The NSF-supported NRDZ Research Partnership and Workshop Series is pleased to announce an in-person workshop to be held in conjunction with the 20th Annual IEEE International Conference on RFID, taking place in Santa Fe, New Mexico, June 15–16, 2026 (Monday–Tuesday). The first day will feature a private tour of the Very Large Array in nearby Socorro, followed by a second day of talks, panels, open discussions, paper presentations, and poster sessions. Thanks to generous support from the National Science Foundation, a limited number of travel grants will be available to help offset the cost of attending and participating in this capstone event at a truly historic location.
The wireless spectrum is a vital natural resource that impacts our lives in numerous ways. While it is often associated with mobile broadband, its significance extends to various domains such as weather forecasting, climate science, astronomy, space exploration, and civil/military navigation. The escalating demand for spectrum has led to a corresponding increase in congestion as these vastly different services converge to utilizing many of the same bands. Consequently, conflict over spectrum has arisen between services utilizing adjacent or overlapping bands, resulting in the potential for harmful interference.
To unlock the full potential of 6G and future wireless systems, while ensuring our continued Earth and space exploration, it is crucial to ensure effective and efficient active/passive spectrum coexistence. The vision is to enable seamless spectrum sharing among disparate users based on time, frequency, space, geography, and geometry, without creating detrimental interference. The past five years have seen progress towards the design and implementation of National Radio Dynamic Zones as an at-scale testbed to facilitate coexistence research across disparate spectrum holders. This workshop aims to provide a venue for disseminating new and exciting research findings, to bring together contributors from academia, government, and industry to explore practical implementations and applications, and to identify key technical and policy challenges for future exploration. Panel discussions and open forums will facilitate interactive exploration and ideation, catalyzing ongoing efforts in spectrum coexistence.
This workshop seeks novel, unique, transformative papers covering various aspects of active and passive spectrum sharing and coexistence, and their application to NRDZ, including, but not limited to, the following areas:
Submissions should present novel contributions and demonstrate a clear relevance to advancing the state-of-the-art in active/passive spectrum sharing and coexistence. All papers should be submitted via EDAS. Full instructions on how to submit papers are provided on the IEEE RFID 2026 Call for Papers page. All full-length papers will be peer-reviewed by a technical program committee, and selected based on their technical quality, originality, and relevance to the workshop. Authors of accepted papers will be published in IEEEXplore.
Authors may choose to submit either:
To be included in the IEEE Xplore proceedings, at least one author of an accepted manuscript must register for the workshop.
Full-length manuscripts may be submitted via EDAS here: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=34257&track=134202
Poster abstracts may be submitted via EDAS here: https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=34257&track=134203
Mariya Zheleva, mzheleva@albany.edu, University of Albany, USA
Christopher G. DePree, cdepree@nrao.edu, NRAO, USA
Christopher R. Anderson, canderson@ntia.gov, NTIA, USA
This event is supported by NSF grant OSI-2322875.
