Spatial Statistics for Wireless Networks Research

Abstract

Wireless networks have become an important part of our daily lives. However, while the networking research community has made great progress in developing the communication technologies themselves, the underlying dynamics of deployment and use of wireless technologies is still relatively poorly understood. This is especially true for user-deployed technologies such as Wi-Fi hotspots, as well as the large-scale use of radio spectrum. This situation is already starting to cause difficulties in the wireless networking research community due to the arising lack of network deployment models for performance evaluation of new wireless technologies. Also the governmental regulators planning for new policy frameworks are lacking models and hard data on how existing networks and devices use the radio spectrum made available to them by the current regulatory regime. These issues are very topical globally, and are being actively pursued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the USA, as well as its European and Asian counterparts. In this paper we discuss our work on applying spatial statistics techniques for constructing models for structure of wireless networks and the way they use the radio spectrum. We focus specifically on key research challenges that would be of particular interest to the wireless communications community.