The Brooklyn 5G Summit and the road to 5G mobile networks

Last week, I have attended (remotely) the Brooklyn 5G Summit (April 20-21). It was an amazing event and interesting opportunity to see the research trends in the area of telecommunications and more precisely mobile communications and it was a real occasion to understand the viewpoint of each stockholder in the telecom market and the prototypes they are developing in their R&D labs for the future 5G manufacturing.

Cognitive Radio and Internet of Things: toward smarter “objects”

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging concept in the future Internet where things have unique identities, physical interfaces and virtual personalities [1]. The so-called things refer to everyday objects not only products with advanced electronic abilities or high level of technological progress but also anything else you can think of either natural or man-made. All these things or objects are put online and become networked and linked to exchange environmental observations among each other as well as with human beings. The IoT paradigm has rapidly spread over the community of academia and industry and was paid close attention as among the hottest research topics [2]. Accordingly, it is widely expected that the IoT will be implemented in all kinds of industry in the coming years [3].

Simulation tools for cognitive radio

Major CR concepts have been tackled through various literature surveys and the development of reliable analytical models. However, numerical simulations must be performed to corroborate the theoretical results for fair and accurate findings.

Wireless Microphones over TV white spaces: how to deal with?

Certainly, dealing with wireless microphones (WM) in spectrum sharing contexts is one of the major bottlenecks that shape the performance of TV bands-based cognitive radio since it is very hard to keep tracking the on-off evolution of WMs activity allowed to operate over the core TV spectrum. However, regulatory bodies like FCC are aware of this issue and have planned some preventive actions to be undertaken:

Cognitive Radio - Underlay, Overlay or Interweave: How the spectrum is shared?

Cognitive radio brings a concept shift as a well regarded agile technology that allows opening up the frequency bands to concurrent operating users in a non-interfering mode. Accordingly to make possible spectrum sharing without causing harmful interference to existing traffics, cognitive users should possess a minimum of information about their surrounding non cognitive users. Depending on the knowledge that is needed to coexist with the primary network, cognitive radio approaches fall into three classes: Underlay, Overlay and Interweave [1].

Cognitive Radio and 5G: spectrum dilemma, more services with “fewer” frequencies

It is widely known that each decade experiences the emergence of a new generation of mobile services. From the birth of the first generation during 1980s to the in-progress fourth generation, it is commonly believed that 5G will be soon a reality.

Interview with Dr Chomora Mikeka: TV white spaces in Malawi, a success story full of challenges

While reading and writing about TV white spaces in Malawi, I was impressed with the struggle of local research leaders to leverage such emerging and very promising technologies.

Today, I’m very glad to share with you this post wherein we will have an amazing and exciting interview with my esteemed guest and friend Dr Chomora Mikeka, who will enlighten us on the success story about deploying broadband connectivity over TV white spaces in Malawi. Foremost, I would like to thank Dr Mikeka for accepting to, generously, share his brilliant experience and advice with us and for having this friendly but appealing conversation.

 For those of you who don't know him, Dr. Chomora Mikeka is a young professor holding a PhD from the Division of Physics, Electrical and Computer Engineering at Yokohama National University, Japan. His PhD research was about power autonomous sensor radio based on cellular and digital TV RF energy harvesting. He has vast experience on research in ICT for agriculture, health and education. He is an innovator and has collaborated in the design, simulations and fabrication of an ultra low power DC-DC buck boost converter with regulated output for less than a milliwatt RF energy harvesting used in modern day communications devices. This was done with colleagues in Spain. He has held a Lecturer position at the Graduate School of Information Technology (Kobe Institute of Computing), training