Patents and Funded Research

The overarching goal of this project is to develop adaptive spectrum management, sharing, and monitoring while ensuring interference protection for safety-critical CNPC communications in BVLOS. The proposed framework includes foundational and algorithmic solutions for co-existence optimization, cooperative sensing, and decentralized market design. The proposed solutions will be rigorously validated using multi-agent aircraft flight tests leveraging 5030-5091 MHz radios.

Dynamic spectrum access techniques have been extensively studied with a primary focus on the inherent uncertainties in these systems, including traffic demands, spectrum availability, wireless channel conditions, and user locations. While aerial spectrum management faces similar challenges, ensuring interference protected spectrum access is of paramount importance. Secondly, to improve spectrum utilization, advanced reservation approaches that provide stable and reliable access become essential, given that reducing transmit power, transmission cessation, etc., midflight are not feasible due to safety concerns. Third, the growing use of machine learning (ML) for spectrum situational awareness, automated resource management, and real-time spectrum monitoring and enforcement is a promising approach. However, the lack of efficient ML-based solutions with realistic and practical assumptions (e.g., ignoring I/Q level samples), the need for large-scale datasets, and significant computational requirements are major barriers to effective automated spectrum sharing. To address these challenges, we propose an agile, dynamic frequency management system (DFMS) that enables adaptive, flexible, and efficient use of the limited spectrum available to aerial operations. Our theoretical developments on co-existence optimization and decentralized spectrum market design are complemented by actual flight tests with multiple Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) UAVs. Our proposed research is organized across the following inter-related thrusts:

Thrust 1 – Coexistence Optimization for UAS Operations. This thrust is focused on coexistence optimization in the 5030-5091 MHz band, by investigating DFMS design and requirements, building an experimental setup for multi-vehicle flight tests to collect accurate spatiotemporal measurement data, and developing an interference-aware system optimization.

Thrust 2 – Decentralized Spectrum Optimization and Market Systems. This thrust is aimed at developing joint cooperative spectrum sensing and access using ML-based solutions, as well as developing decentralized spectrum market with advanced reservation within the DFMS architecture.