Spectral Tweets: A Community Paradigm for Spatio-temporal Cognitive Sensing and Access

Advances in wireless communication, networking, and computation using miniaturized devices have come to a confluence that has greatly improved productivity even in traditionally 'low-tech' sectors of the economy. The flip side is that demand for radio spectrum is on track to outpace advances in spectral efficiency. Innovative and pragmatic dynamic spectrum sensing and measurement-based spectrum access modalities are needed to bridge the gap, and support demand and the national economy in the not-so-distant future. It is now widely accepted that effective spectrum sensing must be a collaborative endeavor, involving many sensors taking relatively sparse measurements across space, time, and frequency. The vision and starting point of this project is that today's smart phones and tablets are ideal platforms for crowdsourcing spectrum sensing, and this is a viable way to create a spectrum sensing web that spans across much of our living and working space. But can all these devices be coordinated to produce local spectrum maps, reveal transmission opportunities, and enable intelligent dynamic access? An appealing idea is to employ Twitter as a service model to multicast short 'spectral tweets.' Devices will hook up to local communities based on GPS information, and set up 'bots' to follow tweets from other devices in the neighborhood.