French technology organization CEA-Leti, which has been involved in the research and development of cognitive radio transceivers since 2005, has become the first research center in France to be awarded a government license to begin testing with television white space apparatus.
Developed by CEA-Leti’s Communication and Security Department (STCS), the license acquisition process originated from their recent innovations in wireless radio systems technology – specifically, its cognitive radio innovations. Although able to dynamically allocate and make use of spectral band resources to optimize both the capacity of wireless networks, and the quality of their service, this kind of spectrum management is not allowed in France yet.
In the U.S., similar unlicensed spectrum management has been allowed by the Federal Communcations Commission (FCC), in any free channels of the television spectrum or Television White Space (TVWS). The service afforded by such authorization is envisioned by the FCC is a long-range Wi-Fi system they call super-Wi-Fi.
While ongoing research has been studying and evaluating whether a similar paradigm could be applied in Europe in the near future, CEA-Leti’s recently developer technology can be applied in the US, as well as Europe now. Possible European application of such technology is, for example, in the framework of the SE43 group of the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT).
CEA’s STCS department is focusing its cognitive radio research on two key issues of dynamic spectrum access (DSA), free-channel detection and flexible high-spectrum-efficiency systems with low power leakage into adjacent channels. The applications of such technologies are easy to imagine, given how well TVWS frequencies perform in outdoor and indoor/outdoor situations, operating at the optimum 470–780 MHz frequencies. Compared to the regular Wi-fi frequencies of 2.4 or 5.4 GHz, the application of this TVWS management could mean more sophisticated home or area networking (such as across university campuses),
Edited by
Ashley Caputo 
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