Best Student Paper Award for UP-EEEI ERDT Scholar at Top Int’l Wireless
Communications Conference
A recent graduate of Electrical and Electronics
Engineering Institute of the University of the
Philippines Diliman (UP-EEEI), Mary Claire
Barela, was among the recent recipients of the
Best Student Paper Award in the 17th
International Symposium on Wireless Personal
Multimedia Communications (WPMC 2014).
Co-authored with her adviser, UP-EEEI Professor
Joel S. Marciano, Jr., An Empirical Study on the
Performance of a Spectrum Sensing Scheme for
Cognitive Radio, their objective was to
“experimentally
determine
the
detection
performance of a proof-of-concept cognitive radio
for TV White Space,” says Barela. TV White
Space (TVWS) refers to a swath of underutilized
spectrum allocated for TV broadcast. The
development of techniques that enable efficient
use of such spectrum by allowing opportunistic
communication from secondary unlicensed users
is an active area of study.
“We investigated how well the prototype can
determine the presence of primary or licensed
users of the spectrum by experimenting with
different signal profiles (models) to represent the
incumbent user in the channel,” she says.
The paper studies detection performance over different parameters, such as time variability of
the primary user signal, dependency on sample size and noise estimates, according to Barela.
She adds that the study addresses a current trend—there is an increasing number of wireless
users but the frequencies and channels that they can use do not. “Now to enable this, we need a
different kind of radio called a cognitive radio. A cognitive radio needs to be very good in
determining the presence of the incumbents, since we want to avoid any interference to them,”
explains Barela. The results of the study provide an empirical validation to existing analytical
studies of energy detection, which can also be applied to other cognitive radio testbeds and
algorithms.
Held at the Menzies Hotel, Sydney, Australia from September 7 to 10, 2014, the WPMC symposia
series were inaugurated in 1998 as a global platform that aims at enabling collaboration in the
field of wireless information. Held in Asia, Europe and America, WPMC has established itself as
a unique global conference dedicated to wireless multimedia convergence. This year’s
conference, with the theme Orchestrating Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications, is
organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and sponsored by the
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
(CSIRO) of Australia, the National Institute of Information and
Communications Technology (NICT) of Japan, the Yokosuka
Research Park (YRP), NEC Corporation and Macquarie
University.
Back in the Wireless
Communications Engineering
Laboratory of UP-EEEI with her
Best Student Paper Award
Barela notes that their achievement also shows that UP-EEEI can
be at stride with research activities from other foreign institutions.
She credits the support given to student research projects like
hers.
“Personally, I find that being able to work in the lab and having
your own workspace is beneficial. Advisers also provide guidance
and push their students to participate in these kinds of
endeavors,” she says. “The Institute, with the help of DOSTfunded projects, also helps in augmenting funding to enable
students to participate in activities such as international
conferences.”
Barela is a BS Computer Engineering graduate and affiliate of the Wireless Communications
Engineering Laboratory (WCEL) at the UP-EEEI. She completed her Masters degree in Electrical
Engineering as an ERDT scholar last April. Her research interests include rural connectivity and
software defined radio. Her participation in the WPMC2014 was supported by the ERDT
scholarship Research Dissemination Grant.