IEEE ICC 2024 The 3rd Workshop on Spectrum Sharing Technology for Next Generation Communications

1. Call for Papers

Scope: To alleviate the conflict between limited radio frequency (RF) spectrum resources and increasing wireless traffic demands, spectrum sharing has been regarded as a natural technique to increase spectrum efficiency and utility for next generation (e.g., 6G) wireless system design and deployment, and is expected to generate huge scientific, societal, and economic value. In recent years, the FCC has released a large amount of spectrum to be unlicensed or lightly licensed allowing dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) among incumbent licensed, lower priority licensed, and unlicensed services and systems. DSS is expected to be used widely in many scenarios and use cases including: 6G Internet of Things, non-terrestrial networks, vehicle-to-everything (V2X), wireless broadband, and others.

To bring DSS to fruition, new technical challenges must be adequately addressed, including but not limited to – intelligent sensing and RF spectrum awareness, incumbent protection and fair sharing of spectrum resources, coexistence of active and passive RF systems, 6G testbed and measurement techniques, beside others. To achieve constructive spectrum sharing, bi-lateral (or bi-directional) sharing between incumbent and secondary services in both licensed and unlicensed spectrum  has  promise to bring large performance gains for both parties. The coexistence between active and passive RF systems has received relatively little attention. Yet, passive sensing services (e.g., radio astronomy and remote sensing) need to operate in quiet RF environments and are often highly sensitive to interferences in co-channel or spectrally adjacent channels. To support wireless coexistence system measurement and deployment, flexible 5G/6G testbed and efficient measurement techniques that can handle large, complex systems are of great interest. 

Topics: This workshop provides a venue to bring together standards developers, researchers, and engineers from the government, industry, and academia to present and discuss recent results and future directions on spectrum sharing technology, and to promote its expedited deployment. The topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Policy and standardization progress on spectrum allocation and sharing.
• Spectrum sharing between active and passive sensing systems. 
• Radio astronomy and spectrum sharing in non-terrestrial networks.
• Bi-lateral spectrum sharing among incumbent and secondary systems. 
• Spectrum sharing among secondary systems (such as NR-U and Wi-Fi 6E).
• Intelligent spectrum sensing and signal (or interference) classification methods.
• Reliability in spectrum sharing in public safety, V2X, and medical communication networks.
• Trustworthy artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) for spectrum sharing.
• Modeling, simulation, measurement, and optimization techniques for spectrum sharing systems.
• Development of testbed and measurement techniques.
• Measurement results and lessons learned from deployments of spectrum sharing systems.

2. Workshop Committee Members

Workshop Co-chairs

• Yao Ma, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),  USA, yao.ma [at] nist.gov (yao[dot]ma[at]nist[dot]gov)
• Cong Shen, University of Virginia, cong [at] virginia.edu (cong[at]virginia[dot]edu)
• Nicholas Mastronarde, University at Buffalo, nmastron [at] buffalo.edu (nmastron[at]buffalo[dot]edu)

TPC Co-chairs:

• Susanna Mosleh,  NIST, susanna.mosleh [at] nist.gov (susanna[dot]mosleh[at]nist[dot]gov)
• Jake Rezac, NIST, jacob.rezac [at] nist.gov (jacob[dot]rezac[at]nist[dot]gov)

Biography of Yao Ma:  Yao Ma received the  Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the National University of Singapore, in 2000.  His past appointments included: Member of Technical Staff at the Centre for Wireless Communications in Singapore, Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, Assistant Professor at the Iowa State University, Research Assistant Professor at the Wright State University, Research Engineer at U.S. Air force Research Lab (AFRL), and Senior Computer Scientist at Infoscitex Inc. Since July 2015, he has been with the CTL, NIST, U.S. Department of Commerce. He serves as a Project Leader in Wireless Coexistence area since 2018. His technical expertise covers topics in wireless communications, signal processing, and networks, with recent focus on spectrum sharing, SDR and system measurement, and AI and machine learning. He is a Senior Member of IEEE (2008), an associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology (since 2004), and a former editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

Biography of Cong Shen:   Cong Shen received the Ph.D. degree from the Electrical Engineering Department, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), in 2009. He is currently an Assistant Professor of the ECE Department at University of Virginia (UVa). Prior to joining UVa, He was a professor at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He also has extensive industry experience, having worked for Qualcomm Research, SpiderCloud Wireless, Silvus Technologies, and Xsense.ai, in various full time and consulting roles. His general research interests are in the area of machine learning and wireless communications. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2022. He was the recipient of the Best Paper Award in 2021 IEEE ICC, and the Excellent Paper Award in the 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks. Currently, he serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking, and an editor for the IEEE Wireless Communications Letters. He was the TPC co-chair of the Wireless Communications Symposium of IEEE GLOBECOM 2021. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Biography of Nicholas Mastronarde: Nicholas Mastronarde received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering (EE) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 2011. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University at Buffalo. He received several awards and honors including a first year department fellowship through the EE department at UCLA, the Dissertation Year Fellowship through the Graduate Division at UCLA, the Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award for 2011, the 2020 SEAS Senior Teacher of the Year Award and the 2022 UB Teaching Innovation Award. His research interests are in the areas of resource allocation and scheduling in wireless networks and systems, coexistence between active and passive spectrum users, UAV networks, 5G and Beyond networks, Markov decision processes (MDPs), and reinforcement learning. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Biography of Susanna Mosleh:  Susanna Mosleh received her Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA, in 2019. She is a Professional Research Experience Program (PREP) Research Associate with the Communications Technology Laboratory, Shared Spectrum Metrology Group, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, CO, USA, developing new methods for dynamic spectrum sharing and wireless coexistence networks. Her research interests include emerging technologies for 5G cellular networks and machine learning/deep learning applications in wireless communications. 

Biography of Jake Rezac:  Jacob D. Rezac received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in applied mathematics from the Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA, in 2011 and 2012, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics from the University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA, in 2017. From 2017 to 2019, he was a Post-Doctoral Researcher with the University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA, and the Communications Technology Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Boulder. He has been a Mathematical Statistician with NIST since 2019. His research interests include theoretical and computational aspects of inverse problems as applied to problems in communications and the physical sciences.

Technical Program Committee members (TBD)

3. Workshop schedule (in-person only, TBD).

Important Dates
Workshop Paper Submission Deadline: 20 January 2024
Paper Acceptance Notification: 6 March 2024
Camera Ready: 15 March 2024
Registration for Accepted Papers: 15 March 2024

Submission link
TBD

Paper Submission
For more information, please see the IEEE ICC 2024 official website:
https://icc2024.ieee-icc.org/authors/