WORKSHOP ON COGNITIVE RADIO

Mr. Ashish Gambhir Assistant Professor from Electronics and Communication Engineering Department attended a workshop on “Cognitive Radio using USRP” at Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad from 6-10th January 2015 organized by Department of Electronics Engineering of the Institution.

Prof. D. Mitra delivered her lecture on “Introduction of Cognitive Radio” where she covered the topics namely necessity of Cognitive radio in the field of Electronics and Communication industry, OFDM, Adaptive Modulation and research aspect of Cognitive Radio. This session was continued by Prof. S. Bhattacharya. He mainly discussed “Numerical Implementation of Cognitive Radio by Wavelet transform. Mr. Kalyan & Ms. Preeti experts from NI Instruments explained Practical Implementation of Cognitive Radio with the help of LABVIEW software. He discussed relevant project work taking place relating to this field and the necessity to encourage students for undertaking more and more innovative projects.

The experts from industry, academia along with students from various colleges joined the Workshop. The distinguished speakers enlightened all of us with the current advancements in Cognitive Radio in communication system.

The salient points covered day wise are as follows.

Day 1:

1. Workshop was started with registration and Inaugural address by Prof. D Mitra and Prof. S Bhattacharya, course coordinators of this workshop.

2. Prof. D Mitra initiated the technical session of the workshop by the formal description of Cognitive Radio and then she extended the topic covering-Motivation for Cognitive Radio (CR), CR functionalities, CR application, Software- Defined Radio, The Evolution of Cognitive Radio and Generic Research issues.

3. In the second half we got a hands-on exposure on LABVIEW modulation & Toolkits organized by industry expert from NI. This was a great experience. They also taught us to simulate small scale projects and research opportunity in LABVIEW.

Day 2:

1. The workshop morning session began with the lecture by Prof. Debjani Mitra highlighting the analytical approach to understand the role of communication system in Cognitive Radio.

2. Prof. D Mitra continued her lecture with Adaptive Modulation Technique for Cognitive Radio. She also discussed basic wireless transmitter, Information Mapping, signal space representation, different modulation scheme and Shannon phenomenon etc.

3. After tea break she introduced a new topic OFDM for Cognitive Radio.

4. She ended her lecture after explaining recent research aspects on Cognitive Radio.

5. In the second half, we got further hands-on exposure on LABVIEW organized by industry experts Ms.Preeti and Mr. Kalyan from NI. They had segregated participants in different groups and for each group they had assigned one system. Hardware simulation with LABVIEW software was covered. Participants interfaced USRP module with LABVIEW software generated, transmitted and received signals of different bandwidth and frequency range.

Day 3:

1. Prof. D Mitra discussed about Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Scheme(OFDM) in detail.

2. She started her lecture with a brief discussion about OFDM. She explained Combat Inter Symbol Interference, Subcarrier Orthogonality in frequency domain, parallel symbol transmission in OFDM, Multipath effects, Adaption ,Scalability, Interoperability in Cognitive radio, Adaption Modulation in OFDM, Channel impulse response and design procedure of OFDM.

3. She also discussed about the difficulties faced by the research scholars in the areas like spectrum sensing, power saving and Bandwidth limiting.

4. Prof. Mitra ended her lecture by explaining about the scopes of research to modify the above stated problem related to Cognitive Radios.

5. In the second half a hands-on exposure on Communication system was organized by Ms. Preeti, industrial expert from NI. They trained the participants to design i. First a transmitter and a receiver were made and then frequency was generated at 900 GHz. Then it was transmitted over a practical channel and signal processing on the received signal was also demonstrated.

6. Hands on classes were really very useful for further project and research work based on Communication system.

Day 4:

1. The first lecture of Prof. S. Bhattacharya was on Wavelet Transform.

2. Prof. S. Bhattacharya discussed about application and utility of Wavelet transform on signal processing and spectrum sensing in the context of Cognitive radio.

3. He divided his lecture into three parts- Conventional Wavelet Transform, Problems encountered and his contribution towards the solution.

4. He started his lecture with a brief discussion about Wavelet. Then he carried on with some numerical, discrete wavelet transform, continuous wavelet transform, DCT etc.

5. Last part of his lecture was the solution given by the research scholars working under his guidance on side lobe suppression and power efficient spectrum designing.

6. In the second half, hands-on session on Communication system was organized by Ms. Preeti, industry expert from NI.

7. Participants designed a practical Cognitive Radio system.

8. After that Mr. Subroto, research scholar from ISM Dhanbad discussed his Ph.D. work on Cognitive Radio. This session was very useful for all of the participants because they got a rough idea of research work going on this field.

Day 5:

1. Morning session was started with the lecture of Prof. S. Bhattacharya. He continued his yesterday’s lecture on Wavelet Transform.

2. Prof. S. Bhattacharya covered Machine Intelligence, Non-linear Dynamics, Multiobjective optimization, Embedded Intelligence for awareness, Brain Empowered Wireless Device and Constrained Optimization etc.

3. At the last part of his lecture he discussed reasons of using wavelet transform over others.

4. After his lecture Mr. Dipen Research Scholar, Electronics Dept., ISM Dhanbad shared his Ph.D. work with the participants.

5. In the second half Ms. Preeti ended her session with description of project work she has already completed and filed a patent on it.

Valedictory ceremony was organized on this day. Chief guest Prof. Vishnu Priye started the ceremony by a very inspiring speech on moral responsibilities of a teacher and teaching methodology. Then Course coordinators Prof. Debjani Mitra and Prof. S. Bhattacharya spoke about the utility of this kind of practical session oriented workshop and then a feedback session was conducted. Certificates were awarded to all workshop participants from various colleges throughout India.

CONCLUSION

The workshop was very beneficial to all the participants as they gained knowledge on the latest developments in this subject and also succeeded in enhancing their teaching skills. This workshop was organized with an objective to introduce recent research aspects in the field of Cognitive Radio. Participants experienced a practical hands on exposure that was very much useful for their further research work. It also provided a common platform for all academicians to interact with each other and share their knowledge and ideas to enhance their technical knowledge in the field of Cognitive Radio and signal processing.

Some glimpses from the event: