Ellersick Prize for Best Paper Awarded to authors in communications

The 2009 Fred W. Ellersick Award for Best Unclassified Paper was earned by a team representing all stages of academic research in the area of communications. The paper, “Enhancing Cognitive Radio Dynamic Spectrum Sensing Through Adaptive Learning” was co-authored by graduate student in electrical engineering: systems Cem Tekin, former undergraduate student Steven Hong, now at Stanford University, and Prof. Wayne Stark.

As described in the paper, “Cognitive Radio (CR) networks present a difficult set of challenges due to the fluctuating nature of the available spectrum and wide ranging number of applications, each having different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. This paper studies the key enabling technologies of Cognitive Radio and makes contributions in two key areas: sensing and learning.”

“In this paper,”  explained Tekin, “we develop innovative adaptive learning algorithms and demonstrate their ability to increase spectrum sensing efficiency without feedback from the receiver. We consider domains where there are multiple noncooperative cognitive users applying learning algorithms to increase their data rate in channels with varying primary user activity.”

The Ellersick Award will be conferred Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at the banquet during MILCOM 2009. MILCOM is the premier international conference for military communications, and is held this year in Boston, MA, October 18-21, 2009.