The ROCKET project targets the ubiquitous wireless provision of bit rates higher than 100Mb/s with peak throughputs higher than 1Gb/s. These goals are inline with the IMT-advanced requirements described in [ITU-R M1645] and match the requirements that the IEEE 802.16 task group m (TGm) for Advanced Air Interface. While increasing peak rates is a natural must-do for new standards, we believe that providing homogeneous high rate coverage is equally important as it guarantees a constant user experience over the whole served area and is the key enabler to a higher average spectral efficiency of the system.
In order to guarantee a strong efficiency, we propose to focus the scope of our investigations to two questions which we believe will be at the centre of future IMT-advanced system design:

- How can we increase the bandwidth and make the whole system benefits from it?
- How to increase system spectral efficiency and provide ubiquitous high-rate coverage?

It is clear enough that reaching Gb/s peak throughput requires not only higher spectral efficiency but also much larger bandwidth. The total spectrum needed by pre-IMT-2000, IMT-2000 and IMT-advanced systems by year 2020 was estimated to range between 1.2GHz and 1.7 GHz in [ITU-RM.2078]. ROCKET will focus on techniques to oppportunistically exploit a large spectrum not only for hot-spot users but for the benefit of every user in the system.

The scope of the project is to study cognitive radio technologies and cooperative transmission systems in tandem. To that goal we envision to

1. Define the detailed project scenarios

2. Develop new techniques for smart spectrum usage and cooperative multiuser and multicell transmissions

3. Devise highly efficient RRM techniques and MAC procedures for improved spectral efficiency

4. Proof some of the concepts by upgrading a hardware demostrator

5. Continuously monitor the objectives and trends of the most relevant standards