Institute for Telecommunication Sciences / Research / Radio Access Technologies / Radio Access Technologies

Radio Access Technologies

Radio Access Technologies control how all the components of a wireless network physically connect over the air interface, and are critical to enabling wireless communication across different generations and types of network protocols. Modern spectrum dependent devices and systems use complex radio access technologies to fully exploit the physical radio frequency spectrum by controlling how transmissions occupy spectrum in frequency, time, and space.

As spectrum dependent devices and systems proliferate at an unrelenting rate, so too do the research questions posed by new technologies, increasingly sophisticated digital signal processing, and rapidly evolving networking paradigms. ITS’s approach to radio science must encompass all the disciplines required to answer these questions holistically. Understanding the scope and limits of all of these technological advances has become essential to understanding how increasing numbers of both similar and disparate spectrum dependent systems might effectively coexist in a sharing scenario.

When it was developed in the 1980s, the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, often represented as a seven-layer pyramid, was a convenient way to visualize the different components and functions of a wired network, end to end. The evolution of wireless radiocommunication networks, the increasing computerization of wireless devices, and now the advent of software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) have blurred the lines of demarcation between OSI layers.

Radio access technology research programs span the middle layers of that pyramid, examining the ways in which technology is used to increase the capacity of the physical radio frequency layer by improving resilience, response time, robustness, and spectral efficiency of spectrum dependent systems.