Sacra

Overview

Energy efficiency and flexibility in the use of radio spectrum are two major research challenges for the development of future wireless communications technologies. To address these challenges, SACRA project is designing and implementing a multi-band cognitive radio technology for future broadband communication devices.

SACRA develops a cognitive radio technology able to perform an optimal joint resource allocation on two separate frequency bands of the radio spectrum. The objective is to be able to distribute the user data flows in an optimal way, based on measurements of radio spectrum occupancy and other inputs of interest. To support such cognitive operation, an advanced hardware platform is needed: SACRA addresses jointly these different aspects in one project to guarantee a coherent system approach, towards a target scenario of interest defined at the beginning of the study. The innovation and impact brought by SACRA project are therefore in the combination of innovative approaches on radio frequency front-end and base band components design with new cognitive radio algorithms integrated into a single demonstrator platform.
The main SACRA objective is the development of this demonstrator to validate the complementary enabling techniques designed for cognitive systems to increase the system gain (throughput/power compromise), especially for IMT-advanced target. The demonstration scheduled in 2012 will be a major technical achievement, as well as a valuable tool to promote the SACRA approach. Operators, manufacturers and regulators will be invited to workshops where SACRA partners will demonstrate a cognitive radio network based on the SACRA platform including wideband RF power efficient solutions for multi-band communications and spectrally efficient radio resource management compared to state-of-the-art technology. The final goal is that the resulting SACRA platform is able to communicate in real-time, over the air, with a real IP application on top of the protocol stack. Finally, SACRA platform will allow to address the next challenges in wireless communications domain.

Overview

Partners