What We Do
The Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) performs cutting-edge telecommunications research and engineering with both federal government and private sector partners. As its research and engineering laboratory, ITS supports NTIA by performing the research and engineering that enables the U.S. Government, national and international standards organizations, and many aspects of private industry to manage the radio spectrum and ensure that innovative, new technologies are recognized and effective. ITS also serves as a principal Federal resource for solving the telecommunications concerns of other Federal agencies, state and local Governments, private corporations and associations, and international organizations. The FY 2016 Technical Progress Report describes research performed in the past fiscal year.
Spectrum Efficiency Metrics: A New Report
The Radio Act of 1912 dictated perhaps the first spectrum efficiency requirement when it said that “In all circumstances, except in case of signals or radiograms relating to vessels in distress, all stations shall use the minimum amount of energy necessary to carry out any communication desired. Formal spectrum efficiency studies began over half a century ago, but there is still no widely-accepted method for applying generalized spectrum efficiency metrics to specific radio (i.e., wireless) systems and services. Without metrics, it is impossible to demonstrate improvements in spectrum efficiency.
NTIA is committed to ensuring that the government’s use of this valuable resource is as efficient and effective as possible. But what does it mean to be an efficient user of spectrum? And how can future systems make better use of spectrum? ITS digs into these questions in NTIA Technical Report TR-18-530, A 53-Year History of Spectrum Efficiency Studies and Recommended Future Directions, a new report that reviews more than 50 years of studies examining domestic and international spectrum efficiency to hone insights for future research.
The literature review found broad consensus on the general form of fundamental spectrum efficiency metrics spectrum efficiency metrics for terrestrial broadcasting, mobile, and fixed services. But the application of generalized spectrum efficiency metrics to specific radio systems and services, each with messy individual idiosyncrasies, is more problematic, and complexity increases when we attempt to apply these metrics to spectrum sharing scenarios and rapid network densification.
Based on the research, ITS makes a number of recommendations to address spectrum sharing, and suggestions for how best to focus future spectrum efficiency studies to enable the United States to maximize spectrum opportunities.
ISART 2018
Path Lost: Navigating propagation challenges for ultra-dense wireless systems
July 24-26, 2018, in Broomfield, Colorado
Network densification in response to the explosion in demand for wireless data presents technical economic, and regulatory challenges ... Network operators are looking to ultra-dense networks and ever-shrinking cell sizes to build capacity, but existing propagation models have an inadequate level of fidelity to represent these environments. ... ISART 2018 will bring together leading experts from government, academia, and industry to explore the current state of the art and map the path forward to the next generation of foundational propagation models. Read more here ...
ITS Releases New Open-Source Code to Boost Spectrum-Monitoring Research
Spectrum monitoring—long-term continuous measurement of the radio frequency environment from multiple sensors—is widely seen as essential to enabling increased exploitation of spectrum. Monitoring is expected be the cornerstone to modern spectrum management that is proactive and automated instead of reactive and static, enabling dynamic spectrum sharing by billions of new connected devices while protecting the operations of incumbent critical radio services.
Effective spectrum monitoring requires low cost programmable sensing hardware, secure and robust networking infrastructure, and meaningful data analytics and data visualization. ITS has been working to advance development of all three through its participation in the development of the IEEE 802.22.3 Spectrum Characterization and Occupancy Sensing (SCOS) standard. ITS has released a first reference implementation of a sensor-control operating platform proposed as part of the SCOS standard. Scos-sensor software, shared through a public GitHub repository, is a robust, flexible, and secure platform for remote spectrum monitoring that allows operation of one or many spectrum sensors, such as a software-defined radio (SDR), over a network. Read more here ...
New Publications
This Month in ITS History
May 1965: CRPL Scientist Disappears in Antarctica
On the frigid morning of May 8, 1965, Carl Disch disappeared from Byrd Station in Antarctica. Disch was a Central Radio Propagation Laboratory employee researching forward scatter in the ionosphere. At 9:15 Disch left the Radio Noise Laboratory about a mile and a quarter from the main Byrd station, but apparently missed the hand line that led back to safety. A search party looked for Disch when he failed to return. Byrd station fired flares, and a human chain was formed to methodically search the snow-covered runway where Disch's tracks appeared to lead, but conditions were difficult. Thirty mile an hour winds covered the footprints with snow and threatened the safety of the searchers; the weather hovered around 44 degrees below zero. No body was found, but after four more days of searching Disch was presumed dead of exposure. The 1965 Bulletin of the US Antarctic Project Officer noted record lows for Byrd Station and underscored the dangers of the area with a story about Old Byrd Station, which had been replaced after it was buried by a snow drift only five years after its completion. Disch's death was the only fatality suffered by CRPL in its Antarctic research, which supported increased understanding of the troposphere and ionosphere. ITS no longer maintains Antarctic research stations but the knowledge gained from these experiments led to a better understanding of radio propagation and interference in the atmosphere that still guides current research.