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Digital radio is starting a new transformation to face the tremendous increase of wireless services: digital radio should provide wireless nodes with awareness, flexibility and adaptability and even full cooperation abilities.
Digital radio is used in a wide range of applications, such as radio diffusion, wireless cellular systems, and wireless sensor networks. Over the last decades, digital radio has proved its high efficiency for wireless systems even in complex radio environments. Thanks to MIMO, OFDMA and coding, the new systems are nearly Shannon's capacity achieving. The next step to put forward is the increasing need of flexibility to faster standards evolution, to permit multiple nodes of different standards to coexist and even more to cooperate. For this purpose, the radio node of the future will rely on software defined radio architecture, and will need cognitive radio capabilities.
Cognition and cooperation are two concepts that recently revolutionized the way researchers think about wireless communication. Therefore, cognition is more than cognitive radio and cooperation is much more than just relaying. Both have their origin in information theory and have truly modified the fundamental nature of the communication area.
The CITI has developed a strong background in digital radio especially for wireless LANs and wireless sensor networks. Our expertise first covers radio channel modelling and simulation aspects. The CITI developed a tool for simulating wireless LANs in real environments: WIPLAN. Our expertise also includes performance evaluation in complex environments, interference modelling, and multi-antennas systems design and prototyping. The CITI is equipped with a radio platform including both simulation and experimental equipment units devoted to new radio standards design and evaluation.