shiba, Y. Yamaguchi, T. Yamada, T. Kaho, T. Nakagawa, and K. Uehara, “Performance evaluation of a broadband spectrum sensing system for white space usage,” IEICE Transactions on Communications, vol. J97-B, no. 12, pp. 1224-1233, Dec. 2014. (in Japanese)
（9）K. Uehara, T. Seki, and K. Kagoshima, “Indoor propagation calculation considering antenna patterns using geometrical optics method,” IEICE Transactions on Communications, vol. J78-B-II, no. 9, pp. 593-601, Sept. 1995. (in Japanese)
（10）Y. Suzuki, H. Harada, K. Uehara, T. Fujii, Y. Yokoyama, K. Oda, and R. Hidaka, “Adaptability check during software installation in software defined radio,” IEICE Transactions on Communications, vol. 1, no. 12, pp. 3401-3407, Dec. 2003.