Supporting Demanding Wireless Applications With Frequency-Agile Radios

With the advent of new FCC policies on spectrum allocation for next generation wireless devices, the authors have a rare opportunity to redesign spectrum access protocols to support demanding, latency-sensitive applications such as high-def media streaming in home networks. Given their low tolerance for traffic delays and disruptions, these applications are ill-suited for traditional, contention-based CSMA protocols. This paper explores an alternative approach to spectrum access that relies on frequency-agile radios to perform interference-free transmission across orthogonal frequencies.