ECE grad student Chulhan Lee, Prof. Sriram Vishwanath, Texas A&M Prof Tie Liu, and Intel's Dr. Ozgur Oyman received the Best Paper Award at the 2008 International Conference on Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks and Communications (CrownCom). Their paper Limits on Cognitive Communications in the Wideband Regime proposes a novel solution to the wireless bandwidth needs of the future.

Wireless multimedia applications require significant bandwidth, some of which will be provided by third-generation (3G) services. Even with substantial investment in 3G infrastructure, the radio spectrum allocated to 3G will be limited.

Cognitive radio—an extension of software radio that employs model-based reasoning about users, multimedia content, and communications context—offers a mechanism for the flexible pooling of radio spectrum using a new class of protocols called formal radio etiquettes. This approach could expand the bandwidth available for conventional uses (e.g., police, fire and rescue) and extend the spatial coverage of 3G.