Cognitive radio

Cognitive radio is a paradigm for wireless communication in which either a network or a wireless node changes its transmission or reception parameters to communicate efficiently avoiding interference with licensed or unlicensed users. This alteration of parameters is based on the active monitoring of several factors in the external and internal radio environment, such as radio frequency spectrum, user behaviour and network state.

History

The idea of cognitive radio was first presented officially in an article by Joseph Mitola III and Gerald Q. Maguire, Jr in 1999.^[1] It was a novel approach in wireless communications that Mitola later described as:

The point in which wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs) and the related networks are sufficiently computationally intelligent about radio resources and related computer-to-computer communications to detect user communications needs as a function of use context, and to provide radio resources and wireless services most appropriate to those needs.^[2]

It was thought of as an ideal goal towards which a software-defined radio platform should evolve: a fully reconfigurable wireless black-box that automatically changes its communication variables in response to network and user demands.

Regulatory bodies in various countries (including the Federal Communications Commission in the United States, and Ofcom in the United Kingdom) found that most of the radio frequency spectrum was inefficiently utilized.^[3] For example, cellular network bands are overloaded in most parts of the world, but amateur radio and paging frequencies are not. Independent studies performed in some countries confirmed that observation,^[4][5] and concluded that spectrum utilization depends strongly on time and place. Moreover, fixed spectrum allocation prevents rarely used frequencies (those assigned to specific services) from being used by unlicensed users, even when their transmissions would not interfere at all with the assigned service. This was the reason for allowing unlicensed users to utilize licensed bands whenever it would not cause any interference (by avoiding them whenever legitimate user presence is sensed). This paradigm for wireless communication is known as cognitive radio.

Terminology

Depending on the set of parameters taken into account in deciding on transmission and reception changes, and for historical reasons, we can distinguish certain types of cognitive radio. The main two are:

• Full Cognitive Radio ("Mitola radio"): in which every possible parameter observable by a wireless node or network is taken into account.
• Spectrum Sensing Cognitive Radio: in which only the radio frequency spectrum is considered.

Also, depending on the parts of the spectrum available for cognitive radio, we can distinguish:

• Licensed Band Cognitive Radio: in which cognitive radio is capable of using bands assigned to licensed users, apart from unlicensed bands, such as U-NII band or ISM band. The IEEE 802.22 working group is developing a standard for wireless regional area network (WRAN) which will operate in unused television channels ^[6].
• Unlicensed Band Cognitive Radio: which can only utilize unlicensed parts of radio frequency spectrum. One such system is described in the IEEE 802.15 Task group 2 specification^[7], which focuses on the coexistence of IEEE 802.11 and Bluetooth.

Technology

Although cognitive radio was initially thought of as a software-defined radio extension (Full Cognitive Radio), most of the research work is currently focusing on Spectrum Sensing Cognitive Radio, particularly in the TV bands. The essential problem of Spectrum Sensing Cognitive Radio is in designing high quality spectrum sensing devices and algorithms for exchanging spectrum sensing data between nodes. It has been shown^[8] that a simple energy detector cannot guarantee the accurate detection of signal presence, calling for more sophisticated spectrum sensing techniques and requiring information about spectrum sensing to be exchanged between nodes regularly. Increasing the number of cooperating sensing nodes decreases the probability of false detection.^[9]

Filling free radio frequency bands adaptively using OFDMA is a possible approach. Timo A. Weiss and Friedrich K. Jondral of the University of Karlsruhe proposed a Spectrum Pooling system^[5] in which free bands sensed by nodes were immediately filled by OFDMA subbands.

Applications of Spectrum Sensing Cognitive Radio include emergency networks and WLAN higher throughput and transmission distance extensions.

Evolution of Cognitive Radio toward Cognitive Networks is under process, in which Cognitive Wireless Mesh Network (e.g. CogMesh) is considered as one of the enabling candidates aiming at realizing this paradigm change.

