Dr. Patrick Mitran
University of Waterloo.

Friday, December 5, 2008, 1:30 p.m.

Cognitive radio is perhaps an overly broad term used to describe a variety of recent communications technologies. In this talk, we first look at some of the definitions of cognitive radio and then settle on the notion of prioritized spectrum sharing. We look at two possible approaches to avoiding harmful interference to incumbent users: interference avoidance and interference mitigation.

In the first case, we look at some of the problems typically associated with interference avoidance and argue for the need of a band manager. Given the presence of a band manager, we present some of our recent results on interference mitigation in cognitive radio with respect to resource allocation in OFDM based cognitive networks and interference reduction via scheduling in cognitive networks. Finally, we argue that secondary users are more than potential interferers by examining the problem from an information theoretic point of view.

Patrick Mitran received the Bachelor's and Master's degrees in electrical engineering, in 2001 and 2002, respectively, from McGill University, Montreal, PQ, Canada, and the Ph.D. degree from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA in 2006. In 2005, he interned as a research scientist for Intel Corporation in the Radio Communications Lab. In 2006-07 he was an applied mathematics lecturer in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University. Since fall 2007, he is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo.

Currently he is interested in the study of cooperation and cognition in wireless networks both from an information theoretical viewpoint as well as coding theory and signal processing perspectives.