ECE Seminar Series—Kenneth Zdunek: Spectrum Sharing for Broadband Wireless and 5G

This event is open to everyone. 

Abstract

Current United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and global spectrum policy initiatives focus on providing additional spectrum for broadband terrestrial wireless, particularly 5G and Wi-Fi. Since there is no unallocated “green-field” spectrum available, freeing up spectrum for 5G requires either the re-location of incumbents or spectrum sharing with them. Spectrum sharing with incumbents without causing harmful interference presents significant technical, policy, and political challenges that are being met with innovative solutions and analysis methods. The presentation will provide an overview of spectrum sharing initiatives at the FCC and ITU-R, and focuses on several recent and ongoing initiatives and the spectrum sharing analysis methods used to address them. These include satellite and terrestrial spectrum sharing at 5 GHz; DoD and commercial spectrum sharing at 3.5 GHz (Consumer Broadband Radio Service-CBRS) utilizing a Spectrum Access System (SAS); and critical infrastructure (point-to-point) spectrum sharing with unlicensed Wi-Fi at 6 GHz. The presenter will describe activities in which he has been involved regarding spectrum for 5G and potential areas for spectrum sharing research, including implications of MIMO and adaptive antennas on co-existence criteria and space-based measurements of aggregated terrestrial interference.

Speaker’s Biography

Zdunek joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois Tech in 2008 as a researcher and instructor. He recently rejoined the department as research professor after a short absence. Since 2009 Zdunek has been CTO at Roberson and Associates, LLC, an Illinois Tech spin-off based partly on research performed in the university's electrical and computer engineering and computer science departments. Prior to Roberson and Associates, which he helped found in 2009, he was vice president of networks research at Motorola, Inc. While at Motorola, Zdunek was twice awarded Motorola’s Patent of the Year for inventions used in cellular voice-data integration and cellular system roaming. He holds 18 other patents, the most recent of which was granted in 2020 and describes a method for detecting and locating unmanned aerial vehicles (drones). Technical publications include a 2018 IEEE VTC paper on satellite and terrestrial spectrum sharing. He has authored and co-authored numerous technical studies contributing to rule-making proceedings at the FCC. He contributed to and participated in an ITU-R working group that resulted in a new recommendation at WRC-19 for satellite-terrestrial spectrum sharing. He provided testimony to the Senate Commerce Committee on the issue of RF spectrum ultimately re-allocated to FirstNet, the National Public Safety Broadband Network. Zdunek was awarded a Ph.D. degree electrical engineering from Illinois Tech, and B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Northwestern University. He is an advocate of K-12 STEM education and is on the board of directors, and is a past president of, the Chicago Public Schools Student Science Fair, Inc., which sponsors the annual CPS Exhibition of Student STEM Research.