Main functions

The main functions of Cognitive Radios are:^[10]

• Spectrum Sensing: detecting the unused spectrum and sharing it without harmful interference with other users, it is an important requirement of the Cognitive Radio network to sense spectrum holes, detecting primary users is the most efficient way to detect spectrum holes. Spectrum sensing techniques can be classified into three categories:
  • Transmitter detection: cognitive radios must have the capability to determine if a signal from a primary transmitter is locally present in a certain spectrum, there are several approaches proposed:
    • matched filter detection
    • energy detection
    • cyclostationary feature detection
  • Cooperative detection: refers to spectrum sensing methods where information from multiple Cognitive radio users are incorporated for primary user detection.
  • Interference based detection.

• Spectrum Management: Capturing the best available spectrum to meet user communication requirements. Cognitive radios should decide on the best spectrum band to meet the Quality of service requirements over all available spectrum bands, therefore spectrum management functions are required for Cognitive radios, these management functions can be classified as:
  • spectrum analysis
  • spectrum decision

• Spectrum Mobility: is defined as the process when a cognitive radio user exchanges its frequency of operation. Cognitive radio networks target to use the spectrum in a dynamic manner by allowing the radio terminals to operate in the best available frequency band, maintaining seamless communication requirements during the transition to better spectrum

• Spectrum Sharing: providing the fair spectrum scheduling method, one of the major challenges in open spectrum usage is the spectrum sharing. It can be regarded to be similar to generic media access control MAC problems in existing systems

Cognitive radio (CR) versus intelligent antenna (IA)

Intelligent antenna (or smart antenna) is antenna technology that uses spatial beamforming and spatial coding to cancel interference; however, it requires intelligent multiple or cooperative antenna array. On the other hand, cognitive radio (CR) allows user terminals to sense whether a portion of the spectrum is being used or not, so as to share the spectrum among neighbor users. The following table compares the different points between two advanced approaches for the future wireless systems: Cognitive radio (CR) vs. Intelligent antenna (IA).

See also

• Channel allocation schemes
• Channel-dependent scheduling
• Link adaptation
• OFDMA
• Radio resource management (RRM)
• Software-defined radio
• Ultra Wideband
• Intelligent antenna (IA) is antenna technology which exploits electronic intelligence to enhance the performance of radio communication systems, as well as being used to enhance the performance of freeband systems. For instance, IA-based multiple antenna terminals enable to communicate multiple radio links simultaneously up to the number of embedded multiple antennas.
• Dirty paper coding (DPC) pre-cancels the known interference signal at the transmitter without the additional transmit power regardless of knowing the interference at the receiver, which can be used to optimize cognitive wireless network channels.^[11]
• Cooperative wireless communications

References

External links

• A very rich collection of Cognitive Radio and Software-Defined Radio references - WCSP Group - University of South Florida (USF)
• A collaborative website about SDR and cognitive radio
• Adaptive Ad-hoc Freeband Communications - Dutch research project aiming to realize ambient, intelligent radio communications.
• Berkeley Wireless Research Center Cognitive Radio Workshop - first workshop on cognitive radio; its focus was mainly on research issues in topic
• Cognitive Radio Blog
• Cognitive Radio Information Center - SCC41 Reference Page
• Joseph Mitola III, Cognitive Radio: An Integrated Agent Architecture for Software Defined Radio, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) Stockholm, Sweden, 8 May, 2000, ISSN 1403 - 5286. - PhD dissertation in which cognitive radio architecture was first defined in detail
• Cognitive Radio Technologies Proceeding of Federal Communications Commission - Federal Communications Commission rules on cognitive radio
• Scientific American Magazine (March 2006 Issue) Cognitive Radio
• Stefan Mangold on Cognitive Radio
• WWRF WG6 - Cognitive Wireless Networks and Systems
• CrownCom - International Conference on Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks and Communications
• IEEE COMSOC TCCN - The Technical Committee on Cognitive Networks of IEEE Communications Society
• IEEE DySPAN Conference