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Every year, MIT TR present a list of the 10 technologies they find most exciting—and most likely to alter industries, fields of research, and even the way we live. The list comprises projects in a broad range of fields.

To avoid future wireless traffic jams, Heather "Haitao" Zheng is finding ways to exploit unused radio spectrum. This article is the fourth in a series of 10 stories we're running over two weeks, covering today's most significant (and just plain cool) emerging technologies. It's part of the annual "10 Emerging Technologies" report, which appears in the March/April print issue of Technology Review. More....

The threat of  gridlock looms as more users crowd into a finite radio spectrum.   UC Santa Barbara's Haitao Zheng has some ideas to keep the traffic flowing. More....

Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research we find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world.
Tuning in Cognitive Radios -- At 15, Haitao Zheng stood out at Chinas competitive Xian Jiaotong University for both her youth and her brilliance. Today, her work on so-called cognitive radios stands out for its potential to make a promising technology practical. Using software, cognitive radios dynamically detect and exploit unused radio frequencies; the devices could alleviate competition for the ever shrinking amount of unassigned radio spectrum. To be truly useful, though, a cognitive radio must not only detect free spectrum but also select the best frequency for a given function, all without interfering with other devices. At Microsoft Research Asia, Zheng created algorithms that allow disparate devices to "negotiate," automatically allocating the available spectrum efficiently and fairly. Zheng is continuing her research on open spectrum systems as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Spectrum allocation is an issue of increasing concern as the number of radio-based devices including cell phones and computers with wireless Internet connections proliferate while the limited amount of available frequency stays the same. University of California, Santa Barbara, associate professor Haitao Zheng is working on a solution to this problem: software-based cognitive radios. More....

Although the FCC estimates that 70 percent of allocated wireless radio spectrum may not be in use at certain times of the day, the ever-growing population of wireless-enabled devices must contend with a limited amount of bandwidth, and computer science professor Heather Zheng at UC Santa Barbara is focused on allowing wireless devices to tap idle spectrum through cognitive radio. Such devices determine which frequencies are unused and select one or more over which to transmit and receive data, and Zheng has devised a scheme for doing so without inducing bottlenecks by giving devices that are not assigned FCC priority to split the spectrum up among themselves through negotiation. She chose a series of game theory-based rules for devices to follow via software, so that each radio can observe its neighbors' activities and take its own course of action.