Long Term Goals (5-10 years)

 

Thrust 1: Conquering the Spectrum. The spectrum under 275 GHz is already on the path to full exploitation. Conquering the spectrum beyond current regulations will entail novel 2D materials and hybrid heterostructures. There are multiple opportunities for scientific, defense and commercial applications of the infra-red and visible spectrum, motivating future integration of NASCE with ongoing efforts at that end of the spectrum. New applications of wireless quantum networks communications will require the new hardware, software, spectrum exploitation and sharing guidelines that NASCE will conceive and develop.

Thrust 2: Programming the Spectrum. A long term research plan is to enable fully autonomous joint sensing and communication that leverages (i) hardware advances in full duplex technology, (ii) wideband sensing from Thrust 1, and (iii) algorithms that are able to cancel interference at receivers serving scientific and passive users of the spectrum. To ensure protection to incumbents and priority users, our efforts will accelerate the science of RF-spectrum focused dataset creation and management, which will identify dataset size and network configurations. This directly ties in with the spectrum usage information that can be learnt by a neural network via methods such as data augmentation, variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, and attention networks. Through closed loop deep-reinforcement learning (similar to the self-training approach used in “AlphaGo”), the NG-Spectrum Server will learn from its past action-state outcomes, providing not only deacisions but also reasoning steps. This effort will dramatically cut-down the timeline for policy-decisions at federal agencies while also reducing the dependencies on carefully crafted datasets for training that need significant expert effort.

Thrust 3: Protecting the Spectrum. Lessons learned in monitoring controlled radio astronomy experiments will ultimately be translated to all spectrum users, enabled in part by Thrust 1 and in support of Thrust 2. Innovations across hardware (enabled potentially by new material and device technologies) and software (deep Artificial Intelligence, smart contracts), will change the landscape of what is possible. Our objective will remain: to protect the spectrum and its users, with new technologies and from new types/sources of (un)intended Radio Frequency Identification.