Workshop on Advances in Software Defined and Context Aware Cognitive Networks 2015 (IEEE SCAN-2015)

The Cisco Visual Network Index report predicts a drastic increase in mobile data and a dominant part of video related data in the near future. Such dramatic increase in wireless video traffic, coupled with the depleting spectrum resource, poses great challenges to today's wireless networks. It is of great importance to improve the wireless network capacity by promoting more efficient use of spectrum. This goal can be accomplished by the cognitive radio (CR) technology, which is an evolutionary technology for more efficient and flexible access to the radio spectrum. CR represents a new paradigm of wireless communications and networking by efficiently sharing spectrum between licensed users and secondary users. In this talk, we investigate the problem of exploiting the enhanced spectrum efficiency to enable high quality multi-user video streaming in CR networks. We will examine multi-user video multicast in a cellular CR network, as well as over a multi-hop infrastructureless CR network. We will also introduce our recent work on a principle of decomposition, which can decompose the complex CR multi-user video streaming problem into tractable sub-problems while still achieving optimal solutions. We will conclude this talk with a discussion of open problems.

Network virtualization is envisioned to support billions of devices for wireless subscriptions and incorporate new wireless services for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet-of-Things. Network virtualization combines networking infrastructures, hardware, software, spectrum, policies, etc. into a single software-based virtual network entity, which then can be offered to different parties. We discuss current state of the research, challenges, and future perspectives.