RWTH Aachen University

RWTH Aachen University is one of the leading technological universities of Europe. RWTH was elected after a fierce national level competition to be one of the German excellence (elite) universities and receives special federal level funding. The faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies is constantly rated as the best of Electrical Engineering Faculty in Germany. One of the major focus areas of the faculty is communications engineering. Faculty is also operating and coordinating UMIC research centre, an interdisciplinary research program that has received German Excellence Cluster status. This centre is the only center in the field of engineering that was awarded this status and an extra 35 MEUR funding for infrastructure and new professorships.

RWTH’s participation into project is done through the Department of Wireless Networks (lead by Prof. Mähönen, Ericsson Chair of Wireless Networks). The Department of Wireless Network is strongly focused on cognitive radios and wireless networks research. The cognitive radio group within department is one of the largest and oldest groups in this field in Europe. The group is covering all the major topics in this field, including very large-scale spectrum occupancy measurement, cognitive resource management research both in theoretical and practical domain, and experimental platform and software design using different SDR-platforms. The group is one of the founding members of UMIC-research centre and responsible for the most of cognitive radio research within UMIC-framework. We have access to large-scale experimental and computational facilities, including having access to large-scale SDR/CR-testbed including USRP2 and WARPradios. The department has a long and successful track-record on participating in and leading international collaborative projects, including many EU-projects (e.g., recent ARAGORN and GOLLUM projects). In the cognitive radio research domain the department is internationally extremely well connected. It is strongly supporting DySPAN conferences, including having TPC co-chairmanship for DySPAN 2010. The members of the department are also active in the standardization domain. The department is active not only in academic publishing, but has an active cooperation with many multinational companies. The department has been actively making technology transfer not only through projects, but also through patenting and spinning-off companies founded by its former members.