Wireless LAN 2.0

In the last years, thanks also to a high penetration of broadband enabled communication devices, an exponential growth of home wireless networks has been registered. Since ITU fixed the target for future wireless communications to 1Gbps, Optimized Local Area access networks (OLA's) are necessary to achieve such a goal, since they can exploit some important benefits such as unlicensed band operations and low transmission power. Unfortunately current communication standards are not designed (or just started) to support the high density of Access Points (AP's) nowadays present in office and home deployment scenarios. This fact leads to an inefficient resource use, due to the presence of high inter-network interference levels, which severely affect the performances of the networks themselves.

WLAN 2.0 intends to overcome the existing limitation of local area access technologies, which can be substantially summarized in limited available data rates, inefficiency in case of uncoordinated and plug&play deployment, strong weakness in handover and mesh capabilities support.

Goals for the project are the development of a unified access and networking technology able to cover different application fields and QoS requirements, such as Gigabit internet access, rich multimedia streaming, sensor networking, domotic applications, or VOIP services. Network should be easy to install and to deploy thanks to the Cognitive self-networking capabilities and it should be able to self-heal and self-maintain. Furthermore, an efficient use of the available resource, from spectrum to battery life, should let WLAN 2.0 to maximize the performances while minimizing the costs.

Wireless LAN 2.0 project is focused on proofing new concepts in the field of Wireless Local Area Access technology. In particular the main field of study will be the flexible use of electromagnetic spectrum in order to increase its efficiency while maximizing the transmission possibilities of the users.

The “network-side” CR issues and capabilities, such as the uncoordinated deployment, scalability, device-to-device communications will be tackled. Advanced Cognitive Radio and Game-theory based algorithm will be investigated as potential solutions. Starting from the acquired knowledge on Game-based access methods, Radio Resource Manager, Cognitive Packet scheduler and L2 Mesh Manager are the entity which will be investigated, taking into account the latest State-of-the-Art publications, and developing the own concepts.