David Cleevely about Cognitive Radio

David Cleevely is an entrepreneur who has started and advised several companies, including the spectrum monitoring company CRFS, which has subsequently carried out the first ever UK-wide spectrum monitoring. Recently Cambridge Wireless published an article showing Cleevely's particular view on Cognitive Radio:

Cognitive radio technology is already being used to some extent in 3G and in defence applications, but its potential – to intelligently react and adjust to optimise the available spectrum – has yet to be fully realised."

The main idea here is that cognitive radio technology is nothing new. In fact, one of the reviews I presented in the last post about spectrum sensing, "A survey of spectrum sensing algorithms for cognitive radio applications" by T. Yucek et al., presented an overview on how Spectrum Sensing is performed today in several wireless standards.
The research on cognitive radio is then not focused on inventing something new, but bringing it to its maximum extent.

David Cleevely also makes another interesting observation. Cognitive Radio deployement will reduce spectrum shortage problem, and as a byproduct it will make the spectrum price falling down:

It’s always a trade-off. Operators will choose between deploying more equipment or buying more spectrum. If equipment is cheap, then it’s not worth paying much for extra spectrum. Equipment and transmission are getting cheaper, and technology is becoming more sophisticated. Once regulators stop saying what spectrum can and cannot be used for, there’s no reason to pay a lot for a once in a lifetime opportunity to offer a service. If someone wants too much for spectrum, use what you have got more efficiently by deploying more kit. The spectrum price will then fall."