What is Cognitive Radio? Different views

Recently Dr. Sudharman K. Jayaweera from the University of New Mexico visited the University of Vigo to present a short course on Cognitive Radio and Dynamic Spectrum Sharing. One of his introductory slides tried to deepen into the definition of Cognitive Radio, that results to be different depending on which area people are working on.

For example, by looking at the landmark paper by Joseph Mitola III we realize that his view stresses the reasoning capabilities of the network. This particular definition was taken mainly by the Computer Science (CS) community.


Jayaweera's slide summarizes the definitions of Cognitive Radio used by different research communities:

• Hardware community: Cognitive Radio (CR) is essentially an extension of software defined radio (SDR).
• PHY-layer researchers: Cognitive Radio is synonymous with dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), that is, just a medium access paradigm.
• Computer Science view: for computer and IT personell a device/system with machine learning capabilities.
• Networking community: a device that performs cross-layer optimizations.
• Information theorists: CR reduces to an interference channel with side information.

That is, while the Cognitive Radio paradigm may include all these concepts each area completely identify CR with their particular interests. It is not clear to me how the definition will evolve as CR becomes a mature technology or which are the capabilities a CR node will include. Probably, as Jayaweera points out, a CR system will include a combination of all mentioned capabilities (and maybe even more).

Credit: The picture on the top is a view of the Sedona National Park through a Sierpinski Tetrahedra. It is part of the photographic Math-Art essays "of a Fractal Nature" by Gayla Chandler.