Institute for Telecommunication Sciences / Research / ITS Research Overview
ITS Research Overview
The ITS Portfolio of Synergistic Research Programs
ITS is both a scientific and an applied engineering laboratory. Theoretical and applied research are equally important facets of the ITS research mission that form a beneficial feedback loop. ITS’s fundamental research portfolio, funded by Congressional appropriation, provides new, expanded scientific and engineering understanding of the basic physical principles upon which spectrum use depends and of the complex technologies being developed to exploit the radio spectrum, including spectrum at progressively higher frequencies. This expertise is leveraged to quickly and effectively respond to telecommunications questions brought to ITS by other federal agencies as well as by NTIA’s Office of Spectrum Management (OSM).
Enhancing Spectrum Utilization
NTIA continues to advance strategic initiatives to make more spectrum available for commercial wireless use and to meet the increasing radio spectrum needs of both federal and commercial users in the U.S. as efficiently and effectively as possible. In November 2023, NTIA released the National Spectrum Strategy, a comprehensive strategy to modernize spectrum policy and make the most efficient use possible of spectrum. The National Spectrum Strategy, and the supporting National Spectrum Strategy Implementation Plan and National Spectrum Strategy Research and Development Plan, all aim to expand access to advanced wireless broadband networks and technologies, whether terrestrial-, airspace-, satellite- or space-based, for all Americans.
Spectrum is a unique natural resource: It is not depleted or depreciated by use, but neither can it be increased. It is impossible to “make more spectrum.” To make more spectrum available means advancing spectrum-dependent technologies to support more and different uses, allowing new services to use the same frequency bands — or near-adjacent bands — that existing users occupy and allowing new services to use bands never before used for similar purposes. Understanding the potential impact of new, existing, and future technologies on each other’s performance requires a multi-disciplinary approach that considers everything from the physics of the radio frequency that carries the signal to digital signal processing by the codecs that compress and decompress the signal so that it can be read by the receiver, whether the receiver is a human being or another device.
- Propagation Modeling
The ability to accurately predict the behavior of radio waves through propagation modeling is fundamental to the ability to plan wireless communication system deployments, assess spectrum-sharing proposals, and develop improved dynamic frequency management and spectrum-sharing systems. ITS continues to build on almost a century of effort in Department of Commerce radio research labs to develop and validate, through scientific theory and measurements, improved ultrawideband, wideband, broadband, and narrowband radio propagation models for various radio bands and environments and promulgate them to industry, other agencies, and national and international standard bodies. - Radio Propagation Data
ITS makes available electronic data files that can be used to validate propagation prediction methods or wireless system analysis techniques. These data sets contain results of selected propagation measurement efforts, along with the header information that gives all the associated parameters for each set. For more information about available data sets, click here. - Radio Propagation Software
Propagation modeling software developed by ITS is not subject to copyright protection in the U.S. and is made available free of charge, as is. Available software includes GLOBE Terrain Extraction Routines, High Frequency (HF) models (2-30 MHz), Irregular Terrain Model (ITM) (Longley-Rice) (20 MHz-20 GHz), IF-77 Wave Propagation Model (Gierhart-Johnson) (Air-Ground), and Millimeter-wave Propagation Model (MPM). For more information about available software, click here. - Improving Telecommunications Network Performance
ITS research to improve the performance of the telecommunications network end-to-end includes development and assessment of methods to improve the quality of transmission. ITS is a world leader in the development of subjective and objective measures of transmitted audio and video quality. ITS audio and video laboratories develop and demonstrate perception-based audio and video performance assessment tools for critical new areas including Internet multimedia conferencing, advanced television, and wireless services. The tools, and the advances associated with them, are rapidly transferred to government, industrial, academic, and individual users via the release of NTIA-developed software toolkits and open-literature publications. - Audio Quality Research and Data
ITS performs basic and applied research in in digital speech and audio compression, transmission, and quality assessment. Research facilities and resources are made available to outside researchers in private industry, academia and other government agencies through cooperative research and development agreements (CRADA) or inter-agency agreements. The Audio Quality Research Web page provides more information about this program as well as access to coder examples and publications describing research results. - Video Quality Research and Software
The ITS Video Quality Research Project promotes increased quality of service in digital telecommunication services by developing technology to assess the performance of new digital video systems and actively transferring this technology to other government agencies, end-users, standards bodies, and the U.S. telecommunications industry. The Video Quality Metric (VQM) software developed by this program is a standardized method of objectively measuring video quality that closely predicts the subjective quality ratings that would be obtained from a panel of human viewers. The technology is covered by four U.S. patents owned by NTIA/ITS and is made available to be freely used for both non-commercial and commercial purposes. Visit the Video Quality Research Web page to learn more.