What: Kurtis Heimerl:  GSM White Space: Spectrum Regulation in Support of Community Cellular Networks

When: Tuesday, October 22th at 12 noon

Where: The Allen Center, CSE 203

Join us for this weeks Change talk by Kurtis Heimerl on his continued work with community cellular networks and the future small micotelcos.

Abstract

Community Cellular Networks, small scale community-operated microtelcos, have the potential to bring cellular coverage to the remaining 700 million people in rural areas without it. The deployments of two real world networks, our Papua network and Rhizomatica's Oaxaca network, support this vision. However, hurdles remain. One primary limitation is regulatory; the Papua network is running without a spectrum license and the Oaxaca network is limited to a 2-year experimental non-profit license. Instead, major nation-scale carriers own this spectrum and are reluctant to share it. In this work, we propose a mechanism, GSM White Space (GSMWS), for allowing secondary community cellular networks to operate in licensed bands with no negative impact to existing carriers. GSMWS uses cognitive radio designs to co-operate in the same bands as existing carriers. I will detail our early progress on these designs and future work.

About the Speaker

Kurtis Heimerl is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley working under Eric Brewer in EECS and Tapan Parikh in the iSchool. His work focuses primarily on cellular systems and their intersection with international development. He is interested in Education, having worked on the Metamouse group learning program, Crowdsourcing, winning Best Paper at CHI for work on Kiosk-based crowdsoucing systems, and cellular systems for rural areas, winning the Community award at NSDI. He will be graduating in the winter and is very excited about the future of rural connectivity.